North Austin man took a 7-year-old boy from an inflatable bounce house at a Kilbourn Park neighborhood block party last month and restrained the child with duct tape before sexually assaulting him, prosecutors said Saturday.
The Sept. 4 assault was stopped when someone walked in on Edward Radford, 38, and the child at a home in the 3300 block of North Kilpatrick Avenue and punched Radford. That person — whom prosecutors didn’t name during a bond hearing at the Leighton Criminal Court Building — then unbound the boy, took him back to the bouncy house and told him not to tell anyone, prosecutors said.
The boy and his family were at the block party that day and the boy was playing with an iPad when Radford approached him, prosecutors said. Radford told the child to come with him and that he was going to make the boy "smarter," Assistant Cook County State’s Attorney Katherine Schoon told the court.
Radford grabbed the boy’s hand and led him to a home office where he restrained the child, removed some of the boy’s clothing and played a pornographic video on the iPad before assaulting him, she said. The assault took place about 4:30 p.m. that day, according to police records.
The boy’s father later noticed tape residue on the boy’s arm after the assault, but the attack went unreported until the boy’s mother found the pornographic video on the boy’s iPad on Sept. 16 and asked him about it. Over the next few days, the boy revealed details of the assault, prompting his parents to do their own detective work.
The parents eventually found the home where the assault happened and, using a Facebook page with photos associated with a community group, identified both Radford and the witness who stopped the assault, prosecutors said. The boy’s father then notified police.
It is unclear whether the witness will face any criminal charges for instructing the boy not to tell anyone. Authorities arrested Radford on Wednesday and later charged him with predatory criminal sexual assault, aggravated kidnapping and unlawful restraint.
Radford, of the 5100 block of West Bloomingdale Avenue, said nothing during Saturday’s hearing, only occasionally shaking his head and fidgeting with a dusty black White Sox cap behind his back. He has previous drug convictions and was sentenced to three years in prison for one of them, Schoon said.
Judge Donald Panarese Jr. ordered Radford held on $500,000 bail, barred from having contact with anyone younger than 18 and barred him from contacting the child in the case.
If convicted of the criminal sexual assault charge, Radford faces between six and 60 years in prison without probation.
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