Benevolent One
Team Owner
Are any of you following the Steubenville, Ohio Rape case?
If you don't know about it. I will try to sum it up in for you. Two Steubenville Big Red football players Trent Mays and Ma'lik Richmond allegedly raped a 16 yr old girl after she passed out drunk at a party. The trial started yesterday. It is in juvenile court where they face a trial by a single judge, no jury and face confinement in a juvenile facility until their 21st birthdays. They reported took her to several other house parties that night as kind of a sexual assault tour. Steubenville is right across the Ohio River from West Virginia. It is a really run down old steel town for the most part, but like most everywhere else it has a some much nicer areas where people have a lot of money. The homes they keep showing on the news, where much of this allegedly occured, are much nicer than any part of Steubenville I've ever been in. Of course I've only been there a few times and didn't really go anywhere I didn't have to for the work I was doing there.
There are a lot of things about this case that are getting a lot of people boiling-over angry. As well it should. There are several videos and picture or two that have come out involving this case. One of the videos is a guy laughing at a party about how they just straight raped that girl. Saying things like, well maybe she did want it, it could have been her last wish. In the main photo, a slumped and seemingly passed out 16-year-old West Virginia girl is being carried, her wrists grasped by Trent Mays, her ankles by teammate Ma'lik Richmond.
Her head is sagged back, her hair dragging on the floor. She looks, if not dead, then incapacitated. With the context of the two boys having been charged with her rape, the natural reaction of anyone of any measure of decency was horror.
The most powerful evidence could come from two eyewitnesses.
One is Mark Cole, who testified at a preliminary hearing in October he videotaped Mays using his fingers to penetrate the possibly passed out girl in the backseat of a car. Later Cole, and friend Anthony Craig, testified they saw Mays again digitally penetrating the girl in Cole's basement while an exposed Richmond attempted to put his ***** in the girl's mouth and later slapped it on her naked hip. More camera phone photos were taken at that time – including one described Wednesday of both the girl and Mays naked from the waist down – although they were soon deleted.
I may not be the most objective person on this whole thing, as I have two teenage daughters myself. But, even if I didn't, how could you not hear these kinds of details and not think "what if it was your daughter?"
This is, of course, getting a lot of media attention around here as we are a fairly short distance from there. They say it is getting a lot of national attention as well, but I never really watch national news so I wouldn't know. I did watch an entire episode of ESPN's Outside The Lines the other day. It was on there because the alleged rapists reportedly got some preferential treatment as
If you don't know about it. I will try to sum it up in for you. Two Steubenville Big Red football players Trent Mays and Ma'lik Richmond allegedly raped a 16 yr old girl after she passed out drunk at a party. The trial started yesterday. It is in juvenile court where they face a trial by a single judge, no jury and face confinement in a juvenile facility until their 21st birthdays. They reported took her to several other house parties that night as kind of a sexual assault tour. Steubenville is right across the Ohio River from West Virginia. It is a really run down old steel town for the most part, but like most everywhere else it has a some much nicer areas where people have a lot of money. The homes they keep showing on the news, where much of this allegedly occured, are much nicer than any part of Steubenville I've ever been in. Of course I've only been there a few times and didn't really go anywhere I didn't have to for the work I was doing there.
There are a lot of things about this case that are getting a lot of people boiling-over angry. As well it should. There are several videos and picture or two that have come out involving this case. One of the videos is a guy laughing at a party about how they just straight raped that girl. Saying things like, well maybe she did want it, it could have been her last wish. In the main photo, a slumped and seemingly passed out 16-year-old West Virginia girl is being carried, her wrists grasped by Trent Mays, her ankles by teammate Ma'lik Richmond.
Her head is sagged back, her hair dragging on the floor. She looks, if not dead, then incapacitated. With the context of the two boys having been charged with her rape, the natural reaction of anyone of any measure of decency was horror.
The most powerful evidence could come from two eyewitnesses.
One is Mark Cole, who testified at a preliminary hearing in October he videotaped Mays using his fingers to penetrate the possibly passed out girl in the backseat of a car. Later Cole, and friend Anthony Craig, testified they saw Mays again digitally penetrating the girl in Cole's basement while an exposed Richmond attempted to put his ***** in the girl's mouth and later slapped it on her naked hip. More camera phone photos were taken at that time – including one described Wednesday of both the girl and Mays naked from the waist down – although they were soon deleted.
I may not be the most objective person on this whole thing, as I have two teenage daughters myself. But, even if I didn't, how could you not hear these kinds of details and not think "what if it was your daughter?"
This is, of course, getting a lot of media attention around here as we are a fairly short distance from there. They say it is getting a lot of national attention as well, but I never really watch national news so I wouldn't know. I did watch an entire episode of ESPN's Outside The Lines the other day. It was on there because the alleged rapists reportedly got some preferential treatment as
