Texas cops brush off rape of 15-year-old without telling mom: 'We didn't have contact information'
A Texas mother has accused the Fort Worth Police Department of failing to notify her after it botched an investigation into the rape of her 15-year-old daughter.
"I was raped on Wednesday December 2, 2015," the teen explained to KDFW. “I told the school thinking they'd help me."
The teen said that she was too ashamed to tell her parents, but she wanted to notify the school because the suspect had been accused of sexually assaulting other girls.
Arlington Heights High School filed a report with police, and the case was assigned to Officer Dennis Hutchins. But according to KDFW, Hutchins never followed up and he was eventually fired for mishandling a number of other child abuse cases.
Sgt. Marc Povero insisted that the department had done its "due diligence to go back through all the cases not properly handled or mishandled and we're re-investigating those cases, this was one of them."
However, the 15-year-old girl's mother said that she was never contacted by police, and that she only learned of the case when she was approached by KDFW.
“I have a minor child who was sexually assaulted and I was not told,” the mother explained. “She made a report and as a parent I could have provided her some emotional support, therapy, guidance to get through it, rather than watch her decline academically and not know what was going on."
Povero asserted that police has contacted the 15-year-old girl -- without a parent or guardian present -- and that she had declined to pursue the charges. And he said that the mother was never contacted because the department didn't have her phone number.
"We didn't have contact information for the mother, that's not to say we couldn't find it, but at that time we had a victim who was not cooperating with the investigation,” he remarked.
It was not immediately clear if Fort Worth police would reopen the investigation, but the school district said that the case would be reviewed to determine if improvements can be made to the system.
“It's heartbreaking to me that my daughter went through this alone,” the mom said.
Watch a video report below from KDFW.