Isiah Dequan Hayes, 19, and Daireus Jumare Ice, 22, were charged with rape and sexual exploitation in Memphis, Tennessee, after allegedly raping a 9-month-old baby girl and filming the incident on a mobile phone. According to the District Attorney’s office, the child’s mom found the mobile phone footage of the guys assaulting her 9-month-old daughter.
The mother reported the incident to police after seeing the horrifying footage and realizing it showed Hayes — who Commercial Appeal identified as “a male acquaintance”—doing sexual activities on her daughter. One of the recordings, reportedly showed him exposing himself and rubbing himself with the infant, who was nude from the waist down. According to investigators, he was seen performing sex acts on the youngster in another video.
The mother was able to identify Hayes on Facebook. She subsequently passed over the material she had obtained to the authorities. Investigators discovered Hayes was in the video. According to the district attorney’s office, Ice was the individual who videotaped it. Hayes was supposedly 17 at the time the tapes were shot.
According to authorities, Isiah Dequan Hayes was detained and acknowledged the sexual assault. Hayes and Ice were both jailed at the Shelby County Jail on $10,000 bonds. They were charged with rape after a grand jury indicted them. Hayes was charged with aggravated child rape and aggravated sexual exploitation of a minor. Ice was charged with criminal responsibility for the action of another in the aggravated rape of a child and, in particular, the aggravated sexual exploitation of a juvenile.
After his arrest, Hayes’ family learned of the accusations against him with horror. To hear this is heartbreaking and scary, his elder brother stated. They apologize as a family. He understands that the kid may not remember, but it is something that a mother will have to remember for the rest of her life. For example, knowing your kid was exposed to anything like that. He continued that one trusted someone with their child, and now one has to deal with this on their own. At that point in time, he wasn’t mentally stable. As in, he understands his mental condition. He was most likely forced to work for money, drugs, or anything else. As they say, he was young and growing up in the neighborhood.
Money, according to Len Edwards of the Commission on Missing and Exploited Children, might be a motivator in such crimes. The first thing to grasp here is that motivation isn’t always about sex. It’s all about money, and it’s a $20 billion-a-year business, he said, adding that this case reflects a larger issue in our culture. When one considers that there are 1.5 million images of child pornography in this country, and according to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, 10,000 of the kids were actually identified last year, that’s a tiny, tiny sample.
Unfortunately, incidents like this one are not as uncommon as we would like. David Vincent Akins Jr., of Magnolia, Texas, was convicted of raping and recording a 3-month-old child and sentenced to four consecutive life terms for a similar crime. He was detained when officials discovered child pornography on his laptop and discovered that some of the images were “homemade.” When the photos and videos were compared to family photos, it was confirmed that the victim was the suspect’s relative.
Akins recorded himself raping the three-month-old and photographed himself sexually abusing her during her first year of life. He was convicted of aggravated sexual assault on a child, a first-degree crime. Sadly, the small child was not the only victim of this monster. During the punishment part of Akins’ trial, five more previous child victims testified.
This baby was raped before she could roll over, said Mary Nan Huffman, Chief Prosecutor of Montgomery County’s Internet Crimes Against Children Division. For the sake of the county and the children, she hopes they never have another David Akins, Jr., in her entire career as a prosecutor, she said.
However, as Isiah Dequan Hayes and Daireus Jumare Ice have demonstrated, there are plenty of other monsters among us who are willing to deprive a child of their innocence for their own perverse pleasure or even for a small sum of money, and there isn’t a severe enough punishment for that. The only solace is recognizing how other convicts often treat such crooks once they are eventually imprisoned. May these two receive all they deserve.
