Criminally Irresponsible. Again.

[Trigger warning for sexual violence.]

A CNN investigation has found that a man accused of raping a colleague, both of whom were hired by BP to assist in the Gulf clean-up, was a convicted sex offender who had failed to register for the sex offender registry. Which would have shown up in a background check. If BP had done them.

Jackson County Sheriff Mike Byrd told CNN he was shocked when he met with the head of BP security for the area several weeks before the alleged rape took place. He said the BP representative told him that only drug screenings, not background checks, were being conducted on the cleanup workers.

"I said, 'You're kidding me.' He said, 'No.' He said, 'There's so many of them, we were told to do drug screens and that was it.' And I said, 'Well, that's not good at all.' "

Byrd said he told the BP official that "you're going to have every type of person coming in here looking for a job, and you're going to have the criminal element in here, and we're not going to know who we're dealing with if we don't do background checks on these people."

"It's sad because you got a victim now by a sex offender, and he's in our jail. Had we have known this, he would have been arrested before the crime could have been committed," said Byrd, who also said that if asked, his department would have done the background checks for free.

The woman who reported the rape has since been laid off. Her attorney, Adam Miller, says: "She gave up her housing where she was living to come here. Now she's been raped, she doesn't have a job, and everybody walked away."

BP issued a statement blaming the subcontractor who failed to do the background check, despite the fact that BP did not make criminal background checks a requirement of the contract.

Hard to believe such a corporation could be so criminally negligent during the clean-up of a massive environmental disaster caused by their criminal negligence.

I wish the survivor at the center of this story peace and justice.