By that time, images and messages from that night had made their way around social media.

Crime blogger Alexandria Goddard, a former Steubenville resident, discovered and preserved many of the messages, at least some of which are now in the hands of authorities. She first spotted the story in the small town's newspaper and started looking into the situation on a hunch that the highly regarded football team's members were getting special treatment at the expense of the victim.

"When I first came across the article, I just felt like -- because it was involving football players, and there is a culture there that football is very important, that there was probably a little more to this story than what the local media was reporting," she told CNN Thursday. "So I started doing my own research."

One image circulated online and posted on a website maintained by Anonymous showed the girl, dressed in a T-shirt and blue shorts, her body limp, being held hand and foot by two males who appear to be teenagers.

Text messages posted to social networking sites that night seemed to brag about the incident, calling the girl "sloppy," making references to rape and suggesting even that she had been urinated on, according to Goddard. CNN has not been able to establish whether this is true.

In one 12-minute video, posted by Anonymous on Wednesday, one teenager makes joke after joke about the girl's condition, saying she must have died because she didn't move during one assault.

Anonymous and others in the video identified the teen by a name that doesn't match the two who were charged, but CNN cannot independently confirm his identity.

"Is it really rape because you don't know if she wanted to or not," the teenager says on the video. "She might have wanted to. That might have been her final wish."

Other male voices can be heard off-camera, laughing and talking about the alleged assault. McCafferty said he cannot say who shot that video.

"The subject in that video was interviewed. He wasn't charged," the chief told CNN. "The attorney general's office has all this. It appears to me after I watched the video he was intoxicated."

The New York Times reported that a cell phone photo from that night shows the girl naked on the floor.

Roughly 11 cell phones and a couple of iPads were seized during the investigation, said McCafferty, adding he was not involved in retrieving evidence from the electronic devices.

McCafferty said "there was evidence on some of the phones."

A special unit with the attorney general's office is doing the work, the chief said.

McCafferty said there was a report of a video showing the alleged attack, but authorities don't have it or know whether it exists.

The attorney for the girl's family told CNN that the girl is in counseling and is "doing as well as one can expect."

"She's trying to go about her life right now, which is difficult because of all the media attention," said family attorney Robert Fitzsimmons. "It's as if she's just flown into this barnstorm. She'll make it through."

The case is now in the hands of special prosecutors under Ohio Attorney General Mike DeWine.

DeWine said that the case is being aggressively prosecuted and remains under active investigation.

"We want to make sure that there is no stone left unturned," he said. "We want to make sure that every one in the community really feels that justice has been done and that all the information does in fact come out."