A Texas high school football team is facing allegations of sexual assault over a "hazing" ritual that involves sodomizing younger players with broomsticks.
The Daily Beast reports that police in La Vernia, Texas have identified at least ten different people who allege that they were sexually assaulted during their time playing for the town's high school football, basketball and baseball teams.
"Varsity players were accused of sodomizing their younger teammates with various instruments, including baseball bats and carbon-dioxide tanks," the Daily Beast reports. "A total of 13 students so far—six of them adults—have been arrested and charged with either sexual assault or sexual assault of a child."
The 13 boys who have been arrested have all denied any wrongdoing, and are all out on bail and are still attending high school.
"What’s bugging me is that these perpetrators are still running around La Vernia," one mother whose son claimed sexual assault complained to the Daily Beast. "They’re still out and about and they’re posting pictures on Instagram and Facebook and having a good old time while they’re out on bond or whatever."
Adrian Guilbeau, a 37-year-old resident of La Vernia and a former high school athlete, told the Daily Beast that while hazing was common back in his day, what has allegedly happened at the high school in recent years goes far beyond anything he or his teammates ever did.
"We poured oil in [a teammate’s] car one time,” he told the Daily Beast. "On the seats and stuff, on the windshield. Dumb stuff like that. One time, we turned the lights off in the weight room and threw weights—now that was dumb. But physically assaulting somebody like that?… This to me is not hazing. This is rape."
