If you are a woman or a young girl, imagine being held against your will in a house in your neighborhood by a gaggle of dirty and dirty-minded thugs you kind of know from around the way. And if you are a young girl, a teenager, you know these men — all in their twenties — because they “run” in your circle of real and electronic friends. Because you are a teenager, your frontal lobe is not fully developed, so you are incapable of making good, sound and safe decisions for yourself.
So you wind up in this house against your will.
Maybe you take a few sips of liquor, as you have before; maybe your cup is spiked with drugs that will render you limp and, finally, unconscious.
Perhaps in the long and arching narrative of evil that’s to commence, your unconscious self is in a better place.
In some house along the 1600 block of Scott Street in Covington, Ky., just across the water from us last May — when all good schoolchildren were dreaming of the end of school, of sleeping in late — a teenage girl was raped by four grown men after she was made sufficiently unconscious during a “social gathering.”
Whether she went to that house on her own, whether she was alone or initially with friends who abandoned her or whether she was lured there by the faint familiarity of neighborhood guys she knew is relevant but not as significant as the barbaric act of rape and the documentation of that rape.
Social media has spawned a generation of idiots.
Jameel Mason, 23; Donald Conrad, 23; and Eflin Tyler, 24, have all been caught and charged with rape; DeyShawn Perry, 20, was also arrested and charged with complicity to rape and promoting the sexual performance by a minor for taping, photographing and sharing the lewd acts, which is how police became aware of the girl’s plight.
Perry allegedly posted still photographs of the girl online.
(Tyler has since been released on bond. If you see him on the street, tape his every movement and post it online so he, too, can experience an invasion of privacy.)
Police were initially investigating a missing person report, but stumbled onto images of the sexual assault on social media. Perhaps Perry is the dumbest of the lot because he is the youngest, but the others have themselves and Perry to blame for thinking they could get away with raping a teenager and documenting it.
That would have been more than enough.
But then Perry had to share it, because all men who fashion themselves as conquerors get off on bragging rights, and the bloodlust of the angry penis will be the downfall of Western civilization because an angry penis cannot be controlled by its master, regardless of who it belongs to.
If each in the quartet gets and does his 10 to 20 years, he will have a good long time to ponder and discuss such matters as The Philosophy of Rape with other Kentucky rapists. My fear, though, is that they will not be rehabilitated after such long stretches of musing, comparing rape notes and being raped themselves, but that they will be unleashed back onto the streets of Covington angrier, less employable and older.
The larger point of all this small-focus heinous behavior is that Mason, Conrad, Tyler and Perry didn’t just hold and rape someone’s daughter — though that in itself is bad enough — they have further besmirched the reputation of an already bedraggled, mostly poor and Appalachian burg caught between the shadows of the bright lights illuminating the happy, drinking revelers of Newport — which might very well be the same population crowding along The Banks to Cincinnati’s stadiums — with very few venturing a few blocks south into Covington beyond the bars dotting the near side of the Roebling Suspension bridge.
A community already known for its poverty and rampant drug use because of the state’s zero-tolerance laws punishing but not treating addicts and its less-than-stellar track record of public education and public housing doesn’t need the stench of rapists and a rape videographer added to its long list of ills and woes.
Because a large slice of the criminal element’s thought process is based on narcissism, criminals do not understand that what they do not only victimizes the immediate victim, but it also victimizes the community at large.
Crime strikes fear in residents, which effects spending habits, housing trends, school systems and whether those systems can attract and retain talented teachers. Larger still, violent crimes like rape and murder cast a cloud of generalized low self-esteem over neighborhoods and, after a short while, people living in high-crime areas because they cannot afford to move anywhere else begin to assume that living in abject fear and loathing is all they deserve and then they are stuck in a cycle they’re forced to teach their children and grandchildren to live within.
And this is how communities — one at a time — become socked in, owned and operated by the lawless, the senseless and the depraved.
All because four fools got together one May night and decided to overpower and brutalize someone’s precious daughter who maybe didn’t make the wisest choices.
I know Scott Street in Covington; I once had a long-ago friend I used to visit there in a two-family house that looked onto the backside of a grocery store parking lot that looked especially creepy at night.
Her neighbors were never particularly friendly. They always looked wary and suspicious and reminded me, stereotypically, of the weather-worn faces of the mute-mouthed mountain people in Deliverance, one of my favorite movies. Covington is a place that makes a visitor feel like she could turn a corner and be smack dab in the middle of a dirt farm in the middle of nowhere.
I wonder now as I did then: The good people of Covington have more power than they realize to change their reputation, beginning with a house on Scott Street.
CONTACT KATHY Y. WILSON:
letters@citybeat.com
This article appears in Oct 22-28, 2014.
