Two 12-year-old Ohio girls were given a year in jail each for their part in a vicious assault on an autistic girl that was caught on a video that went viral earlier this year.
The two preteens were sentenced to the year in jail, but they had that jail time suspended if each completes a one-thousand-word report on autism and serves 100 hours of community service.
The viral video depicts the two preteens viciously attacking 12-year-old Macktaja Baldwin, an autistic girl who lives near her attackers in the same King Kennedy tenement building in Cleveland.
Even more disturbing than the children seen attacking the autistic girl is the fact that one of the attackers’ mother can be heard yelling, “Punch her mother f**ing face in, beat her face in” and urging her 12-year-old daughter to seriously hurt the autistic girl.
The two accused 12-year-olds appeared in court on Wednesday wearing ankle bracelets from their home detention.
Judge Thomas O’Malley, the judge handing down the sentence, said he was disturbed by the case and warned the girls that if they didn’t write the reports on autism and fulfill the 100 hours of community service they would go to jail for a year.
Calia Harris, the mother heard urging her child to beat the autistic girl, also has a court case and is charged with six counts including felonious assault.
The autistic girl’s mother was perhaps even more disturbed by Harris’s actions than those of the two attackers.
“She had every power in the world to stop that fight once she got outside. But she didn’t,” Mrs. Baldwin said of Harris’s actions that day.
Follow Warner Todd Huston on Twitter @warnerthuston or email the author at igcolonel@hotmail.com
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