SARATOGA -- A few days after Audrie Pott killed herself, while her baffled parents were grieving and students across the Saratoga High School campus wore her favorite color, teal, in her memory, a couple of the 15-year-old girl's closest friends came to Audrie's mother and delivered a shocking message: "There is more to this than you know."
Sheila Pott rushed to check her daughter's cellphone, emails, texts and Facebook page. And then she found the haunting words of her beautiful, once-bubbly daughter: "These guys did (expletive) to me while I was sleeping," read one message. "This is the worst day of my life," read another.
Not only had she been sexually assaulted after drinking too much at a house party, her family's lawyers say, but pictures of her naked during the attack were being shared online.
Three days after her last online cry of despair, she was dead.
As Audrie's mother hunted for clues, a female sheriff's deputy assigned to patrol Saratoga High School began hearing whispers that at least one graphic and humiliating photo of Audrie was racing through social media. Audrie, who had gone to a house party in Saratoga on Labor Day weekend, had too much to drink and fell asleep in a bedroom and woke up to "the worst nightmare imaginable," according to her family's lawyer, Robert Allard.
Audrie's story swept across the country Friday, echoing recent cases in Nova Scotia, Canada, and Steubenville, Ohio, involving drinking,sexual assault and online photos.

The audacity of the boys to share the horrifying images in Audrie's case was the critical piece of evidence that led to their arrests on Thursday, authorities say, a stunning example of how cyberbullying can lead to tragedy and provide a digital trail for police.
"The bravado to think -- what were they thinking?" Santa Clara County Sheriff Laurie Smith said in an interview Friday. "I don't know why they would think it would be OK."
After seven months of detailed investigation, including the confiscation of numerous cellphones and computers of students, sheriff's deputies arrested three 16-year-old boys on Thursday, pulling two out of Saratoga High School classes where they were still enrolled and one who had transferred to Christopher High School in Gilroy. They were arrested on suspicion of two felonies and one misdemeanor involving sexual assault and the distribution of the images. The boys are in custody in juvenile hall. This newspaper is declining to name the suspects because they are juveniles. It is uncertain whether they will be tried as adults.
Three San Jose lawyers representing the boys issued a statement Friday saying that much of what has been reported over the past several days is inaccurate.
"Most disturbing is the attempt to link Audrey's suicide to the specific actions of these three boys," according to the statement from Eric Geffon, Alan Lagod and Benjamin Williams. "We are hopeful that everyone understands that these boys, none of whom have ever been in trouble with the law, are to be regarded as innocent."
The lawyer representing the Pott family on Friday said, however, that there was nothing else so distressing in her life that would cause her to kill herself. "Nothing remotely would cause her to do this," Allard said. "She had problems like any other high-schooler. Divorced parents is not something unique. She was a good kid and she had a long life ahead."
Ed Vasquez, who is a spokesman for Allard's law firm, Corsiglia, McMahon & Allard, said it was clear from Audrie's Facebook page that "she was devastated and humiliated by what had taken place. She was extremely angry that an image was captured and it was being disseminated. She was humiliated that everybody at the school would find out and she wanted answers from people at the party about what happened."
Audrie's parents, who were in seclusion Friday but are planning a Monday news conference, revealed their daughter's identity as a first step in bringing awareness to this kind of violence and cyberbullying, as well as pursuing an "Audrie's Law" to help curb the problems.
The case is especially significant to South Bay authorities, who were criticized for not filing charges in 2007 against members of the De Anza College baseball team accused of gang-raping an extremely intoxicated teenage girl at a house party in San Jose. The failure to prosecute that case was a key factor in the downfall of former District Attorney Dolores Carr.
"These aren't easy cases. We put resources into the De Anza case and were frustrated that it couldn't be prosecuted," said Smith, the sheriff, explaining the length of the Saratoga investigation. "But in De Anza, we didn't have photographs. I would rather have the best case we can move forward than the fastest case we can move forward."
Audrie had gone to a girlfriend's house on Sept. 2, Allard, the family's lawyer said. The friend's parents were out of town for the weekend, he said, and the teens had access to an unlocked liquor cabinet. The teens, including Audrie, began drinking alcohol mixed with Gatorade.
At some point Audrie went to a bedroom and fell asleep.
"They did unimaginable things to her while she was unconscious," Allard said. "A photo or multiple photos were taken of the assault as it was taking place."
The digital photos "spread like wildfire" among students at Saratoga and at least one image was posted on the Internet, Allard said.
Audrie had considered those boys her friends. "They were not strangers," he said. "She knew them pretty well. They were friends."
A year before the Labor Day assault, Audrie went to school officials saying she had been bullied by boys, Vasquez said, although he would not say whether the incidents involved the same group of teens. Two weeks after Audrie's death, Saratoga High School Principal Paul Robinson dismissed claims that bullying had anything to do with her suicide. On Friday, Robinson deferred comment to the superintendent of the Los Gatos-Saratoga Joint Union High School District.
On campus and around Saratoga on Friday, dozens of students declined to talk about whether they knew anything about what happened to Audrie.
One student said there were no assemblies and no announcements about the arrests. But after his band class, his teacher, Jon Pwu, told the percussion class to learn from the shocking event.
"Look out for each other," Pwu told the class. "Be there for your friends."
..........

