Investigations conclude no evidence assault occurred

Police closed an investigation into allegations that “Hispanic men” assaulted a teenage girl on South Whidbey June 7 after finding no evidence to back up the alleged victim’s story, which seemed to have inconsistencies, according to police reports.

The girl’s mother reported to the Island County Sheriff’s Office that the girl stopped at a coffee stand on Howard Road on her way to school and saw two men assaulting a dog.

The girl got out of her car to intervene, but one of the men pushed her to the ground and started kicking her in the side, according to the police report.

The girl described the men as Hispanic, possible construction workers, who were driving a rusty, red truck.

At school, the girl felt a lot of pain in her side and went to the school nurse, who called her mother and recommended that she be taken to the emergency room for a possible spleen injury, the report states.

The woman took her daughter to a clinic in Everett, according to the report.

Security video from the car wash did not show the alleged assault, the alleged perpetrators or the red truck. People who had been in the area reported that they hadn’t seen anything.

Video from the coffee stand showed that neither the girl nor the red truck had been there that day, a detective wrote in his report.

The girl’s description of the barista did not match anyone who was working that day.

The girl later changed her story and said she fabricated the part about going to the coffee stand, the report states.

In an interview with a deputy, the girl admitted she had participated in a “fight club” but hadn’t done it for a long time, the deputy wrote. She continued to maintain that the men assaulted her, the report states.

The girl’s mother left a small poster describing the alleged assault at a nearby business.

It ended up being posted on social media and generated angry comments about the alleged assailants.