After child peed on a 5-year-old girl, a made-up story put a man in jail, police say
A group of children were playing hide-and-seek when a 5-year-old girl was peed on while hiding in the bushes, WWMT reported.
“Her hair smelled like nothing but urine and it was like soaked, her whole shirt front to back was soaked,” Katrena Rapier told the station.
Rapier told FOX17 her two young boys were playing with the girl when she was peed on.
“She came in the house and she was wet, like soaking wet, and I’m asking her what happened but she was afraid to tell me because she thought she was going to get in trouble,” Rapier told FOX17. “And then I called my boys because I knew they’d tell me and then they said the guy said ‘stupid (racist slur)‘ and started peeing on her.”
After the 5-year-old girl told her parents about the incident on Aug. 22, the parents called Grand Rapids Police Department and reported that a 60-year-old white man had urinated on their black daughter, according to a news release posted by the Grand Rapids Police Department on Facebook. The girl told police the man also called her a racist slur.
Witnesses — two 7-year-old kids and another 5-year-old — also alleged that that had happened, police said.
After investigating, police arrested a man on Aug. 23 while conducting a search warrant at his home, the statement said.
“It is anticipated charges will be determined by the Kent County Prosecutors Office,” police said at the time. “If criminal charges are approved, the suspect will be subsequently arraigned.”
But those charges were not filed, prosecutors said in the Aug. 24 Facebook post update, because a lot of the story was made up.
The girl was peed on, the statement said, just not by an older man.
“The children admitted the adult (male) was not involved” after their parents talked to them more about the incident, the statement said. The children said one of them had urinated on the 5-year-old girl, police told Michigan Live.
Kent County Prosecutors told Michigan Live that the kids “concocted the story to avoid trouble.”
“We appreciate the conscientiousness of the parents in bringing the matter to the attention of the police, and in continuing to ask their children question(s) as new evidence was obtained,” prosecutors said in the release.
The man who was blamed in the “fabricated” story is a registered sex offender who lives on the same street as the kids and has a “long criminal history that includes two counts of indecent exposure in 1994 and attempted criminal sexual assault in 1981,” the station reported.
Prosecutors used this “prime example” to remind people why it is “important to wait until all the evidence has been gathered and the criminal investigation has been completed before jumping to any conclusions,” they said in the Facebook post.