Idaho school sex assault results in probation

BOISE, Idaho — The investigation into the sexual assault of a disabled black football player by his white teammates at an Idaho high school showed that crucial evidence was collected by school employees, not law enforcement officials, and that the culture that led to the attack stretched far beyond the locker room.

John R.K. Howard and two teammates were charged with sodomizing the victim with a clothes hanger in 2015 in the locker room at the high school in the tiny farming village of Dietrich. The sex assault charge against Howard, who was 18 at the time of the incident, was later dropped. He was sentenced last week to probation for felony injury to a child. The other two cases are sealed because they are being handled in juvenile court.

An Associated Press review of roughly 2,000 pages of documents from the Idaho Attorney General’s Office found that school officials did not immediately report the crime. Instead, Superintendent Ben Hardcastle gathered key evidence, including the hanger, and began interviewing the suspects and some of the 27 potential witnesses before notifying the Lincoln County Sheriff’s Office.

Fellow students, neighbors and even football coaches were allowed to pressure the 17-year-old victim about his testimony, in some cases telling him that the case could bring the town to ruin and send friends to jail.

Like most of his classmates, the victim grew up in Dietrich, though he was one of just a few black children in the community. He also struggled with mental illness and a developmental disability that made it hard for him to describe time sequences or immediately recognize the racial implications of the teasing he endured.

The teen ultimately had a breakdown from the stress and had to be institutionalized for a time, according to his mother.

In the village of about 300 people, the school is the main public gathering space. The athletics programs are “pretty much the only community activity,” especially during cold winter days, said Roy Hubert, a Lincoln County commissioner who has lived there since 1943.

The school locker room was ruled by a so-called “bro code” that forbade students to share what happened there with anyone outside, according to the attorney general’s documents. Coaches were reluctant to be in the room when the boys were changing or showering, an absence that may have allowed the code to thrive.

Racial harassment was common, though some claimed it was unintentional: The victim was nicknamed “grape soda,” “fried chicken” and “Kool-Aid” by his teammates and coaches. School officials knew that a student had drawn a cartoon on a whiteboard of the victim sitting in the back of a bus, and the victim later reported that Howard frequently called him a racial slur.