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By Jennifer Lebovich and Kathleen McGrory | Miami Herald

Three boys were charged Wednesday in the sexual assault of an 11-year-old autistic girl in an elementary school restroom.
One of the boys, also 11, followed the girl into a restroom at Norland Elementary School in Miami Gardens earlier this month and forced her to perform oral sex on him, authorities said.

He is charged with sexual battery on a child under 12 and with false imprisonment.
The two others, ages 13 and 11, acted as lookouts outside the restroom, the arrest report said.
The Miami Herald is not identifying the youths because of their ages.

“It’s a terrible, unfortunate incident,’ said Miami-Dade Schools Police Chief Charles Hurley. “I don’t know where youngsters are learning some of these things. These are acquired behaviors.
The girl’s mother said she did not find out about the attack until two days later, when she got a call from the school. She said, though, that family members noticed a change in the girl’s behavior right away.

“She wouldn’t hold her head up, she wasn’t the same,’ said the girl’s mother.
The girl has Asperger’s syndrome, a mild form of autism, and is in a special education class at Norland Elementary, 19340 NW Eighth Ct.

The girl’s mother and attorneys hired by the family called for more security to prevent such incidents in schools.
“Two places your children should be safe: home and school,’ the mother said. “That should be a safe haven for them.’

The attorneys said they had not ruled out taking legal action.
A schools spokesman said the alleged assailants had been suspended and would be recommended for expulsion. The three, who were charged as juveniles, were not physically taken into police custody. Instead, the department filed the charges directly with the Miami-Dade state attorney’s office.

Police said the assault took place about noon March 3. The girl had been in a class preparing students for the FCAT, the attorneys said.

She was in a restroom when one of the boys came in and locked the door.
The boy “told the victim to get on her knees and he unzipped his pants,’ the arrest report said. He then made her perform a sex act .

The two other boys were outside the bathroom acting as lookouts, the report said. They were charged with false imprisonment and as accessories to sexual battery.
Hurley, the schools police chief, said his department approached the case “with an extreme amount of caution, care and sensitivity.’

“Instead of just making a quick arrest, we tried to gather as much information as we could,’ he said.
School administrators said they were reviewing procedures at the school.
Hurley said schools remain a safe place for children.
“We open our doors every day to 340,000 kids,’ he said. (more…)

(Joanne Rathe, Globe Staff Photo, photo taken from http://signposts-au.org/)

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The Autism News English, English Aimee Mury, autism, autistic, Eliza Mury, film

Eliza Mury was only one year old when she said her first word — ”doggie” — and a few more words followed. But soon her parents noticed that her vocabulary seemed frozen. Speech therapy didn’t help.

Eliza’s mother, Aimee Mury, took her daughter to doctors and specialists, but none diagnosed anything more serious than a hearing deficiency. Friends and relatives, though, had gently begun to suggest that Eliza might be autistic. Aimee Mury was so fearful of the condition, she could barely say the word.

After repeated exams by specialists, Eliza was diagnosed with autism when she was 2 1/2, in the spring of 2007. Aimee Mury read everything she could about the condition. But as she learned about traits and treatment, she had a hard time seeing what an autistic child looked like.

”It’s very hard initially to meet other people and kids,” Mury said. ”I was on YouTube and I was trying to search for autism. And I found there was very little out there.”

Nearly three years after Eliza’s diagnosis, Aimee Mury has helped create a movie about her daughter and their struggle to get her diagnosed called ”Eliza, My Songbird.” The movie, produced and directed by Mury’s neighbor, Zadi Zokou, will have its first public showing Sunday at Natick’s Morse Institute Library.

Mury, 42, saw the movie as a chance to help other families with autistic children get diagnosed more quickly than Eliza. But Eliza also plays a prominent role in the movie. Mury and her husband, John, pastor of Natick’s Beacon Community Church, hope that making autistic children more visible will help diminish the stigma of the neurological disorder.

”I think it’s a wonderful tribute that she is willing to do this,” said Kelly Gryglewicz, a member of the board of directors of the Autism Alliance of MetroWest, and a friend of Mury’s. ”A lot of people are not willing to disclose the diagnosis.”

Getting Eliza diagnosed with autism was a long and frustrating process that began when the girl was 18 months old. Appointments with specialists took months to book, and in the beginning, none of them believed Eliza was autistic. Girls are less likely than boys to be autistic. And while many autistic children shy away from social contact, Eliza was very social — even though she was indiscriminate, trying to sit on a stranger’s lap, for instance.

”That’s what I was quickly learning was that even within the professional group, there’s a lot of misunderstanding of what a child with autism can look like,” Aimee Mury said. (more…)