Two high school girls in southern Maryland were arrested for sexually assaulting an autistic boy and recording the act with their phones between December and February.
The girls, 15 and 17, admitted to putting a knife to the boy's throat, kicking him in the groin, and filming him while he performed sexual acts, sometimes with animals. More than once, the girls lured the boy to walk on frozen pond then left him in the freezing water when the ice broke.
When questioned by his mother, the boy shrugs off the abuses as playful behavior, and even believes that the younger girl is his girlfriend. His mother says that the 16-year-old diagnosed with autism in elementary school is "socially naive".
"He's not a good judge of people," the mother said. "I keep trying to talk to him about it, but it's hard to get much out of him. I'll say, 'This is what so-and-so told me, and I know this happened,' but he'll act like, 'Oh, [the girls] were just playing around.' He didn't deny anything. I am trying to make him understand that people are talking about this all over TV, but he wanted to go to school today."
The boy's mother says the girls frequented their house and that the group would go out to movies. She suspects that they attacked her son while she and her husband were away at work when school was closed on snow days.
The boy's mother is also concerned that the boy does not fully understand the seriousness of the abuse.
"We told him that what these girls did was unacceptable," the mother said. "But yesterday, I asked him, 'You're going to stay away from these girls, right? You don't plan on hanging out with them again, right?' He said, 'I don't know.' "
