Photo credit: Getty
Police
in Chicago are working to identify those who sexually assaulted a
15-year-old Chicago girl in an attack that was streamed on Facebook
Live.
Anthony
Guglielmi, a spokesman for the Chicago Police Department, said
Wednesday that no arrests had been made, but he tweeted Tuesday that
detectives were questioning several people. The girl, who went missing
Sunday and who was sexually assaulted by five or six men or boys in the
video, was reunited with her family on Tuesday morning, he said.
The video marks the second time in recent months that the Chicago Police Department has investigated an apparent attack that was streamed live on Facebook.
In
January, four people were arrested after a cellphone footage showed
them allegedly taunting and beating a mentally disabled man.
Police
only learned of the latest alleged attack when the girl's mother
approached the head of the police department, Superintendent Eddie
Johnson, Monday afternoon as he was leaving a police stationon the
city's West Side, department spokesman Anthony Guglielmi said Tuesday.
She told him her daughter had been missing since Sunday and showed him
screen grab photos of the alleged assault.
He
said Johnson immediately ordered detectives to investigate and the
department asked Facebook to take down the video, which it did.
Guglielmi
said Tuesday that detectives found the girl and reunited her with her
family. He said she told detectives that she knows at least one of her
alleged attackers, but it remained unclear how well they knew each
other.
He
said Johnson was "visibly upset" after he watched the video, both by
its content and the fact that there were "40 or so live viewers and no
one thought to call authorities."
Investigators
know the number of viewers because the count was posted with the video.
To find out who they were, though, investigators would have to subpoena
Facebook and would need to "prove a nexus to criminal activity" to
obtain such a subpoena, Guglielmi said by email.
A
spokeswoman for Facebook, Andrea Saul, said she had no specific comment
on the Chicago incident but that the company takes its "responsibility
to keep people safe on Facebook very seriously."
"Crimes like this are hideous and we do not allow that kind of content on Facebook," she said.
Jeffrey
Urdangen, a professor at Northwestern University's law school and the
director of the school's Center for Criminal Defense, said it isn't
illegal to watch such a video or to not report it to the police. He also
said child pornography charges wouldn't apply unless viewers were
downloading the video.
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