Time has not necessarily helped a Forsyth County teenager who was allegedly drugged and sexually assaulted.
The girl was 15 when it happened and now she is almost 18 and nearing her high school graduation.
But instead of looking ahead, her mother says, she is focused on her past -- particularly November 2008 -- and on the trial that has yet to happen because her accused attacker, 42-year-old Kenneth Dustin Grant, though wearing an ankle monitor, disappeared two days before he was to be in court for jury selection.
“Not a whole lot has changed,” said the girl’s mother. “The U.S. Marshals have gotten involved. I don’t have a clue where he is."
But, the mother said, if she and her husband can’t do anything to help their daughter, they will try to help the victims in the future.
“I have been in touch with state representatives, congressmen and senators, explaining what has happened,” she said.
The mother said a tougher mandatory-minimum punishment for child molestation -- up to 20 years for the first conviction and as much as 30 years or life for a second one -- aren't enough if "you don’t change the bond requirements."
As in her daughter’s case.
The $75,000 bond Grant posted Jan. 7, 2010, and the house arrest ordered apparently were not enough to ensure he would show up for trial.
Last September, two days before Grant’s trail was to begin, he disappeared. The case has been put off indefinitely.
“She’s not doing well,” the mother said of her daughter, who is not identified because The Atlanta Journal-Constitution does not name victims of sexual assaults. “She’s just having some residual problems from it. It’s rough on her because she knows he’s out there.”
First reports were that Grant vanished after cutting off his electronic ankle monitor and tossing it into Lake Lanier.
Court officials now say they don’t if he removed the monitor or if it was still on Grant's leg and he was just "out of signal range." All they can say definitively is that the last signal from the monitor came from a marina on Lake Lanier, according to court administrator Dawn Childress.
Prosecutors, the defense attorney and the girl realized Grant was gone only when he didn't show up for court.
“What happened to our daughter has already happened,” the mother told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution Thursday. “If we could keep it from happening to somebody else’s daughter, it would be good.”
Grant is charged with 23 felonies -- four counts of aggravated sexual battery, four counts of child molestation, and three counts of sexual exploitation of children involving the girl; and 12 counts of sexual exploitation of children after a forensic examination of the computer by the Georgia Bureau of Investigation allegedly turned up child porn involving young girls who are not identified.
But authorities were able to identify one person in those images. The mother said her older daughter didn't know she had also been assaulted until she saw the photos; she appeared to be unconscious during the attack and has no memory of it.
The assault of the younger girl was on the night before Thanksgiving in 2008. The divorced Grant had asked her to babysit his sons and to stay all night because he expected to be out late.
While the boys -- then 2 and 4 -- slept, Grant allegedly drugged the girl and assaulted her. The next morning, Grant drove the girl home. Two weeks later, she told her best friend and the friend told the mother.
The delayed trial -- possibly indefinitely -- seems to have made things worse for the girl emotionally, the mother said.
“After this trial thing happened, she lost it,” the mother said.
For a time, the teenager did not want to go to school. And there also was a period last fall when the girl was more rebellious, didn’t want to live at home and routinely missed her curfew.
For now, the girl and her older sister know nothing of the early efforts to toughen the law concerning bond for accused molesters.
“We tell her as little as possible," the mother said. "What she knows right now is he’s gone and the marshals are looking for him. She doesn’t ask questions. If she does, we’ll answer them. We just want her to focus on going to school and not being scared.”
The girl has applied to colleges.
"She wants to do criminal investigations," the mother said. "She wants to be a profiler. … She wants to catch bad guys.”
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