US police are searching for five or six men or boys involved in sexually assaulting a 15-year-old girl in Chicago and posting the act on Facebook Live.
None of the roughly 40 people who watched the live video reported the attack to police, authorities said on Tuesday.
Police only learned of the assault when the girl’s mother approached the head of the police department, Superintendent Eddie Johnson, late on Monday afternoon as he was leaving a police station, department spokesman Anthony Guglielmi said.
She told him her daughter had been missing since Sunday and showed him screen grab photos of the alleged assault.
“For you to do something like that and then post it up on Facebook like it’s a joke…its just terrible,” the girl’s mother told news outlet WMAQ.
The girl’s uncle told Chicago Tribune that a teenager alerted him to the assault on Facebook Live.
Guglielmi said Chicago police asked Facebook to take down the video, which it did.
He said detectives found the girl on Tuesday morning. She was brought to a hospital where she was reunited with her family.
She told detectives that she knows at least one of her alleged attackers, the spokesman said, but it remained unclear how well they knew each other.
Several people questioned
Guglielmi said investigators are questioning several people, but no one is considered a suspect yet and no arrests have been made.
He said Johnson was “visibly upset” after he watched the video, both by its content and the fact that there were “40 or so live viewers and no one thought to call authorities”.
Investigators know the number of viewers because the count was posted with the video. To find out who they were, though, investigators would have to subpoena Facebook and would need to “prove a nexus to criminal activity” to obtain such a subpoena, Guglielmi said.
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