Their faces—and names—were all over the Internet. Five teens accused of raping an 18-year-old woman inside a Brooklyn, N.Y., park Jan. 9 were arrested and charged with the crime. Now that charges against them have been dropped, an attorney for one of the teens is lashing out at the prosecutor for the way the case was handled.
“What’s troubling is they’re electing not to prosecute the father for the heinous act of incest or the complaining witness for falsely reporting the incident. … My client was charged. There’s no way to wipe out his or the other teens’ names from all over the Internet,” attorney Spencer Leeds told the New York Daily News.
Last week, Brooklyn District Attorney Ken Thompson announced that the teens wouldn’t be charged but that the actual story was “disturbing and troubling.” According to Thompson, the five teens’ story that they had walked up on a father having sex with his 18-year-old daughter in the park turned out to be true. According to reports, two of the accused teens reportedly also had consensual sex with the young woman.
Leeds says that before the father made the false accusations that his daughter was raped by the teen boys, the five were “schoolboys leading anonymous lives.” The Daily News notes that the New York City Police Department even released video surveillance footage of the teens at a convenience store before the alleged attack.
The DA’s office had said last week that the father and the daughter had become uncooperative in the investigation and that prosecutors had no plans to charge the daughter or her father with any crimes.
“Now [the teen boys] have to get their lives together,” Leeds told the Daily News. “Meanwhile, the father gets to remain anonymous. That’s what’s troubling.”
Read more at the New York Daily News.