A football locker room, a broomstick and a sex assault case roil a school

Officials at Damascus High School in suburban Maryland waited more than 12 hours to tell police about credible allegations that several junior-varsity football players pinned a teammate in a locker room, pulled his pants down and sexually assaulted him with a broomstick, interviews and documents show.

The school officials held off despite discussing among themselves in a group text message on Oct. 31 — seen by The Washington Post — the names of a victim and three possible assailants.

Instead of calling police, they launched their own inquiry and on Nov. 1, plucked students one-by-one from class as they questioned suspects, learned the names of three more victims and then took statements from those boys.

None of the victims was sent for medical care. All went back to classes without their parents being called.

The lag appears glaring for the nationally regarded Montgomery County school system, which operates under a formal agreement with police to report immediately any sexual assaults to the department’s special victims unit for investigation.

“It’s absolutely absurd what the school did,” James Humphries, a retired commander of the Montgomery County police special victims unit said in an interview. He is not part of the current case, but during his nine years with the unit, he helped teach principals about when to report incidents. “They’re not trained to do these types of investigations and these types of interviews.”

The four victims were 14 or 15.

Their accused attackers, all 15. Each faces a count of rape and three counts of attempted rape, a crime that in Maryland includes nonconsensual acts that use an object.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/crime/a-football-locker-room-a-broomstick-and-a-sex-assault-case-roil-a-school/2019/03/29/01500f30-2fc8-11e9-8ad3-9a5b113ecd3c_story.html?utm_term=.b942edbf8dc0&wpisrc=al_trending_now__alert-local--alert-national&wpmk=1