It has been a few months since I wrote about Baltimore schools and I find that over the past week or so an amazing story has broken there. A teenager who is a convicted rapist has been allowed to return to high school and parents were not told about it. The student in this case is 15-years-old and just last month was convicted of having sex with a minor child last year, a member of his own family.
“She struggles. She is in therapy,” the girl’s mother said. “I wouldn’t wish what we have gone through on my worst enemy.”
In May of 2023, when her daughter was three years old, she was sexually abused…
Records show, on December 27, the 15-year-old entered a plea in Harford County to second-degree rape, which is a charge that does involve intercourse.
The 15 year old was not sent to juvenile detention. Instead, the Department of Juvenile Services recommended probation. He was given 50 hours of community service and counseling for “sex offense specific treatment”. As a convicted rapist, he was also ordered to have “no unsupervised contact with children under 15.”
If you have kids this age, then you already know that 15-years-old is often the age for sophomores in high school. This student, who was given a slap on the wrist and sent back to Patterson High School, is constantly around younger students including freshmen girls, many of whom are still 14-years-old.
In fact, it’s worse than that. In digging into this case, WBFF discovered that the same student is facing similar charges in a second case involving another young child.
According to court documents obtained by Project Baltimore, the charges in the second case came down in September related to an alleged incident that happened in April 2022 in Baltimore County. At the time, the alleged victim was two years old, and the accused assailant was 13.
He’s now 15 and facing multiple charges, including second-degree rape, sex abuse and second-degree assault/battery in the Baltimore County case.
Again, this kid is walking around in high school and the parents of the other 1,300 kids haven’t been told about it. How is this possible? Under Maryland law, a student cannot be removed from high school for a sex crime unless he is on the sex offender registry. In this case, because this person is under 18, his name has not been added to the registry. Instead, he is listed on a separate list of juvenile sex offenders which the public does not have access to.
This story was shocking enough that even the governor got involved and said he would look into it.
Maryland Governor Wes Moore says he’s taking a closer look at the state laws that allowed a 15-year-old rapist to attend a Baltimore City high school…
“People need to feel safe in their communities, and kids need to feel safe in their schools,” Governor Moore told Project Baltimore.
The governor may want to also have a look at Department of Juvenile Services Secretary Vincent Schiraldi. When WBFF tried to ask him about the situation after a public event, he did his best to avoid the question.
At a public event this week, Project Baltimore attempted to speak with Department of Juvenile Services Secretary Vincent Schiraldi about an investigation that found a 15-year-old rapist attending a Maryland public school. Here’s what happened.@chrispapst @FOXBaltimore pic.twitter.com/qV009WbyOU
— Project Baltimore (@Project_Bmore) January 31, 2024
Schiraldi seems awfully camera shy now but just a few years ago when he was still a researcher at Columbia University he argued that maybe sex offender registries should be ended.
In the discussion, the panelists argue that registries fail to keep the public safe, and the stigma creates an “underclass of people who struggle to find a good job and safe place to live.”
“They’re not subhuman because of that behavior. And I feel like we’ve let that go,” Schiraldi said during the discussion. “And I think that we won’t win the policy debate until we remind people that even when you do a really bad thing that some people find very disgusting, you’re still a human being.”
That sounds great, really, but maybe we could put the rapist student in a classroom with Mr. Schiraldi’s kids (assuming he has any) and see how that goes. Honestly, every time I think Baltimore Public Schools have hit bottom, they surprise me.