‘Gender-fluid’ male who raped teen girl in Loudon County high school bathroom identified, released from court supervision on 18th birthday

The Virginia teenager who raped a freshman girl in a Loudon County high school bathroom while wearing a skirt and identifying as "gender-fluid" was released from a juvenile treatment center in November and last Wednesday, on his 18th birthday, he was released from court supervision. 

Hunter Heckel, charged as a juvenile, will not have any public conviction on his record nor will he have to register as a sex offender. The decision comes despite Judge Pamela Brooks stating during his 2022 sentencing, “Over the years this court has read many psychosexual reports, and when I read yours, frankly, it scared me. It scared me for you, it scared me for society.”

In October 2021, The Daily Wire reported that the incident occurred within the Loudoun County school system, and revealed that the school had concealed the rape while working to implement a policy allowing transgender-identifying students to use the bathroom per their identified gender rather than the one corresponding to their biological sex. Superintendent Scott Ziegler at the time accused parents who objected to the policy of being transphobic and denied that a rape had taken place in the bathroom.

After the incident became known to the girl's parents, her father, Scott Smith, attended a school board meeting to confront the board about the cover-up. He was escorted from the meeting by police and arrested. His arrest at a school board meeting where he was protesting a policy that facilitated the rape of his daughter became a flash point for Democrats eager to shut parents up who had concerns about policies over Covid, gender, or explicit curriculum in their children's schools. When the FBI was tasked by Biden's Department of Justice with investigating parents who attended school board meetings, this case was one of the catalysts named. The DOJ said that parents should be investigated with the same tools used to investigate domestic terrorists.

After Heckel's release, Scott Smith, the victim's father, said that prosecutor Buta Biberaj did not notify his family about Heckel's release. Smith also mentioned that after the rape, Biberaj extended a plea deal for lesser charges. “They were trying to push through a BS plea bargain with no consequence. We were told there was nothing we could do about it,” Smith explained to The Daily Wire. “If he hadn’t [assaulted a second girl], they were going to push us off a cliff.”

Biberaj also argued in court that Smith should be sentenced to jail for disorderly conduct after he got angry at a school board meeting where Ziegler denied that Smith's daughter was raped. Virginia Governor Glenn Youngkin later pardoned Smith for his conviction of disorderly conduct. Biberaj has since lost his re-election efforts.

Smith is currently suing Loudoun County Public Schools after lawyers acknowledged that it had violated federal law intended to protect women. Smith criticized the decision to release Heckel, saying, “He basically walked out of this scarless. Hunter got a new start yesterday. When do we get our new start?"