Maryann


Her cousins remember her
as friendly
and straightforward;

her friends remember her
as rebellious
and confused.

Her teachers remember her
as a discipline problem.

The police remember her
as a sad story.

The river remembers her
as frightened
and desperate.

Her killers remember her
as an easy lay.

If thirteen years old
is a little young to be a whore,
it’s even younger
to be a statistic.

Maryann was a girl my age. She would have been a senior now, if she hadn't been gang-raped and murdered five years ago by a group of older men with whom she'd been having sex. They killed her because they knew she had finally confessed to her mother what was going on; that she had gone to the police; that they would be arrested. Their girlfriends, jealous of the way their boyfriends looked at the younger rival, encouraged them to get rid of her. First they beat her, then they raped her, then they threw her in the woods like garbage. Finally, they duct taped her, wrapped a chain around her body, and threw her in the Housatonic river. The coroner said she asphyxiated. No one knows exactly when she died.

This happened in 1998. The police have finally arrested the five men responsible for Maryann's death. All of them plead not guilty to a slew of charges including sexual assualt, assualt and battery, kidnapping, murder, and threat of injury to a minor. Two of them face the death penalty if they are convicted.

I sincerely hope that the animals who attacked and killed this little girl do not recieve the death penalty. I hope they are sentenced to life in prison without possibility of parole. Maybe their hearts will jump for joy if they hear this from the judge's lips, but I'll smile. Maybe they don't know what happens in prison to the kind of criminals who rape little girls, but I do, and it's no less than they deserve.