The victim was the 11-year old daughter of Mexican immigrants, living in Cleveland, Texas, a "timber town"[1] of about 9,000 people in the Greater Houston metropolitan area and Liberty County.
Her father was a former construction worker, unemployed at the time for a year and a half because of a back injury, while her mother was working making change in a slot game room.
[4] On 29 November 2010, the Monday after Thanksgiving Day, a cell phone video clip with images of the rape of a young female circulated in the cafeteria of Cleveland's high school.
[5][6] Police investigators identified and contacted the girl, whereupon she said that, over the 2010 Thanksgiving holiday break, she was raped by a group of young men first at a house and then in a mobile home.
According to a search warrant affidavit obtained by the media, police determined the video clip was recorded inside an abandoned mobile home on the city's northern outskirts, next to a Baptist church.
[9][10] On Monday 4 April 2011, nineteen defendants appeared in the court of Liberty County district judge Mark Morefield for their arraignment hearing, with six of them pleading "not guilty.
"[8] The New York Times first report,[4] written by journalist James C. McKinley Jr., focused on the impact of the crime on the Cleveland community,[note 1] which was criticized for being sympathetic toward the accused.