What is it with rape, douchebaggery and towns ending in "ville"?
Some background to this story..
After a tragic accident that saw the death of her husband, Mrs Coleman decided to relocate her family to Maryville, for a fresh start. She had a very pretty little girl, named Daisy, who was growing up to be an even prettier teenager. Her daughter had caught the eye of a footballer in her school and they had begun to send each other texts.
Nothing wrong with that. It is normal nowdays.
One night in January a few years ago, Daisy, then 14 and a friend she had known since she was a small child, who was staying with them, had a few drinks Daisy had stashed away in her wardrobe. After texting the footballer, he and his friends came to her house and Daisy and her friend decided to sneak out of the house and they went to a party at said footballer's home. Normal teenage behaviour.
This is where things get twisted.
When they got to his house, the girls were plied with more alcohol and other substances, given to them by the boys at the party and encouraged to drink it. She does not remember anything that happened after that.
But what happened after that is what leads us to this point today.
The sun hadn’t yet risen the next morning when Coleman, groggy from a sleep interrupted, made her way toward the living room.
She had woken moments earlier to the sound of scratching at the front door — the dogs, she figured, had gotten out — and grudgingly went to investigate.
Instead, she found Daisy, sprawled on the front porch and barely conscious.
The low temperature in the area that day was listed at 22 degrees, and the teen had spent roughly three hours outside, wearing only a T-shirt and sweatpants. Her hair was frozen. Scattered across an adjacent lot were her daughter’s purse, shoes and cellphone.
Coleman tried to process what she was seeing. Daisy had a history of sleepwalking — years earlier, she had wandered outside. Had she done it again? In her daughter’s bedroom, Coleman found the 13-year-old asleep. She, too, seemed confused.
Still struggling to make sense of it all, Coleman carried her daughter to the bathroom, to be undressed for a warm bath.
That’s when she saw the redness around her daughter’s genitalia and buttocks. It hurt, the girl said, when Coleman asked about it. Then she began crying.
“Immediately,” Coleman says, “I knew what had happened.”
Coleman called 911, which directed her to St. Francis Hospital in Maryville, where, according to Daisy’s medical report, doctors observed small vaginal tears indicative of recent sexual penetration. The 13-year-old also ended up at St. Francis.
It wasn’t until a captain of the Nodaway County Sheriff’s Office arrived at the hospital for one-on-one interviews with each girl, however, that the full picture of the night’s events began to emerge.
While the last Daisy remembered was drinking “a big glass of clear stuff,” the 13-year-old’s recollections proved more useful.
The younger girl, who admitted drinking that night but denied doing so after arriving at Barnett’s, said she went into a bedroom with the 15-year-old boy, who was an acquaintance. He is unidentified in this article because his case was handled in juvenile court, but sheriff’s records include his interview, in which he said that although the girl said “no” multiple times, he undressed her, put a condom on and had sex with her.
When the two returned to the basement’s common area, the 13-year-old said, Barnett emerged from another room and asked if the girls were ready to go home. She said Daisy was unable to speak coherently and had to be carried from the bedroom.
Around 2 a.m., the girls were driven back to the Coleman house, where, the 13-year-old said, the boys told her to go on inside, saying they would watch over Daisy outside until she sobered up.
The younger girl also offered a significant detail, one later reiterated in the interviews of at least three of the boys.
As Daisy was carried to the car, she was crying.
That's right. After raping her, they left her outside in freezing temperature in a tshirt and track pants, unconscious... And they did this deliberately.
The police were called, the boys involved rounded up. There was video footage of the rape. Police then obtained a search warrant and they found further evidence of what happened that night. Daisy's 17 year old footballer boyfriend, Barnett, was arrested, along with a few others for the events of that night.
You would think this was a done deal.
Medical tests performed on Daisy support the allegations that she was pretty much comatose, because of the amount of alcohol and other substances she was plied with. They have video footage and evidence gathered from the room where her rape and that of her friend occurred.
It seems not.
As many of the town rallied around the athletes involved, with the prosecutor alleging it was just a few teenagers getting up to what teenagers apparently do, drinking and having sex, the prosecutor, Rice, dismissed the charges against Barnett and his friends, apparently before the results of the rape kit even came back. And this is where it becomes even more insidious:
When a reporter visited Maryville police to obtain copies of Zech’s arrest record, for instance, the department employee who pulled the file was the mother of one of the five boys at the Barnett home that night.
“It’s a big town in a rural area, but it’s still a rural area,” says author Harry MacLean, who spent four years living in Nodaway County while researching “In Broad Daylight,” his best-selling book on the murder of Skidmore bully Ken McElroy and the town cover-up that followed. “…They do tend to revolve around the influence of several families. All of those small towns are like that there. There’s four or five or six families that carry the weight.”
And in Maryville, the Barnett name carries a good deal of weight.
Rex Barnett served 32 years with the Missouri Highway Patrol’s Troop H before embarking on a fruitful political run. In 1994, the Republican was elected as a state representative, serving four terms before leaving the House in 2002.
He also has political ties to prosecutor Rice. Barnett’s granddaughter worked as a volunteer on the campaign of U.S. Rep. Sam Graves, who also employs Rice’s sister as an aide in constituent services.
Rex Barnett is the grandfather of the alleged rapist.
Mrs Coleman was fired from her job and she, Daisy and her other children harassed and abused and quite literally, run out of town.
And amazingly enough, the issue becomes even uglier.
Mrs Coleman put her house on the market after she left Maryville to protect her family and especially her daughter. What happened next is, well..
There wasn’t much left by the time she arrived, just a burnt-out structure and the haze of smoke that lingered around it.
The siding and gutters had melted. The roof was gone. Inside, piles of ash filled the rooms that had once bustled with the pleasant sounds of a family.
That morning last April when Melinda Coleman received word that emergency vehicles were gathering around her Maryville house, she had hoped for the best.
Yes, the Coleman house mysteriously burned down, the cause of the blaze remains unknown.
Because that's not suspicious at all, is it?
As for Barnett?
Well he is having a grand old time at university and
gloating about his popularity with the ladies.
Daisy has attempted suicide twice, been hospitalised numerous times and treated for severe depression. Her 13 year old friend has not fared any better.
Anonymous have become involved and are threatening to expose the whole town, and the prosecutor, Rice, who is now facing scrutiny and demands to release details of who funded his campaign, has decided to re-open the investigation in the case.
As you can imagine,
Barnett's family are none too pleased. They have today come out and stated that their son was now struggling with the negative publicity and they felt he was being assassinated. She then blamed Daisy for a conspiracy against her son and her family.. She has obviously ignored the fact that Daisy and her family were run out of town after being threatened, abused and harassed and the family home burned down.
And Fox News take on this case now being re-opened? Well Shep Smith invited a guest on his program to discuss it...
“What did she expect to happen at one in the morning after sneaking out?” attorney Joseph DiBenedetto said on Shephard Smith Reports. “I’m not saying — assuming that these facts are accurate and this did happen — I’m not saying she deserved to be raped, but knowing the facts as we do here including what the prosecutor has set forth, this case is going nowhere and it's going nowhere quick.”
Shep Smith immediately jumped in and refuted his claims.
“What you’ve done, Joseph, is taken an alleged victim of rape and turned her into a liar and a crime committer,” he said. “That’s a far jump from a 1,000 miles away."
No shit Shep...