Fla. Mother and Son Are Attacked

A young girl plays on one of the many clothes lines in Dunbar Village in West Palm Beach, Fla. Saturday, July 7, 2007. Residents of the community complain that kids have nothing to do, and this is one of the reasons for the recent gang rape of a woman living in the complex. In the year leading up to the gang rape, police were called to Dunbar Village 717 times. (AP Photo/J. Pat Carter) (J. Pat Carter - AP)

WEST PALM BEACH, Fla. -- Mother and son huddled together, battered and beaten, in the bathroom _ sobbing, wondering why no one came to help. Surely the neighbors had heard their screams. The walls are thin, the screen doors flimsy in this violence-plagued housing project on the edge of downtown.

For three hours, the pair say, they endured sheer terror as the 35-year-old Haitian immigrant was raped and sodomized by up to 10 masked teenagers and her 12-year-old son was beaten in another room.

Then, mother and son were reunited to endure the unspeakable: At gunpoint, the woman was forced to perform oral sex on the boy, she later told a TV station.

Afterward, they were doused with household cleansers, perhaps in a haphazard attempt to scrub the crime scene, or maybe simply to torture the victims even more. The solutions burned the boy's eyes.

The thugs then fled, taking with them a couple of hundred dollars' worth of cash, jewelry and cell phones.

In the interview with WPTV, the mother described how she and her son sobbed in the bathroom, too shocked to move. Then, in the dark of night, they walked a mile to the hospital because they had no phone to call for help.

Two teenagers _ a 14-year-old and a 16-year-old _ have been arrested. Eight others are being sought.

Welcome to Dunbar Village, a place residents call hell.

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"So a lady was raped. Big deal," resident Paticiea Matlock said with disgust. "There's too much other crime happening here."

Built in 1940 to house poor blacks in then-segregated West Palm Beach, Dunbar Village's 226 units sit just blocks from million-dollar condos on the Intracoastal Waterway. Billionaires lounge on beachfront property just a few miles away on Palm Beach.

The public housing project's one- and two-story barracks-style buildings are spread across 17 grassy, tree-lined acres surrounded by an 8-foot iron fence. The average rent is about $150 a month.