Negroid Rapes 14-Year-Old White Girl Jews Support Rapist

The rape occurred, prosecutors said, at a party attended by 50 students from Belmont High. A 14-year-old girl asked her 17-year-old date to take her upstairs to the bathroom because, after several beers, she felt sick.

The young man was Tajien White, a black student from Boston who’d been in the Belmont schools since first grade. He was very popular, handsome, a 6-foot-3-inch then 17-year-old football star, president of the junior class.

The 14-year-old, a petite freshman, might have been flattered by an upperclassman’s attention.

According to White’s lawyer, Willie Davis, there was no rape, no non-consensual anything. White may have put his finger inside the girl, Davis said. “But there were kids making out all over the house,” he said, “doing what kids do.”

According to prosecutors, however, when the clearly intoxicated girl reached the bathroom, White closed the door, attempted to have oral sex with her and then had intercourse, which she neither agreed to nor encouraged. Her blood left on the bathroom rug, she told White she wanted to go home. He took her there.

That was in February 1998.

Nearly two weeks ago White was sentenced, not to the three to five years the prosecution wanted but to one year of probation. Yet this did not happen without a mini-media swirl: several of the hundreds of Belmont residents who originally rallied to White’s defense showed up in court to support him. White’s father blamed the prosecution on race: the girl is white.

Phillip B. Heymann, a former deputy U.S. attorney general now at Harvard Law School, penned an entire column in the Boston Globe whacking the Middlesex County DA for overzealousness. “It’s unfair to assign total responsibility to the male” for what happens sexually between two teenagers when one of them has been drinking, Heymann said in an interview, unless he clearly forced her. “This never should have come to trial.”

Rebutted District Attoreny Martha Coakley, “He says that because he doesn’t think it’s a crime, because his underlying premise is that this is just what kids do. “But,” said Coakley, denying any race bias, “this isn’t about two people getting drunk and falling into bed together. This is about a kid who went upstairs because she felt sick . . . who was too drunk to function.” Suddenly her jeans are around her ankles. And she’s 14.

Kim Allis’ daughter, Paget, was among the Belmont students who attended White’s sentencing, who rallied two years ago, not around the victim, but the accused.

Yesterday, at her Belmont home, Kim Allis considered again the questions: Should you try a 17-year-old for assaulting a 14-year-old? Does the girl’s drinking mitigate the seriousness of the crime? What’s the moral here, the lesson, save to lecture children again about the dangerous mix of sex and alcohol?

“I don’t know,” said Allis. “It was such a polarized, charged situation. They threw (White) right out of school. They didn’t do any counseling about it. And because he’s a black kid, there was a certain knee-jerk reaction to jump on the bandwagon.”

In a statement to the court, the girl’s aunt spoke of how that bandwagon-jumping devastated her niece. “She had a close circle of girlfriends,” the aunt said. “But after reporting the rape, most of her girlfriends stopped returning her calls. . . At school, White’s friends and teammates harassed (her),” once screaming “rape” at her while she practiced softball in the field house.

The aunt said that after nine years in the Belmont schools, her niece finally left the high school and her childhood friends behind. She was unable to endure the harassment anymore combined with the death of her mother, who collapsed in a coma and died April 5, two months after the February party. She was 38. She left five children.

Yesterday, Paget Allis, who keeps in touch with White, was asked, too, about the lesson here, about what was served by going to court.

Like her mother, Paget had trouble answering. “It doesn’t sound like she’s happy,” she said of the victim. “He’s as good as can be expected, but not that good. It’s like it just got out of control,” she said. “I don’t know if anyone’s better off.”

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