A gut-wrenching case out of Richmond, Virginia, though the details remain murky: Family members say an 8-year-old boy was killed via a rock or brick to the head when he tried to fight off a teen who was sexually assaulting his 12-year-old sister. The siblings were playing near railroad tracks in their backyard last night when, relatives say, a teenage boy attacked the girl, WRIC reports. "From what I understand, the sister was raped and (the brother) tried to save her," the children's aunt says, per the New York Daily News. "And he was hit in the head with a brick and killed."
Police began a manhunt after the girl was seen running out of the woods naked and bleeding. And though the victim initially gave police a false description of her attacker as a white man with facial hair—police say she did so because the suspect threatened her before fleeing—police eventually tracked down a black, teenage male, WWBT reports. "Nobody expects something like this to happen to the babies in their family," says a relative. As for the young girl, "She's just traumatized." (In a similar tragedy over the weekend, a Good Samaritan was killed while chasing down a woman's assailant.)