By Latrishka Thomas
A woman who was apparently raped seven years ago recounted the entire ordeal yesterday before a court for a second time.
In the retrial of a man who reportedly raped a 15-year-old girl in 2016, the alleged victim was the first to take the stand.
The man, who was charged with rape and serious indecency, was previously convicted of the crimes but later saw his conviction overturned by the appellate court and a retrial ordered.
It is the Crown’s belief that on April 12 2016, the complainant went to the defendant’s business place to print her School Based Assessment (SBA) but noticed that it was not on her flash drive when she got there.
The defendant is said to have offered her a ride home, but on their way back he made a detour.
The prosecution believes that he took her to a bushy area in Five Islands, and put his privates in her mouth, and then forced himself upon her.
The victim took the stand yesterday before a jury of nine and began giving the court more details.
She said that the defendant was a friend of her mother’s whom she first met in primary school.
She recalled that on the day of the incident the computers at her school’s lab were not working, so she and everyone else had to find another way to print their SBAs.
The woman said she went to the defendant and asked for a favour since she did not have any money. She said she told him that her mother would pay him later.
The defendant agreed, but when she inserted her flash drive, the project was nowhere to be found.
According to her, the defendant offered her a ride since he was leaving anyway.
She said that she sat in the back seat of his blue car as they drove to her home, and after she retrieved the document, they headed back in the direction of town.
The witness said however that the defendant said that he needed to pick up something at a specified location.
She stated that when they got to Five Islands, the defendant made a U-turn and drove into a dirt road where he joined her in the back of the car.
The alleged victim broke down in tears before she could tell the rest of the story.
It was after a brief break that she told the court that the defendant forced her to perform oral sex upon him and had sexual intercourse with her using a condom.
“I was trying to push him off but he wouldn’t stop,” she recalled.
The woman also remembered that the man whispered sexual things to her and even told her to stop crying “because I like it”.
The witness said that after the defendant was finished, he tossed the condom out of the window, told her to straighten her clothes and took her to print her assignment.
The complainant said later that afternoon she told a friend what had happened and they both went to her dad’s workplace where they were joined by the police.
She said she was examined at a clinic, and then she took officers to the scene of the crime where a condom was found.
But in cross examination, defense attorney Wendel Robinson questioned who found the condom.
He was able to pull from the witness the fact that she said in a previous police statement that her mother found the condom and picked it up with a stick.
The lawyer later suggested that the witness planned the ordeal with her mother and had been to the alleged scene of the crime before.
The woman became emotional once again but strongly disagreed with the lawyer’s claims.
The trial continues on Thursday.
