ST. LOUIS • Police said today a reported "knockout game" attack that recently attracted national attention to St. Louis is false.
Ashley DePew, 23, and her boyfriend Justin Simms, 25, were charged today with falsifying a police report today against a woman and her boyfriend who claimed she was the victim of a random attack outside of a St. Louis bar last month, police said.
Police now believe she was actually injured by her boyfriend and they fabricated the "knockout game" story as a cover for her injury.
Dotson said the damage false reporting causes is widespread.
"We had to spend a significant amount of resources unraveling the lies they told," Dotson said. "That's resources that could have been spent on other crimes and it damaged the perception of the city. I hope these two individuals get help in their relationship."
The 23-year-old woman told police she and her boyfriend had gone to The Trophy Room early on Nov. 17 to pick up a friend who was intoxicated, but became separated in a crowd. The woman told police that she had been punched in the eye by a group of young men outside of the bar, on Arsenal Street west of Kingshighway, at about 3:30 a.m.
She reported the alleged attack to police two days later.
But authorities say witnesses and evidence from the bar indicate the couple wasn't there that night, and there was no attack. Police said detectives interviewed the male friend the couple claimed to have picked at the Trophy Room, and that he refused t their request to play along as a witness to the allged attack. He told police he was never with Depew or Simms the night of the alleged attack.
The woman and her boyfriend admitted on Thursday that they had fabricated the story because they feared repercussions from police and their families, police said in court documents. They told investigators that they were traveling back to the St. Louis area along Interstate 55 and began arguing. When the woman tried to put her hand on her boyfriend's, he told police, he flung it back violently, inadvertently punching her in the eye.
After going to a hospital, they told the woman's parents that she had been punched at random by a stranger. The parents noted that the scenario sounded similar to the "knockout game," in which groups of young teens target people at random, punching them for no reason and often not taking anything of value. Some perpetrators refer to the assaults as the "knockout game" or "knockout king."
The woman's attorney, Ethan Corlija, said he hopes prosecutors will refuse to issue charges against his client.
"I don't want this to detract from the fact that she's still a victim," he said. "She sustained pretty serious injuries no matter how the Circuit Attorney choses to view it, it still boils down to her being a victim and we can't lose sight of that fact."
Corlija declined to discuss the sequence of events his client discussed with him, saying only that the facts "will surprise a lot of people."
He said she had to have surgery to repair the damage to her face, but that she is expected to make a full recovery and not suffer any loss of vision. He also added that the couple still is together.
"When the facts do come out, people will be surprised at the way it actually did happen."
The woman's story went viral after
a local television station aired the woman's story, garnering thousands of hits on Facebook, Twitter and other websites.
"This is why police work is so difficult, it's because people lie to us and the media doesn't do the level of investigation that we do and it is broadcast to a much larger audience before all the facts are known," Dotson said.
The Post-Dispatch did not report on the "knockout game" claim at the time, pending resolution of inconsistencies in the story.
A 72-year-old Vietnamese man
died in 2011 after he was randomly attacked in the Dutchtown neighborhood, and the Post-Dispatch has reported on other such attacks in other parts of the city.
Dotson said the last suspected "knockout game" attack that he's been made aware of happened either late last year or earlier this year, and believes it has quieted since its peak in 2010.
