(Photo: Kevin Hagen/The New York Times/Redux Pictures)



A horrific gang rape in a dark Brooklyn playground has left not only an 18-year-old brutalized victim in its wake, but also a collection of traumatized parents — including the girl’s father, forced from the scene at gunpoint — who have no doubt been undone by their various connections to the crime.

“One of them put a gun in my face, telling me to run, and all of them had their way with her,” the father, who was having a beer with his daughter in the park at the time, on Thursday evening, told WABC. He added that he didn’t have a cellphone and went to beg for help at a nearby store, although no one there would call police.

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While one of the teen perpetrators is still at large, four suspects have been arrested — two of them, ages 14 and 15, after being turned in to police by their own parents. The arrests came a day after the police released a surveillance video of the teens entering a deli before the incident. An attendant at the deli told the New York Times that the footage came from his shop and that he recognized the suspects because they often came by to steal snacks off the shelves. “They’re bad boys,” he said.

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Many questions about the crime still linger — including why it took the father of the victim nearly 20 minutes to locate police and why no one, including bystanders, called 911 for help, notes the New York Times. As for the teen victim, who suffered cuts to her arms, neck, and knees during the attack and was treated and released at a nearby hospital, “I didn’t know what to do,” she said, according to CNN. “I was in panic mode.”

Teen suspects on surveillance video. (Photo: AP Photo)

And now she, as well as everyone else connected to the crime, must live with the aftermath. That includes the teen girl’s father. “If you’re a father in this situation, you are going through rage and guilt and trauma of having been there, and then a sense of rage and humiliation,” Alan Lipman, director of the Center for the Study of Violence in Washington, D.C., tells Yahoo Parenting. “That’s a trauma in and of itself, seeing your daughter about to be brutalized. Then there’s the issue of how he deals with his daughter going forward, how he will face her.”

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Lipman, a psychologist on faculty at the George Washington University Medical Center, adds, “It’s likely he’s feeling deep anger, guilt, and self-reproach for having placed himself and his daughter in such a situation. He’s certainly thinking about the profound feelings of helplessness, hopelessness, and rage, and of being placed in a situation where he could not act to help his daughter. Just imagine the helplessness and fury he must have felt when he went looking for help.”

And then there’s the matter of the parents who have turned their children over to the authorities — reminiscent of another New York City crime one year ago, after which the parents of kids who shot city cops came forward with public apologies and various explanations. “It’s like I failed as a mom,” one of the mothers said.

In this case, for the parents who turned in their teens, “there’s got to be a great deal of conflict,” Lipman says. “On one hand, there’s a kind of mortification upon discovering their child’s behavior — but it’s also their child. There’s likely also the recognition that if they don’t turn him in, the consequences may be greater.”

Feelings of failure may also be at play. “It would be very plausible to believe the parents in this situation would be thinking about how they could’ve raised a son who behaved this way, as well as guilt about not having observed their son’s behavior more closely,” he says. Also, since there’s still one rapist at large, there’s a whole other set of emotions likely coursing through everyone who has been caught or come forward: “fear,” Lipman says. “Fear of what might happen.”





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