Early Tuesday evening, Curtis Houck at NewsBusters noted that the rape of a 14 year-old girl at a Maryland high school by two older teens (17 and 18) who recently arrived the U.S. was the subject of a question at Trump Press Secretary Sean Spicer's press conference earlier that day. The Washington Post's first story on the rape Friday illustrates Houck's observation that the crime is "an inconvenient story for their liberal narrative" that one must downplay or simply not report negative news about the actions of illegal immigrants.
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The Friday Post story by Dan Morse and Justin Wm. Moyer clearly couldn't avoid its immigration element entirely, but they took their sweet time getting to it.
Tuesday evening, to her credit, Kasey Jones's Associated Press story covered the White House press conference question, but also surfaced an outrageous quote from the school district's superintendent, and linked the incident to a bill pending in the Maryland legislature which would make enforcing immigration laws even tougher than it already is.
First looking at the Friday Post story, the two reporters called the assailants "students" in their headline and during earlier paragraphs. In Paragraph 9, they finally owned up to the fact that one of the two is in this country illegally and should have been expelled or in custody by now, while immigration status specifics about the recently-arrived 17 year-old were unavailable because of his age (bolds are mine throughout this post):
Two Rockville High students arrested for allegedly raping classmate at school
A 14-year-old girl was pushed into a boys bathroom at Rockville High School on Thursday morning and raped by two other students during school hours, according to Montgomery County District Court records filed Friday.
Police arrested two ninth-graders, Henry E. Sanchez, 18, and Jose O. Montano, 17, who appeared in court Friday and were ordered held without bond.
“I believe that you are a danger,” District Judge Eugene Wolfe told Sanchez.
On Thursday morning, Montano forced the girl, who told police she knew him as a friend, into a bathroom after asking her to have sex with him, which she refused, according to court documents.
The girl tried to resist being dragged into a bathroom stall, clinging to a sink, as Montano pulled her then shoved her into a stall, the court records state.
The two took turns holding the girl down and sexually assaulting her as she cried out, fought back and repeatedly told them to stop, according to police affidavits filed in court.
(Paragraphs 9 and 10)
Sanchez, a native of Guatemala who arrived in the United States about seven months ago, has a pending “alien removal” case against him, court officials said Friday. “He is a substantial flight risk,” Montgomery County Assistant States Attorney Rebecca MacVittie said in court Friday.
Montano has been in the United States for about eight months, MacVittie said. Details about Sanchez’s removal case, or Montano’s immigration status, couldn’t immediately be learned Friday.
Warner Todd Huston at Breitbart News has posted "a transcript from three of the four available pages from the detective’s statement of probable cause." Its brutal contents are not for the faint of heart.
Now to the AP story, wherein we learn that the school district's superintendent really doesn't like being on the hot seat where he so richly deserves to be:
High school rape gets drawn into immigration debate
... White House press secretary Sean Spicer, in response to a reporter’s question at Tuesday’s press briefing, called the crime “shocking, disturbing, horrific.”
“I think part of the reason that the president has made illegal immigration and crackdown such a big deal is because of tragedies like this,” he said.
... Jack Smith, superintendent of Montgomery County Public Schools, pushed back against the focus on the immigration status of the accused students.
“Some try to make this into an issue of immigration,” Smith said at a news conference Tuesday. “We would like to change the conversation.”
While expressing horror at the crime and repeatedly assuring parents that their children are safe at school, Smith said, “We serve every student who walks in the door. It is not only the right thing to do, it is the law.”
Unfortunately for Mr. Smith, it is highly debatable whether it's "the right thing to do" to place two far older males, about whom the district had to know almost nothing at the time of placement, in a freshman class.
Of course Smith would like to "change the conversation," but he doesn't get to. That's because it has just been shown, despite his hollow assurances, that "children are not safe" at Rockville High School. Additionally, even though "it is the law," it seems long past time at the very least to question a school's legal obligation to educate an 18 year-old — supposedly an adult — without at least requiring that he or she prove that they have a right to be here — which Sanchez, aka Sanchez Milian, apparently did not have.
It was also useful that the AP's Jones noted a somewhat related measure Maryland's Democrat-dominated legislature is considering:
On Monday, Maryland’s House of Delegates approved a measure to prevent authorities from detaining immigrants to ask about their immigration status.
Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan ... vowed to veto the bill if it reaches his desk.
As Houck at NewsBusters noted on Tuesday, WTTG Fox 5’s Ronica Cleary is the reporter who put the White House press conference question about this crime to Sean Spicer. This is another example of how the Trump administration's move to broaden press representation at briefings, by bringing up topics that national elite press has routinely ignored, is at long last broadening the scope of the national discussion. One could also argue that the press conference question pushed the Associated Press to do additional reporting on the story which it never would have done if the question hadn't come up, thereby exposing the superintendent's outrageous outlook to the entire nation.
Cross-posted at BizzyBlog.com.
