Back in February 2014, a 16-year-old girl from Omaha was drugged and raped by multiple attackers. It appeared to be an open-and-shut case. Police had a witness, as well as DNA evidence linking two of the attackers to the crime. Despite this, no one was arrested until this past January. As a result, a sexual assault victim had to wait a year to know that her attackers were going to answer for their crime.
According to a devastating article in yesterday’s Omaha World-Herald, the victim, known as “Anna,” went to a party on the night of February 15, 2014. Someone slipped her a drink. The next thing she knew, multiple people were taking turns abusing her. When someone dropped her off at her house the next morning, she was covered in bruises and bite marks, and also had a black eye and a swollen cheek. A medical exam revealed that Anna had several tears in her vagina and another in her anus.
A few days after the assault, a student at Omaha South High School got a picture of the half-naked sexual assault victim and reported it to police. The investigation got a major break when one of the partygoers, Brooke Ray, told police what happened. It’s almost unheard of for a third party to be able to give an eyewitness account of a sexual assault.
Ray said that two boys at the party, Nicholas Bregg and Javohn Templeman, carried Anna to Ray’s car and drove her to the home of Kim Lassek to recuperate. She then saw first Templeman, then Bregg, assault Anna. Tests later confirmed that both Templeman and Bregg’s DNA were inside Anna.
It later emerged that Templemann and Bregg hauled Anna to the Templemans’ house, where Templeman’s sister, Jalyia, took a picture of Anna and posted it to Instagram. That picture would prove to not only be her undoing, but also those of her brother and Bregg. Police only learned what happened to Anna after the picture started popping up on cell phones at Omaha South.
Despite overwhelming evidence, the case was handled like a Keystone Kops routine. Anna gave police the names of at least two people who attacked her at the party, but no one followed up on those leads. It was not until December 2014 that police were able to identify anyone else who attended the party–but they wouldn’t cooperate. To add insult to injury, a sample of Anna’s urine went unrefrigerated for almost a week, eliminating any chance of conclusively proving what was in that drink.
Templeman and Bregg were finally arrested on January 21. Douglas County prosecutors were well aware that this investigation had been horribly mishandled. They offered Templeman and Bregg a plea bargain which would have avoided a trial. Bregg took the deal, pleading no contest to second-degree sexual assault and false imprisonment. He faces up to 10 years in prison. Bregg’s attorney, Glenn Shapiro, thinks the delay caused by what he called “a jacked-up investigation” may have allowed the people who originally attacked Anna to get away with a horrible crime.
Templeman opted to go to trial, hoping that jurors would buy his claim that he’d been drugged as well. It was a fatal miscalculation; jurors only needed an hour to convict him of first-degree sexual assault. He faces up to 50 years in prison. His sister was charged with distribution of child pornography; she faces up to four years in prison if convicted.
Omaha police launched an internal investigation in February. While police chief Todd Schmaderer admitted that there had been an “unacceptable delay” in getting justice for Anna, no policies have been changed. That’s as unacceptable as the original delay.
A sexual assault victim should never have to endure an undue wait for justice. But it’s simply outrageous that a sexual assault victim would have to wait a year to get justice despite overwhelming evidence of what happened to her. A lot of people should have been fired–at minimum–for making Anna wait this long. And if Schmaderer can’t recognize that major changes are needed to ensure there isn’t a next time for this in Omaha, he needs to go too.
