Carly Bagwell didn’t wait to report what happened to her.
In the early hours of July 1, 2018, while sleeping at a friend’s apartment, she said she was sodomized by three men.
“I swear, I feel like I’m bleeding,” she told a 911 operator, calling minutes after she said the assault took place. “I’m not lying. I’m not lying on my daughter’s life.”
After a night of bowling and drinking in Wyandotte, Bagwell and her friends had left a bowling alley on Biddle Avenue and headed to a friend’s apartment in Westland.
Some of her friends started playing beer pong, but Bagwell was feeling ill and decided to try to lay down in one of the bedrooms.
“I went to sleep,” she recalled. “They came in the room and assaulted me.”
Westland police responded quickly. Multiple witnesses corroborated her claims. And as she underwent a forensic exam on that night five years ago, she thought the worst part was behind her.
But she was wrong.
‘Slam Dunk Case’
Reader warning: There are some descriptions of sexual violence below. It may be triggering to some readers.
Within hours of the reported assault, the three suspects – Samuel Spino, Keith Parkinson and Richard Hay — would be interrogated by a Westland police sergeant.
Bagwell told officers that she had been digitally penetrated by the men, with each of them placing their fingers inside of her. At one point, she said she felt a tongue licking her.
“They had sodomized me,” Bagwell recalled. “I had active bleeding and several tears and, that took about nine months to heal up. I would bleed every time I would use the bathroom.”
But during their interviews with police, the men initially denied anything happened at all.
“I wouldn’t want to do nothing like that to Carly,” Spino told the officer. “She’s a nice person.”
Hay said he may have touched Bagwell’s shoulder or back, but certainly not her genitals.
Parkinson denied even entering the bedroom, then refused to speak further without an attorney present.
But under further questioning, Spino’s and Hay's stories changed dramatically.
Hay said that after Bagwell went into the bedroom, he told Spino, “'Sammy, there’s your chance.’ Like a joke. And that’s when Sammy went in there, and that’s when I walked in and asked him what was going on.”
He said when he entered the bedroom, he believed he observed Spino penetrating Bagwell.
For his part, Spino acknowledged licking Bagwell’s genitals, saying that the two had once been intimate before.
“I thought it was okay because I did that the time before,” Spino told the officer. “That’s what it was.”
In written statements, two suspects admitted to penetrating or touching Bagwell’s genitals.
If you or a loved one has experienced a seuxal assault, you can call the Michigan Sexual Assault Hotline at 855-VOICES4 (855-864-2374) or text 866-238-1454
Her rape exam yielded DNA matches for all three suspects, and in August 2019, they were charged with first-degree criminal sexual conduct.
Bagwell recalled speaking to the officer in charge.
“He was telling me that this is a slam dunk case. This is going to be so easy. They confessed. There’s these witnesses,” she said.
But what felt like the beginning of the end to Carly was barely even the beginning.
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Her case was scheduled to go to trial in January of 2020, but the defense asked for an adjournment. Then the COVID-19 pandemic began, and months became years.
Motion hearings were scheduled and rescheduled 16 times over the next year. While COVID-19 was to blame in the beginning, other forces contributed to delays.
Final conferences were adjourned repeatedly for the defense, the prosecution and the court. By now, another year had gone by and Bagwell felt like her case had been forgotten.
Frustrated, she reached out to Wayne County Prosecutor Kym Worthy herself.
“I e-mailed her a few times. A few follow-up emails with no answer,” she said. “Never wrote back.”
Bagwell felt like she was prosecuting her attackers by herself, and for good reason. The prosecutors assigned to her case kept leaving, and not just one or two.
“I’ve had…I’ve lost count. I believe it’s been about 10 (prosecutors),” Bagwell said. “I’ve been told they keep quitting…we had to start every single time from the ground up, every single time I would get a new prosecutor.”
Four years later
By now, it was 2022. Bagwell said it seemed like the case might never end.
The Westland police sergeant assigned to her case grew so frustrated that he asked the Michigan Attorney General’s office to take over from Wayne County.
“Ms. Bagwell has suffered emotionally since that night and even attempted suicide,” he wrote, but “has not found the justice that she sought so desperately, and that she deserves.”
The attorney general’s office said it could not intervene.
“For the longest time, I was telling my prosecutor that it doesn’t feel like it’s us against the three boys anymore,” Bagwell said. “I feel like it’s me and (the sergeant) against you guys.”
In a statement, the prosecutor’s office blamed delays on the pandemic, a judge’s retirement during trial, incomplete police work and lengthy appeals that happened during the case.
But they acknowledged that staff turnover played a significant role in the delay, with six different lead attorneys rotating through the case.
The prosecutor’s office also blamed the victim herself, calling Carly Bagwell “very inappropriate, profane and in some cases abusive to our staff members,” adding later: “She has accused and verbally attacked several people on baseless and unfounded claims of misleading her and lying to her.”
Cheree Thomas, an advocate for victims of sexual violence, reviewed the prosecutor’s statement for 7 Action News and called it a form of victim blaming.
“When we talk about a person who’s experienced a horrendous crime against themselves. Being upset? We should expect them to be upset,” Thomas said.
As deputy director of the Michigan Coalition to End Domestic and Sexual Violence, Thomas speaks with victims of sexual abuse almost every week.
“You have every right to be upset, you have every right to swear,” she said. “If we’re sensitive about people swearing when they’ve experienced a harm, then we have to ask ourselves, is this what we should be doing right now?”
A ‘shameful’ end
Finally, this past summer, the defendants would consider a plea.
While Carly said she wanted any deal to include time prison time, the prosecutor’s office offered an option with just probation. Reluctantly, Carly agreed.
Last month, in the basement of Third Circuit Court, the final defendant took his plea.
Despite the probation department’s recommended sentence of 12-24 months in prison, Spino’s no contest plea to criminal sexual conduct in the second degree earned him, and his co-defendants, five years probation and 25 years on the sex offender registry.
None of men will spend a day in prison.
“I’ve shown up for it all for over five years,” Bagwell said during her victim impact statement that day, “and it’s shameful that this is the outcome.”
Had she known the day she reported her assault what she learned on the day of sentencing, Bagwell told 7 Action News that she wouldn’t have called police.
“Because I think the process of getting this taken care of was worse than what actually happened,” she said through tears.
Reached by 7 Action News, attorneys for Spino and Parkinson did not respond to requests for comment on the case or declined to respond to a reporter’s texts and emails.
Ronnie Strong, an attorney for Richard Hay, called the plea deal “fair and equitable given the facts, circumstances, the strength and weaknesses in both parties' case.”
The final sentence in Bagwell’s assault would come nearly 2,000 days since she first reported her assault.
“You have someone who did all of the things we tell people who’ve experienced sexual violence; ‘If you do these things, it leads to a likely outcome that’s favorable,” Thomas said. “And it didn’t.”
Contact 7 Investigator Ross Jones at ross.jones@wxyz.com or at (248) 827-9466.