Arrests in sex cases delayed for years
Bridgeport Police Youth Bureau blamed
BRIDGEPORT — The city’s Youth Bureau was disbanded in 2018, but fallout from years of changes is still being felt.
In late January, more than four years after an 11- year- old girl complained to her social worker that she had been repeatedly sexually assaulted by a 38- year- old man, police charged the man in her assault.
The time lag, officials said, was discovered by members of the Special Victims Unit as they sifted through cases they inherited from the dissolution of the Youth Bureau.
“Detectives and supervisors of the Special Victims Unit uncovered several cases dating back to 2013 that were a part of the original Youth Bureau files,” Police Department Spokesman Scott Appleby confirmed. “These cases were reviewed, and when necessary reinvestigated, and evidence was sent to the state laboratory when appropriate. If probable cause existed to charge, a warrant was applied for.”
In November 2015, the state Department of Children and Families received a complaint by a school counselor of a sex assault of a child and forwarded the complaint to the Police Department’s Youth Bureau. In December 2015, a forensic interview was done with the girl at the Center for Family Justice.
The girl disclosed during that interview that she had been sexually assaulted by Brian McAllister approximately two to three times a month between 2012 and 2013, according to the arrest warrant affidavit.
Police did not present an application for an arrest warrant for McAllister, of Bridgeport, until Jan. 20, 2020. The now 41- year- old man was charged with first- degree sexual assault of a child, risk of injury to a child and fourthdegree sexual assault.
For more than four decades, the Youth Bureau investigated crimes against children ranging from rape to murder. The numbers of cases it handled are not available but sources said it was hundreds.
Problems began to show up in the final years of its existence. Allegations surfaced that case files were being stuffed into drawers and forgotten after detectives were transferred to other areas of the department.
Police admitted in court documents that a 2015 sexual assault of a 14- yearold girl was not fully investigated for two years because the original investigator was transferred out of the Youth Bureau and not replaced.
Police Chief Armando Perez acknowledged in 2018 that there were problems with the way the Youth Bureau handled investigations, but attributed those problems to earlier administrations. He pointed out the unit’s failure to find out what happened to 10year- old Bianca Lebron, who disappeared in front of her school on Nov. 7, 2001, and was never found.
The last straw for the Youth Bureau, according to law enforcement sources, was the two years it took to investigate the sexual assault of an 8- year- old girl.
Police acknowledge that, although they began the sexual assault investigation in April 2015, Youth Bureau detectives didn’t send the rape kit to the state lab for DNA processing until April 2017 when the suspect, 31- year- old Derrick Siberon, was being investigated for the death of his 10- month- old son.
The state police lab identified Siberon’s DNA in the rape kit taken from the girl.
“The Youth Bureau needed to undergo a change,” Perez said when he made his decision to dissolve it in 2018. “So the Youth Bureau was absorbed into the Detective Bureau, which is overseen by Capt. ( Brian) Fitzgerald.”
“The YB investigated crimes against youth, not crimes done by youth offenders,” Fitzgerald said in 2018, adding now the Detective Bureau would oversee those cases. “We’re ready for it.”
The change was part of what Appleby described as a departmentwide “restructuring and reorganization of divisions.” Some of the Youth Department’s staff was reassigned to other entities within the Detective Bureau.
Perez initially defended the head of the youth bureau, Sgt. Joseph Hernandez, despite numerous complaints about how Hernandez was running the unit. But in September 2018, Hernandez agreed to retire and the bureau was melded into the Detective Bureau.
Appleby said the Police Department is not aware of any other outstanding cases that existed prior to the creation of the Special Victims Unit.
Maura Crossin, executive director of the Victim Rights Center of Connecticut, had been critical in the past of the way the Youth Bureau handled sexual assault cases.
“While elimination of the Youth Bureau appears to be a drastic move, I think it is a step in the right direction for the Police Department,” Crossin said in 2018. “Sometimes you need to shake things up to get it done right.”
She said she did not want to comment for this story when asked Friday.