FAIRFAX COUNTY, Va. (7News) — On Tuesday in Fairfax County, Virginia Attorney General Jason Miyares met with crime victims and their families who shared their stories about how they feel local prosecutors went easy on alleged criminals.

The Virginia Attorney General’s Office hosted the Victim Voices Roundtable in honor of National Crime Victims’ Rights Week and Sexual Assault Awareness Month.

“I want to thank everybody for joining us,” Miyares told a roundtable of victims and their families. “First of all, I know this is hard. It’s hard for people to relive their worst moments of their life. It’s hard when you have this horrific feeling that the government that is supposed to be your voice has failed and they have failed you.”

Arlington mother Rose Kehoe said her son was killed by a driver who was drunk, high, and speeding, but Arlington County Commonwealth’s Attorney Parisa Dehghani-Tafti refused to try the person who killed her son as an adult.

“My son was, at the time, a senior in high school,” said Kehoe. “He was leaving his girlfriend’s house. He got in his car to come home, and a young man who was under the influence of THC and alcohol was driving 95 miles an hour, and upon impact, killed my son. So he never made it home alive that night.”

Kehoe is disappointed in how Dehghani-Tafti handled the prosecution.

“She didn’t even come to the sentencing hearing,” said Kehoe. “She didn’t listen to us. She had already made up her mind even before meeting with us. So she didn’t even entertain any kind of what do the victims need? What do we want to hear? You know, offer comfort, whatever it is. And so she just kind of dismissed us, and the fact that she didn’t come to the sentencing hearing to me just says that ‘your son’s life wasn’t important’.”

“They were worried about the driver, even though he had killed somebody,” added Kehoe. “He had broken many laws that night, and yet they were more concerned about his mental health rather than accountability and saying, ‘Hey, we should at least listen to these victims.'”

Kehoe said the driver was a month shy of his 18th birthday.

“If they had maybe tried him as an adult, he would have had a sentence that was probably a little bit more appropriate for the crime that he had commissioned,” said Kehoe.

Deghani-Tafti told 7News that her office prosecuted the case “ethically and vigorously.”

“First, the families who suffer a child’s death are always on my mind and my heart,” Deghani-Tafti told 7News. “Legally, there are specific criteria outlined in the VA Code that govern transfer to Circuit Court, after a hearing. Code of Virginia Code – Article 7. The criteria for transfer were not met, and the JDR Court’s decision to sentence for significantly less than we had argued for (3 years in juvenile detention) demonstrates that the JDR Court would not have transferred the case to Circuit Court – because the considerations are essentially the same. It would have been easy to argue for a transfer in a hearing we knew could not end in a transfer, but we did not think it was the ethical or compassionate thing to do.”

Jen McDougal also joined the roundtable discussion. McDougal said a sex offender who identifies as transgender exposed himself to her, her nine-year-old daughter, and several other young girls in a women’s locker room— which she said could have been prevented had Fairfax County Commonwealth’s Attorney Steve Descano prosecuted the sex offender in an earlier incident.

“My daughter finished her first day at swim class at Washington Liberty High School, and we finished class, we walked into the women’s locker rooms, and immediately, as we turned the corner, we saw an individual who was an individual man, as I saw it in the women’s locker room, completely naked, facing the doorway. So we walked in to see a man changing in the women’s locker room,” McDougal told 7News.

“Were there other women and girls in that locker room too when that happened?” 7News Reporter Nick Minock asked McDougal.

“There had to have been at least a dozen other small girls and moms scattered about the room,” she said.

Several other victims attended the Victim Voices Roundtable on Tuesday, but they did not want to be shown on camera. They shared their stories with Miyares and identified gaps in services provided to victims.

“The system breaks down when a prosecutor walks into a room and they see two victims,” said Miyares. “They see the crime victim, but they also see the defendant as a victim in their own right.”

“And the reality is that you have some prosecutors that, in my personal opinion, view themselves more as social workers than as prosecutors,” added Miyares.

Adrian Perry with the Virginia Attorney General’s Office said she heard from a therapist who serves victims of crime in Fairfax County, who shared that victims are being traumatized after going through the justice system in Fairfax County.

“That’s a real problem,” she said. “This is not just a ‘failing survivors of crime, failing to hold violent offenders accountable so they cannot continue to re-offend and escalate in their level of violence’ because they’re getting away with slaps on the wrist. This is also an overall mental health and well-being problem for survivors of crime and you all have been failed, and we’re very, very sorry, and we take it seriously, but I do want you to know that we commend you for everything that you’ve done to speak up and to be here, and we truly value your presence.”

7News reached out to Descano’s office on Tuesday, requesting to interview Descano on this topic, but his office did not respond.