No furlough for victim

The Boston Herald

Beverly Beckham

The mother is calm because she needs her daughter to be. The mother is the leader. She can lead her daughter back to the night that changed their lives, or she can take her hand and walk her toward tomorrow.

She chooses tomorrow.

After the hearing, when the boys who sexually assaulted her then 15-year-old finally admitted what they had done, the mother went to a store and bought her daughter a small box and said, ``Put all your bad memories in here. It was one night of your life. It's not your whole life. You have a choice. To let it ruin you or to let it go.''

The mother prays every day that her daughter will let it go.

The assault took place on Feb. 2, 2002. The teens, Justin Goldstein and Justin Kesner, along with the victim, were students at Canton High School. They'd been at a party together. The girl had two Smirnoff Ices and got drunk.

The boys drove her to an empty apartment where they repeatedly assaulted her, then told her to clean herself up while they drove to a store to buy industrial cleaner to scrub away her blood left on the bed and carpet.

She vomited in the kitchen as they were leaving the apartment. They dropped her off barefoot in the snow three houses away from the party they'd left hours before. They told her to tell people she got lost in the woods. But she confided to friends that she'd been raped.

The next morning she told her mother. This should have been a clear-cut case of guys doing wrong. But they were jocks and popular, and the girl was blamed. She got drunk. She let it happen. It was her fault, people were saying.

``I was shocked that she drank,'' her mother says. ``But she did. She did not `go willingly,' though. Those words written in a news report killed me.''

For 28 months the two teens denied they had done anything wrong. And the girl had to live with this. She transferred from Canton High because of the looks and the taunts. Her family was harassed. The girl wanted to leave town. The girl wanted to die.

The boys graduated from high school and went on to college.

Finally, on June 2, Goldstein and Kesner, now 19, confessed. They stood in Dedham District Court and pleaded guilty to indecent assault and battery and assault and battery by force.

``Nobody knew all they did to her. Now they do. If we went to court and 12 people had found them guilty, it wouldn't have meant as much. They were finally forced to admit, `Yes. We did what she said we did.' ''

There was no remorse though. ``The judge gave them the opportunity to say something, to say `We're sorry.' But they didn't. My beautiful daughter didn't want to live after this. They did that to her.''

Goldstein and Kesner were sentenced to one year in prison followed by five years of probation. (They will be eligible for parole in six months and are being held at Plymouth County House of Correction.) They do not have to register as sex offenders. There's an end to their sentence.

As for the girl?

``Thank God, she's found a place - her new high school, where she's on the honor roll, where she is getting to find the girl she was before all this,'' her mother says. ``This could have ruined her. She felt like an outcast. But she's strong. We're all stronger now.''

The mother knows you can't lock up the past forever. ``Down the road, this will have its repercussions. But for now it's over. She's 17. It's time to move on.''