AUBURN — A Litchfield man accused of having video sex chats with a 13-year-old girl and sexually assaulting her on a school playground was indicted this week on seven counts of assaulting corrections officers at Androscoggin County Jail.
Steven Griffin, 19, of 2651 Hallowell Road was indicted by an Androscoggin County grand jury of assaulting an officer March 28 and six officers April 23. All seven counts are Class C felonies, each punishable by up to five years in prison.
Griffin was in custody after his March indictment on charges of unlawful sexual contact, visual sexual aggression against a child and solicitation of a child to commit a prohibited act.
A Sabattus school official notified police in January after sexually explicit material was found on the laptop of a 13-year-old student.
Skype chat logs from a month earlier revealed sexual chats between Griffin and the teen, police said in court records. Griffin explained in those chats the sex acts he intended to engage in with the girl, police said.
The girl told police she chatted with Griffin about three times a week, sometimes while in a classroom. She said Griffin would disrobe during the chats and engage in autoerotic acts, court papers said.
The girl initially denied meeting with Griffin in person, and told police that Griffin had warned her that he would stop speaking to a mutual friend — another teenage girl — if the victim refused to continue the sex chats on Skype. The victim told police she feared her friend might commit suicide if Griffin were to ignore her.
On Dec. 12, the victim met Griffin at a school where he put his arm around her as she sat on a slide, court papers said. She told police she tried to walk away, but Griffin grabbed her buttocks and her arm.
“I pushed him off as best I could,” the girl is quoted as saying in a police affidavit, “but I couldn’t. I am 13 and he is an 18-year-old guy. He is a lot stronger than me.”
The girl said Griffin grabbed her arm and pinned her against a brick wall, grabbing her breasts and putting his hands down the front of her pants. The girl ran home and didn’t tell anyone about the incident, according to a police affidavit.
In January, a Sabattus police detective searched Griffin’s home in Litchfield. There, police seized his computer and arrested Griffin.
In March, he appeared in Androscoggin County Superior Court on the charges, where he pleaded not guilty and continued to be held in lieu of $5,000 bail. Conditions of bail included no contact with the victim and no unsupervised contact with anyone under 16.
cwilliams@sunjournal.com
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- Steven Griffin
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