3-Month Nightmare Emerges in Rape InquiryMichael Stravato for The New York Times
LEAVING HOME The 11-year-old girl often came home, right, late at night, her father says.
By JAMES C. McKINLEY and ERICA GOODE
Published: March 28, 2011
CLEVELAND, Tex. — A year ago, the 11-year-old girl who the police say was the victim of repeated gang rapes in this East Texas town was an outgoing honor roll student, brimming with enthusiasm, who went on hikes and planted trees with a youth group here.
A TROUBLED HOME The initial assaults occurred in the Rayford T. Ellis home, the affidavits say.
“She has always been a really bubbly child,” said Brenda Myers, director of the Community and Children’s Impact Center, who worked with her. “She always had a smile on her face.”
But in October, just after starting sixth grade, the girl became withdrawn, Ms. Myers said, and in November, she stopped attending the center’s meetings.
What happened during those months is the subject of a criminal investigation that has sent waves of shock and sorrow through this impoverished town and has provoked anger across the nation.
The police say the girl was raped on at least six occasions, from Sept. 15 to Dec. 3. Nineteen boys and men, ages 14 to 27, have been charged in connection with the rapes, the most recent arrest last Wednesday.
Court documents and dozens of interviews over several weeks with the girl’s family, her friends and neighbors, as well as those who know the defendants, provide a more complete picture of what occurred as well as a deeper portrait of the victim. What begins to emerge is the nightmarish ordeal of a young girl over two and a half months involving an eclectic group of young men, some with criminal records, who shared a powerful neighborhood bond.
In his first interview, with The New York Times, the father of the girl, a 57-year-old carpenter named Juan, said he became aware of his daughter’s abuse in late November, when she arrived home at 3 or 4 a.m. after having slipped out without permission. She was shaking and weeping when her mother opened the door to their small white frame house, he said, and she immediately closed herself in her room.
Later in the day, she told her mother she had been raped after her parents found sexually explicit photos that had been sent to her father’s cellphone, which she had been using. She told her father that the men had threatened to kill her.
Juan, whose last name is being withheld to protect his daughter’s identity, said his wife reported the crime to the police three days later, but in court documents the Cleveland Police Department said it was first alerted on Dec. 3 by school authorities.
Juan said his daughter had been a bright and easygoing girl, adept at schoolwork. As she reached puberty, he said, she had grown tall for her age and had begun to talk about wanting to be a fashion model. Yet she was still a child; her bed was piled high with stuffed animals. “Her mind is a child’s mind,” he said. “That’s what makes me so angry.”
The arrests have raised fundamental questions about how a girl might have been repeatedly abused by many men and boys in a tightly knit community without any adult intervening, or even seeming to register that something was amiss, until sexually explicit videos of the victim began circulating in local schools.
“It wasn’t that anyone was asleep,” said the Rev. Travis Hulett Jr., the pastor of the New Bethel Missionary Baptist Church, which anchors the Precinct 20 neighborhood where most of the defendants live. “You can be awake and see things and still not do anything.”
The Cleveland police and the local district attorney have released little information about the alleged rapes and the evidence, and their silence has allowed rumor and speculation to flourish. Judge Mark Morefield of State District Court issued a broad order two weeks ago prohibiting law enforcement officials, defense lawyers, potential witnesses and relatives of the girl and defendants from speaking about the case to reporters.
According to court documents, the police seized the telephones of three men arrested, and the father of the girl said his family’s phones and computer were taken for evidence, as well. Eighteen defendants have pleaded not guilty; the 19th has yet to be arraigned.
The police interviewed the girl in early December, after school security officials heard rumors about sexually explicit videos circulating among the students. Then an elementary school student told a school employee she had seen pictures of the girl having sex with two young men, one of them a high school basketball star.
NO ONE HOME Assaults of the girl are said to have continued in this abandoned trailer.
The girl, a sixth grader whose parents are immigrants from Mexico, told investigators that one of the defendants called her on Sunday, Nov. 28, during the Thanksgiving break, and asked if she wanted “to ride around,” according to four police search warrant affidavits.
That defendant, Eric B. McGowen, 19, who was on probation for burglary, and two other male teenagers picked her up at her house, and took her to a house in Precinct 20, the affidavits said. The wooded community is a hodgepodge of small houses, trailers and churches, bordered on two sides by railroad tracks and on a third by a prison. Everyone is related by blood or friendship.
The girl was taken to a blue house with white trim and a heart-shaped welcome sign — a house with a troubled history. The head of the household, Rayford T. Ellis, has a long criminal record and is a registered sex offender; one of his sons, Authur Ellis, 27, was arrested this year on murder charges. Neither man is charged in this case.
The police say a younger son, Rayford T. Ellis Jr., 19, an iron worker known as Mookie, shot and killed a teenager at the same house in August 2008. The younger Rayford Ellis was awaiting trial on manslaughter charges when he was arrested in early February on charges that he had raped the girl. (He has fathered at least five children with four young women, according to paternity suits.)
It is unclear from the affidavits if the younger Mr. Ellis was there the night of Nov. 28. But the girl said that a cousin, Timothy D. Ellis, 19, was there, and ordered her to strip, telling her that he would “have some girls beat her up” and would not drive her home if she refused, the affidavits said.
The affidavits said the girl told investigators that she then “engaged in sexual intercourse and oral sex” with several of the men present, among them Jared G. McPherson, 18, a high school basketball player, and Jared L. Cruse, also 18, who has since been charged with robbing a grocery store in the next county.
During the sexual assault, the girl said, she heard Mr. McGowen call someone on the phone and invite him to the house to have sex with her, the affidavits said. Four more men whom she did not know arrived.
The assault was interrupted when Timothy Ellis’s aunt arrived at the house, the affidavits said, and the men took the girl out a back window to a squalid abandoned trailer a block away, where the sexual attack continued. Her underwear was left behind.
According to indictments, one man accused of participating was Kelvin R. King, 21, who was out on bond while awaiting trial on rape and robbery charges. Another was Marcus A. Porchia, 26, who worked at a local mental health clinic. Yet another, Isaiah R. Ross, 21, the son of a local school board member, was also present at the Nov. 28 rape, according to a search warrant affidavit for his telephone.
The November assault was not isolated, court documents say. Mr. King’s brother, Xavier M. King, 17, and Devo Shaun Green, 20, are accused of raping the girl on Sept. 15. Mr. McGowen and two others — Jamarcus N. Napper, 18, and Cedric DeRay Scott, 27 — are charged with sexually assaulting her on Oct. 25. Carlos B. Ligons, 22, is charged with sexually assaulting her on Dec. 1. The last indictment, released Monday, accuses Walter J. Harrison, 26, of raping her on Dec. 1 and Dec. 3. The police released no details about those episodes.
Four of the defendants are charged with continuous sexual abuse of a young child. The rest are charged with a single count of aggravated sexual assault of a child under 14. Both felonies carry a sentence of 25 years to life in prison. In Texas, a child under 17 cannot give legal consent and, as in most states, ignorance of a child’s age is not a legal defense.
