Excerpts from a statement read by the mother of Travis Therrien’s victim:
“I am happy that I get to finally face the coward who kidnapped and raped my mentally disabled child. Why am I happy, you may wonder? I am happy because he has no place to run from me and has to hear my anger and frustration with him and the course of events that me and my child have had to face over the past year.
“The night you kidnapped my child, I spent out in the cold, driving up and down the streets of Lewiston (and) Auburn, looking for her, calling her name out the window, screaming at cops: ‘You need to be looking for her.’ I drove down dangerous streets asking total strangers if they had seen my child in the picture.
“It was well past her medication time, well past her bedtime. My child, like clockwork, shuts down and goes to sleep by 9 o’clock. … Thoughts ran through my head, ‘Is she where it’s warm? Is she safe? I found myself crying in my hands when the phone rang at 7 a.m. It was the police. We have found her. I could finally breathe. I went to the police department to get her. Then they told me she had been raped! My brain could not wrap itself around understanding that she had been raped.
“Then we had to go to the hospital and I had to sit there and watch the doctor put a speculum into my child and swab her for DNA. I was sick to my stomach. This should not be happening. Why is this happening?
“After what you did, you did not deserve to breathe the same air as my child. I feared you would get a slap on the wrist and walk away after what you did to my child.
“She said, ‘Mum, I can take you to his house.’ I said, ‘OK, show me where he lives.’ … She said, ‘There’s his truck.’ I asked her which place was it. She told me the landlord lived in the first one and Travis lives in the middle one. I knocked on the first door and asked, “Are you the landlord of this place?” And they said, ‘Yes,’ and my heart sank. I asked is there a black man named Travis that lives in the middle? They said, ‘Yes.’ Tears streamed down my face as I asked them to call the police. They refused! I knocked on the second door. You refused to open it and face me. You truly are a coward. You kidnapped and raped my child and hid from me behind a door. You disgust me.”
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