Ohio Attorney General Mike DeWine says he’ll convene a grand jury, as soon as next month, to determine if others will face charges connected to the rape of a 16 year old Weirton girl last August.
More than a dozen people, many of them underage, refused to cooperate with investigators during the course of the investigation that lead to two Steubenville High School students being found delinquent, or guilty, of sexual assault this past weekend.
Wheeling Attorney Bob Fitzsimmons is representing the family of the victim.
“The family is just, kind of, relieved to get through this whole thing,” Fitzsimmons said of the reaction to the convictions on Monday’s MetroNews Talkline.
“This thing was, obviously, very trying and stressful for the entire family knowing that their little girl, 16 year old daughter, was going to appear before media, judges, attorneys to discuss a night when some despicable things happened.”
After being found delinquent during the trial in Jefferson County Juvenile Court, Trent Mays, 17, and Ma’Lik Richmond, 16, will each spend at least a year in juvenile detention for raping the girl during a night that included stops at several sites around Steubenville.
Mays could serve an additional year for taking a photo of the girl when she was naked.
Prosecutors said, during their trial, that the boys knew the girl was too drunk to consent to sex and took advantage of her intoxicated state to assault, degrade and humiliate her and then bragged about it to others, largely via text messages that became evidence during the trial.
Fitzsimmons says the girl, who says she does not remember what happened, was not the accuser. “It wasn’t something that she elected to do. She did not point the finger at these boys. These boys accused themselves through the social media,” he said.
“Once the law enforcement officers started reading these social media texts and things like that and saw these pictures, there was a crime there and they prosecuted it and they, appropriately, got convictions.”
Some of what happened that night was captured on video and in photos that were distributed via text message or Twitter with hashtags like #drunkgirl.
Fitzsimmons says the victim should serve as an example for others. “Here we have a 16 year old girl, standing up for women across the country, who was brave enough to actually go into court and help prosecute a case and see that justice was served.”
At this point, Fitzsimmons says the family members have not decided if they will file civil lawsuits against the defendants or others.
Both Mays and Richmond are players on Steubenville High School’s Big Red Football Team. They could be held in juvenile detention until they turn 21.