Investigation

Records Suggest Loudoun Sent Team Of Police To Deal With ‘Upset Parent,’ Not Alleged Rape

   DailyWire.com
A woman sits with her sign during a Loudoun County Public Schools (LCPS) board meeting in Ashburn, Virginia on October 12, 2021.
ANDREW CABALLERO-REYNOLDS/AFP via Getty Images

Dispatch records from the Loudoun County Sheriff’s Office suggest that a school administrator and school resource officer (SRO) did not act urgently to involve police specialists in a reported rape on May 28 at Stone Bridge High School.

At 1:33 pm, the SRO — who works full-time at the school handling routine matters but officially works for the sheriff’s office — radioed that he “was briefed by assistant principal of a student that has made allegations of being possibly raped or touched unwanted by another student a couple of hours ago. Investigating at this time and parents are and have been notified at this time by admin.”

It is unclear whether the assistant principal learned of the rape “a couple of hours ago,” or whether the alleged rape occurred then and the administrator did not learn of it until some later time period.

The SRO then “investigated” for nearly an hour without calling for outside police officers.

At 2:21, 2:28, and 2:30, three calls for police are finally placed — one requesting a supervisor, one requesting “another unit,” and one noted as “upset parent.” Given that these calls came in a nine-minute window well after officials first learned of the rape, it seems likely that the impetus for all three was the “upset parent.”

That is, after all, what Principal Tim Flynn told the community in an email at 4:48 pm:

Good evening Stone Bridge families this [sic] is Stone Bridge Principal Tim Flynn. There was an incident in the main office area today that required the Loudoun County Sheriff’s Office to dispatch deputies to Stone Bridge. The incident was confined to the main office and the entrance area to the school. There was no threat to the safety of the student body. The incident was witnessed by a small number of students who were meeting with staff adjacent to the main office. Counseling services and the services of our Unified Mental Health Team are available for any student who may need to talk about today’s incident. Students might have noticed Sheriff’s Office personnel on campus and I wanted to let you know that something out of the ordinary happened at school today. The safety of our students and staff is the top priority of Loudoun County Public Schools.

Scott Smith, the parent of the victim, previously told The Daily Wire that he was aghast to find the incident being handled only by people who worked at the school full-time — with the SRO seeming to take direction from the principal — rather than a team of police officers one would expect to find processing a major crime scene. There were no outside police or medics at the scene when he arrived, he said. He became irate.

He said that police responded to deal with complaints about him making a scene in the office, not to the rape allegations. Once on the scene, he said, the team of police eventually became persuaded that what had occurred was a serious incident that required their attention, and escorted his family to the hospital where a rape kit was administered.

Smith said he did not believe a rape kit would have been administered based on the laid-back way administrators and the SRO appeared to be handling it on their own. The county’s prosecutor later said that the case relied on DNA evidence, suggesting that if a rape kit had not been conducted that day, no substantiated rape would have likely been added to Stone Bridge’s books.

Loudoun County Sheriff’s Office dispatch logs

In addition to Principal Flynn’s email which made no mention of a rape, Loudoun’s superintendent, Scott Ziegler, went on to tell the school board at a June 22 board meeting that he had no record of sexual assaults in bathrooms. The school system also reported on required statistics to the state of Virginia that it had zero sexual assault incidents in the school that year.

Ziegler later said he misunderstood the question in the school board meeting, and apologized for an “error” in reporting to the state.

The sheriff’s office previously told The Daily Wire there were no 911 calls from the school, but has now produced “dispatch” logs that include radio calls.

The calls also show that at 7:21 pm, the FBI called and “asked about the incident at Stone Bridge HS,” which was “found through prior calls.” Once the agent was advised that “it was a sexual assault investigation,” the agent said it “would not require their help.”

Smith was arrested at a June 22 school board meeting where he became angry again after Ziegler’s misleading statement. That arrest led to Smith being included in a letter, by the National School Boards Association, that talked about angry attendees at school board meetings, as well as a response by Attorney General Merrick Garland that suggested the FBI could have a hand in dealing with such matters.

The suspect in the alleged rape was transferred to a different school, where he was arrested for an alleged in-classroom sexual assault on another girl October 6.

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The Daily Wire   >  Read   >  Records Suggest Loudoun Sent Team Of Police To Deal With ‘Upset Parent,’ Not Alleged Rape