When the girl was 8, she was sent to California to live with her grandmother during the contentious divorce of her El Mirage parents. There, she said her "daddy did something bad to her," her grandmother told authorities. The grandmother called El Mirage police in August 2006, reporting that the girl said she had been sexually abused for about two years.
The case was forwarded to Arpaio's Special Victims Unit. A week later, a caseworker from California CPS phoned MCSO Detective Chad Brackman to say she had "useful information" about the matter after talking to the grandmother. MCSO sex-crimes Detective John Felbab was assigned the case, "but very little was done," El Mirage police later wrote in a report. "[Felbab] conducted a minimal amount of follow-up."
At a December news conference, Joe Arpaio listens to questions about botched sex-crimes investigations under his watch.
![Levalya Beyart of El Mirage says that after her daughter reported being raped in 2007, the Sheriff's Office told her, "This [is] not a priority."](http://media.phoenixnewtimes.com/joe-arpaio-s-office-says-to-hell-with-the-children.7636314.40.jpg)
Jamie Peachey
Levalya Beyart of El Mirage says that after her daughter reported being raped in 2007, the Sheriff's Office told her, "This [is] not a priority."
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The last action the Sheriff Office took was to interview the girl in February 2007.
It would have been easy to find the suspect — he was convicted in November 2006 of robbery and was serving a three-year sentence in an Arizona prison. But the man never was interviewed about the crime.
El Mirage police wrote that no explanation exists for why the case wasn't worked or submitted to the County Attorney's Office. "This was clearly a prosecutable case," El Mirage police wrote.
In November 2007, El Mirage detectives could not locate the victim, her mother, or the grandmother. They contacted Arizona CPS and "obtained nothing to go on." The case is considered active.
The girl's mother says she can't comprehend why police dropped the case. The girl was interviewed by experts several times, and they concluded she was telling the truth. But she says a Sheriff's Office detective told her that the case never would stand up in court, "that it was my daughter's word against [her assailant's]. They said they didn't want to put her through it."
Yet the girl and mother still are ready to testify, the woman tells New Times. The woman's phone number was passed along to El Mirage police at her request.
Asked whether she thought it was possible that her ex-husband could commit a similar crime, she replied, "If he did it to his own daughter, why couldn't he do it to somebody else?"
Pursuing such a sex-abuse investigation — after 5 1/2 years of inactivity — won't win Arpaio the kind of headlines he craves.
Which could explain why a teenage girl in Chicago still is seeking justice.
