Described by police Chief Howard Jordan as "by far one of the most sickening cases I've seen in my career," 36-year-old Gary Steven Atkinson of San Francisco was arrested this week on multiple counts of kidnapping, rape, and lewd acts with a minor. The 16-year-old teen, if you recall, went missing a couple of weeks from an Oakland group home last week. She was found this week, raped and beaten.
The details are grim. The girl was allegedly kidnapped the moment she went into the Frutivale BART station:
Police said Atkinson encountered the girl at the station and forced her to ride with him on a train to San Francisco, where she was held against her will, beaten and sexually assaulted. Court documents say Atkinson took the teen to his residence in San Francisco, where she was sexually assaulted multiple times before she was able to escape Nov. 29, the documents say.
God, people are just terrible. The girl managed to escape and find her way on an empty Muni bus where, thank God, the driver saw that she seemed "disoriented and very scared." The driver then contacted the authorities.
On the night of November 27, the girl went missing from the Fred Finch Youth Center, a home for teens with developmental disabilities in East Oakland where she had been living for the past six months. This was the third time she had run away. Staff members from the home followed her to the Fruitvale BART Station, where they lost track of her. That was when she allegedly encountered Atkinson.
