Boy's silence disturbs Elia

The 13-year-old male victim of an alleged sexual assault with a broomstick and hockey stick at Walker Middle School on April 30 told nobody about the attack, and two months of previous bullying, until after an incident Tuesday night at the school, schools Superintendent MaryEllen Elia said Saturday.

The victim didn't tell anyone at the school, she said.

He didn't even tell his own mother.

More than just horrified about the heinous nature of the crime for which four other boys are accused, she is concerned that students are afraid to come forward if they are being bullied, Elia said in a telephone interview.

School officials began to take action Tuesday night, the Hillsborough County schools superintendent said, after flag football coaches witnessed some kind of altercation between the victim and some of the students accused of assaulting him. All five were members of the Odessa school's flag football team.

It might have been verbal, Elia said. There may have been pushing.

Either way, the coaches noticed that it was unusual, and when they broke it up, they began to talk to the victim.

He said the others had been bothering him and had hit him with a hockey stick, Elia said.

The next morning, a coach had the students sit down and write out their versions of what had happened.

"In their written statements, at least one of the students described a situation involving the hockey stick," Elia said.

The school resource officer then called the victim in for an interview. When the officer "realized the seriousness of the charges, we notified the sheriff's office," the schools superintendent said.

On April 30, two students pinned down the victim on a locker room floor at the school while the other two raped him with a broomstick and hockey stick, deputies said Friday. It was the culmination of two months of bullying, they said.

Randall John Moye, 14; Raymond A. Price-Murray, 14; Lee Louis Myers, 14; and Diemante J. Roberts, 15, were arrested at the school Wednesday on sexual battery and false imprisonment charges. The four have been removed from school, said school district spokesman Steve Hegarty, although no final decision has been made about their school status.

All four will be tried as adults, said Pam Bondi, assistant state attorney.

Efforts to reach families of the accused have been unsuccessful.

Because she had not seen the written statements given by the students, Elia said, she did not know what time the students said the incident occurred or what staff person from the school, if anyone, may have been in the vicinity at the time.

School officials are trying to determine the level of supervision at the time. There was a flag football activity on the day deputies say the rape happened, Elia said.

"I only know we have two coaches there at the end of the game," she said. "Most of the kids don't go into the locker room."

The four students were arrested about 7 p.m. Wednesday, Elia said. The next morning, parents were alerted via ParentLink, an automated call system.

The three-sentence notification said: "Four male students were arrested yesterday for an incident involving another student. Currently, those students are not at Walker and will not return to Walker unless their legal issues are resolved. The details of the situation are confidential, but I want to assure our parents that we are doing all we can to make sure our students are safe."

Of the alleged victim's silence, Elia said: "That is a problem. We have to figure out a way that our kids know that they have people that care about them. There is always somebody at the school that the kids will relate to. A particular teacher. A guidance counselor, it might be the custodian. The big issue is that the student didn't do this. In a conversation the principal had with the mother, she found out he didn't even tell her."