I strongly suspect something like Rohypnol was slipped into her drink.
Whenever we have our annual sexual assault awareness training (it's required for all Army personnel), we are warned never to leave a drink unattended. It is, unfortunately, fairly common to use a drug to put the intended victim to sleep and rape her. She doesn't even need to be drinking alcohol.
Whether a date rape drug was used on her may not be publicized, but if so, it would be a factor in the trial. I hope the young criminals are put away long enough to become too old to want to hurt someone like that ever again.
“I strongly suspect something like Rohypnol was slipped into her drink.”
I think that is way over hyped. The basic issue is that most women do not handle alcohol very well because they typically have a lower weight and their liver does not convert alcohol into sugar as quickly as a man does. Given that she was 14-15 years old at the time there’s a good chance she was under 100 pounds. all she would need to do is drink 4 drinks relatively quickly and she’d be out, especially if she wasn’t used to drinking. A lot of women claim that they were slipped something but that’s usually to cover for their embarrassment of either passing out drunk or sleeping with someone they regretted the next morning.