TAMPA - A young woman was walking back to her car after the Gasparilla parade on Saturday when she says a man dragged her behind a building and raped her near the intersection of Howard and Swann. She managed to get away and called 911. Police took her to the hospital and began a routine rape investigation.
When they started checking the victim's background, they discovered she had an arrest warrant out for her.
It was from an arrest when the woman was a juvenile and she was accused of not paying restitution. The woman says she was not aware there was a warrant out for her, and her attorney says it appears to be a paperwork error.
"They were more interested in prosecuting her for something that's a paperwork snafu from four years ago, that was juvenile. They were more interested in working on that than finding an experienced rapist," stated the victim's mother.
Still, the woman was put in handcuffs and taken to jail. She was not allowed bond, and the medical staff at the jail refused to give her the Morning After Pill even though it had been prescribed at the hospital.
"The medical supervisor would not allow her to take the pill because she said it was against her, the supervisor's, religion. So, here we have a medical supervisor imposing her beliefs on a rape victim," claimed the victim's attorney Virlyn Moore. "As a human being, how someone could be so violated by this monster and then the system comes along and rapes her again psychologically and emotionally - it's outrageous and unconscionable."
"At this point, we're very concerned about the welfare of this young woman," said Tampa police spokeswoman Laura McElroy. "There's a lot of unanswered questions about exactly how this unfolded we are going to get to the bottom of it."
McElroy says there is a policy in place where anyone who is suspected of a misdemeanor is not taken to jail if they're the victim of a sex crime.
She says while it's nearly impossible to draw up a policy that addresses every situation, this may be a case where department policy should be reexamined.
"The system as a whole, that is so broken, it needs to be completely fixed, so broken, so broken that something like this could happen, something like this should never have happened," said the victim's mother.
The victim did manage to finally bond out of jail Monday afternoon. She was too emotionally distraught to speak with the media, and FOX 13 does not identify the victims of sexual assault.