SARATOGA, Calif. –  The parents of a 15-year-old California girl who took her own life after she was sexually abused and an explicit photo of the assault circulated among her classmates want the three boys who have been arrested in the case prosecuted as adults, a lawyer for the family says.
Authorities arrested the three 16-year-olds on suspicion of sexual battery against Audrie Pott, a Saratoga High School sophomore who hanged herself in September. The arrests this week shocked many in this prosperous Silicon Valley suburb of 30,000 as new details of the case emerged.
"We're talking about, other than murdering someone, the highest degree of a crime you could possibly do, which is to violate them in the worst of ways...and then to effectively rub her face in it afterwards," Robert Allard, the attorney representing the teenager's mother, father and step-mother, said Friday.
But lawyers for the three boys, whose names have not been released because they are minors, released a statement Friday asking the public to withhold judgment until their clients can give their side of the story, the San Jose Mercury News reported.
"Much of what has been reported over the last several days is inaccurate. Most disturbing is the attempt to link (Audrie's) suicide to the specific actions of these three boys," the statement from San Jose attorneys Eric Geffon, Alan Lagod and Benjamin Williams reads. "We are hopeful that everyone understands that these boys, none of whom have ever been in trouble with the law, are to be regarded as innocent."
Allard said the trouble started over Labor Day weekend while Audrie was on a sleepover at a friend's house where the parents were gone and the unaccompanied teens got into the liquor.
"Audrie, by all accounts, consumed some of that alcohol and eventually went upstairs to go to sleep and woke up to the worst nightmare imaginable," concluding that she had been molested, he said.
She soon found an abundance of material online about that night, including a picture and emails. She also discovered that her attackers were three boys she considered friends — young men in whom she had confided, the lawyer said. On Facebook, Audrie wrote that the whole school knew what happened, and she complained that her life was ruined, Allard said.
Eight days after the party, she hanged herself.
"She was being consoled by other friends and they were concerned about her," the lawyer said. "One day she apparently felt that she couldn't cope with it anymore and poor Audrie was traumatized to the point where she ended her life."
Her parents did not learn about the assault until after her death, when Audrie's friends approached them, Allard said.
Santa Clara County Sheriff Laurie Smith told the Mercury News that investigators for her department started looking into the circumstances surrounding Audrie's Sept. 10 suicide in the days immediately following it. A deputy assigned to Saratoga High heard rumors about the sexual assault and possible photographic evidence, and detectives spent months interviewing students and subpoenaing cell phone records, Smith said.
"We still have more interviews to do. We have more phones to get," the sheriff said. "We have good evidence to justify the criminal charges even though the investigation is ongoing."
Together with two other episodes recently in the news — a suicide in Canada and a rape in Steubenville, Ohio — the case underscored the seeming callousness with which some young people use technology.
In Canada, meanwhile, police said Friday they have received new information and are reopening their investigation in the case of 17-year-old suicide victim Rehtaeh Parsons.
Parsons was photographed while being sexually assaulted in 2011 and was then bullied after the photo was shared on the Web, authorities said. Police initially concluded there were no grounds to charge anyone.
In Steubenville, Ohio, two high school football players were convicted last month of raping a drunken 16-year-old girl in a crime that was recorded on cellphones by students and gossiped about online. The victim herself realized she had been attacked after seeing text messages, a photo of herself naked and a video that mocked her.
"The problem with digital technologies is they can expand the harm that people suffer greatly," said Nancy Willard, an Oregon-based cyberbullying expert and creator of a prevention program for schools.
Audrie's family has alleged her attackers tried to destroy evidence. That claim was posted on a Facebook page for a foundation set up in the girl's name.
It didn't provide further details on what type of evidence might have been targeted by the suspects. However, it asked any students with information to come forward.
"That was one thing that really bothered the parents," Allard said. "For the past seven months they've been living their lives as if nothing happened, attending school as normal sophomores, while they're suffering indescribably for the loss of their daughter."
Allard, who hired two former San Jose police officers to investigate what happened, said Thursday's arrests "reopened a wound" for the girl's family members, and they have gone into seclusion. But they want to see action taken again those who passed the photo around. Her mother, father and step-mother have scheduled a Monday news conference where they plan to discuss how they found out about the attack.

http://www.foxnews.com/us/2013/04/13/family-lawyer-calif-girl-who-killed-herself-was-friends-with-boys-who-allegedly/#ixzz2QM2XS6GD

http://www.news-herald.com/articles/2013/04/15/news/e79556f2-5427-43a1-8ec2-218a48d355e1.txt