A Kentucky man has been charged with raping a 15-year-old girl after he drove to Alabama last month, pretended to be her father to check her out of school, and took the girl to an abandoned building, where he raped her.
Lauderdale County Sheriff's Sgt. Josh Casson said 43-year-old Justin Stephens likely met the girl online and groomed her for the sexual assault, WAFF reported.
Casson said the girl's parents found out about the assault when they found a phone the girl wasn't supposed to have. They took it to a crisis care services in the area, and from there police investigators took over.
Court documents say that Stephens called Central High School in Florence on September 18 and told staff he needed to take his daughter out of school, according to Law & Crime. Surveillance camera footage showed the teen getting into Stephens' black pickup truck at about 9 a.m. He brought her back to school five hours later.
Investigators tracked him to a hotel in neighboring Colbert County. He admitted taking the girl to an abandoned house where they "engaged in sexual intercourse" at an abandoned house and reportedly confessed to exchanging nude photographs with her.
Stephens — from Lowmansville, Kentucky, some 500 miles away — has been charged with rape, traveling to meet a child for sex, and enticing a child to enter a vehicle or a house, WAFF said. He appeared in court on Wednesday and was ordered held on a $365,000 bond. If he bonds out, he must surrender his passport and is ordered to have no contact with the victim.
The Lauderdale County School System issued a statement saying it was "aware" of the investigation and "is cooperating fully with law enforcement agencies." They did not provide a comment on allowing someone who was not the child's father to take her out of the school. Casson said that Stephens may also face charges in Colbert County
