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The tiny town of Mashpee, Massachusetts is nestled on the hook-shaped peninsula of Cape Cod, which was named by an English explorer way back in 1602. Mashpee lies about 39 miles south of Plymouth, Massachusetts, where English Pilgrim settlers first celebrated the distinctly American tradition of Thanksgiving in 1621. Mashpee lies about 30 miles north of Martha’s Vineyard, which is perhaps most famous as the setting for the 1975 film Jaws, in which a great white shark ate a series of great white people. According to the most recent US Census stats, Mashpee is 87.6% white and only 2.5% black.

Mashpee is not the sort of place where you’d expect to see a recently-arrived 15-year-old white girl go missing for a few days after a viral video showed a 13-year-old black girl smacking her, punching her, pulling her by the hair, and forcing her to lick a middle-school bathroom floor.

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Aliyah Konton is the white girl in question. Her surname is reputedly Scottish and English. Her first name is a Hebrew word that literally means “ascent” and is most often used to refer to members of the Jewish diaspora returning to Israel. I don’t know whether she is Jewish or not, but she looks white in all available photos and videos, and I’ll assume that she also looked white to the black girl who humiliated her in the bathroom of Mashpee Middle-High School on May 25.

According to one of her classmates, Aliyah was new to the school:

She just seems like she was trying to fit in and just trying to make friends with everybody. No student, no person, should ever be harmed in that way.

The 72-second video that was first uploaded to Snapchat and then blasted all over the Internet appears to have been filmed by an accomplice of the 13-year-old bully Negress. It begins in a school corridor in media res because it’s unclear exactly what prompted the altercation.

Aliyah is tall, plump, and wears a sweatshirt, pajama pants, and sandals with white socks. She is smiling inappropriately as if completely unaware of the danger she faces. Whoever uploaded the video captioned it “She high off dat perc,” which I will helpfully translate as “The smiling white girl is high on Percocet.”

The small Negress suddenly slaps Aliyah in the face as female onlookers gasp.

The video then cuts to a bathroom, where the videographer catches the smaller black girl dragging a howling Aliyah in by the hair and then shoving her past a row of stalls.

After the black female assailant smacks and punches the much larger Aliyah a few times, Aliyah still offers no resistance and has an oddly inappropriate and possibly special-needs smile, as if it’s all some giant misunderstanding.

A white-sounding female voice, probably belonging to the smart-phone videographer, says:

You said you want to beat her ass, so fucking beat her ass, then. You want to talk shit. No bitch, you say you want to talk shit, beat her ass, so fucking beat her ass.

The diminutive black female assailant, whose voice is deep enough to land her a job as a male sports announcer, then says: “Lick the ground. Lick the ground. Lick the ground. There. Lick the ground.”

When Aliyah hesitates to obey orders, her antagonist grabs her hair and forces her face down to the bathroom floor, where Aliyah finally licks whatever seamy mélange of germs, urine, feces, and menstrual juices await her tongue.

Mission accomplished, the black girl walks away and the video ends, only to be uploaded to Snapchat sometime later that day.

School officials notified the Mashpee Police Department about an assault in a school bathroom on May 25.

But parents — including Aliyah’s — weren’t notified about the filmed attack until eight days later, on June 2, when Aliyah suddenly went missing from her home. She disappeared only a day after Mashpee Middle-High School held a peaceful graduation ceremony.

Search teams were formed, “MISSING” flyers were distributed by the police department, and an electronic billboard showed Aliyah’s face outside Mashpee Public Schools.

The story gained some local traction but hardly any national steam because, as we all know, media outlets have been shamed into avoiding accusations of engaging in missing white woman syndrome.

Apparently in the interest of seeming equitable, even Mass Live called Aliyah’s filmed beatdown a “fight” eight times in one article and five more times in a linked article. I’ve seen many fights and have been in a few fights myself, but this didn’t look like a fight to me.

I’d only be speculating, but the most plausible explanation for Aliyah’s abrupt disappearance was her public humiliation not only in high school — where social status is a matter of life and death — but before the entire world thanks to social-media sadists who are so hungry for attention that they’ll even upload evidence of their complicity in a crime, as well as bloodthirsty smart-phone voyeurs who get their rocks off at the sight of people they’ve never met being bludgeoned and forced to lick bathroom floors.

I’ll also take the liberty of assuming that Aliyah was in the throes of near-suicidal agony as she perambulated for days through the Cape Cod peninsula, possibly wishing that she’d been eaten by a shark, because at least it’s over quickly.

On Wednesday, June 5 — three days after she went missing — two males who were visiting the Planet Fitness in Barnstable, Massachusetts, which is about 20 miles west of Mashpee on Cape Cod, told the manager that they thought they had spotted the girl whose face was on all those “MISSING” posters. Employees said that the girl had come in asking to use the bathroom and may have also used a locker-room shower.

On the same day, Mashpee police announced that they’d filed seven counts of assault and battery in the Falmouth District Court Juvenile Division against the unnamed 13-year-old black assailant. They said they were still looking into filing criminal charges against a 13-year-old accomplice who has since been charged.

In a video message, Mashpee Police Chief Scott W. Carline said, “I’m happy to announce our missing juvenile has been located safely in the town of Barnstable.”

Aliyah Konton, who’d been lost for three days, had been found.

But after what happened, how much of her will be lost forever?