A 15-year-old Chicago girl was apparently sexually assaulted by five or six men or boys on Facebook Live and none of the about 40 people who watched the live video reported the attack to police, authorities said on Tuesday.
The video marks the second time in recent months that the Chicago Police Department has investigated an apparent attack that was streamed live on Facebook. In January, four people were arrested after cellphone footage showed them allegedly taunting and beating a mentally disabled man.
Police only learned of the latest alleged attack when the girl’s mother approached the head of the police department, Superintendent Eddie Johnson, late on Monday afternoon as he was leaving a police station in the Lawndale neighborhood on the city’s West Side, department spokesman Anthony Guglielmi said.
She told him her daughter had been missing since Sunday and showed him screen grab photos of the alleged assault.
Guglielmi on Tuesday said that detectives found the girl and reunited her with her family.
He said she told detectives that she knows at least one of her alleged attackers.
He said investigators are questioning several people, but no one is considered a suspect yet and no arrests have been made.
He said Johnson was “visibly upset” after he watched the video, both by its content and the fact that there were “40 or so live viewers and no one thought to call authorities.”
Jeffrey Urdangen, a professor at Northwestern University law school and the director of the school’s Center for Criminal Defense, said it is not illegal to watch such a video or to not report it to the police.
He also said child pornography charges would not apply unless viewers were downloading the video.
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