Teen who raped girl in Loudoun County school bathroom not required to register as sex offender

by WorldTribune Staff, July 28, 2024 Contract With Our Readers

A biological male who identifies as “gender-fluid” who was convicted of assaulting two girls in Loudoun County, Virginia high schools has been released from court supervision and will not be required to register as a sex offender, reports say.

Hunter Heckel, charged as a juvenile, will not have any public conviction on his record, The Post Millennial reported on Saturday.

Hunter Heckel

The first assault occurred in May 2021, when Heckel, wearing a skirt, assaulted a girl in the bathroom at Stone Bridge High School. The second assault took place at Broad Run High School in October 2021.

Judge Pamela Brooks had stated during Heckel’s 2022 sentencing, “Over the years this court has read many psychosexual reports, and when I read yours, frankly, it scared me. It scared me for you, it scared me for society.”

Nicole Whitman, the Chief Deputy Commonwealth’s Attorney, voiced her concerns about the ruling on Heckel.

“I wished that Heckel would be under supervised release until he was 21 years old, not 18, but the decision and the deal were made under the prior administration for the Commonwealth’s Attorney, so it wasn’t up to me,” Whitman stated.

The Daily Wire reported in October 2021 that the Loudoun County school system had concealed the rape while working to implement a policy allowing transgender-identifying students to use the bathroom of their declared gender identity rather than the one corresponding to their biological sex.

Loudoun County Public Schools Superintendent Scott Ziegler at the time accused parents who objected to the policy of being transphobic and denied that a rape had taken place in the bathroom.

“After the incident became known to the girl’s parents, her father, Scott Smith, attended a school board meeting to confront the board about the cover-up. He was escorted from the meeting by police and arrested. His arrest at a school board meeting where he was protesting a policy that facilitated the rape of his daughter became a flash point for Democrats eager to shut parents up who had concerns about policies over Covid, gender, or explicit curriculum in their children’s schools. When the FBI was tasked by Biden’s Department of Justice with investigating parents who attended school board meetings, this case was one of the catalysts named. The DOJ said that parents should be investigated with the same tools used to investigate domestic terrorists,” Hayden Cunningham wrote for The Post Millennial.

Related: Virginia governor grants ‘absolute pardon’ to father arrested at school board meeting, September 11, 2023

The victim’s father said that prosecutor Buta Biberaj did not notify his family about Heckel’s release. Smith also mentioned that after the rape, Biberaj extended a plea deal for lesser charges. “They were trying to push through a BS plea bargain with no consequence. We were told there was nothing we could do about it,” Smith told The Daily Wire. “If he hadn’t [assaulted a second girl], they were going to push us off a cliff.”

Biberaj also argued in court that Smith should be sentenced to jail for disorderly conduct after he got angry at the school board meeting where Ziegler denied that Smith’s daughter was raped. Virginia Governor Glenn Youngkin later pardoned Smith for his conviction of disorderly conduct. Biberaj has since lost his re-election effort.

Smith is currently suing Loudoun County Public Schools after lawyers acknowledged that the school district had violated federal law intended to protect women. Smith criticized the decision to release Heckel, saying, “He basically walked out of this scarless. Hunter got a new start yesterday. When do we get our new start?”


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