Teammates of two high school football players from Ohio accused of raping a girl at a party last summer testified on Friday they saw their classmates commit sex acts on the girl during the alcohol-fueled events that night.
A third witness, a friend of the defendants who was also granted immunity, said he saw both defendants making sexual contact with her while she appeared to be passed out, naked and face down on a basement floor.
"She wasn't moving. She wasn't talking. She wasn't participating," said Anthony Craig, 18.
Mark Cole, a teammate granted immunity for his testimony, said he recorded a video of Mays performing the act on the girl during a car ride between houses in Steubenville the night of the party, but deleted it the next morning.
"It was one of those moments when you realize you did something wrong or stupid," Cole said during testimony in which he also said he drank eight to 10 beers that night and his memory of the evening was foggy.
Evan Westlake, who also was granted immunity, testified he saw Richmond commit a sex act on the girl on the basement floor of a house the same night last August.
Mays and Richmond are accused of raping the girl when she was too drunk to move or speak. She told police she did not remember what happened, but reported the incident the next day after she heard details from friends. The boys have denied raping her and say any sex that happened was consensual.
A state forensics investigator, Joann Gibb, methodically quoted from text messages that she said came from the phone of one of the defendants, Trent Mays, 17, and from the phones of friends and classmates. The messages described the inebriated girl as “dead” or as a “dead body” and stated that Mr. Mays acknowledged penetrating the girl with his fingers.
For the prosecution, the text messages were a way to project a real-time accounting of the night. Defense lawyers say that anything that happened between the girl and Mr. Mays and his co-defendant, Ma’lik Richmond, 16, was consensual.......
A few of Mr. Mays’s texts described by Ms. Gibb suggested that Mr. Mays believed that his football coach, Reno Saccoccia, would protect him.
“I got Reno to take care of it,” Mr. Mays texted at one point. He added in another text, referring to the coach, that “I feel like he took care of it” and that “he was joking about it so I’m not that worried.”
Efforts to reach Mr. Saccoccia on Thursday night were unsuccessful.
Officers who took the stand Thursday described the contents of the cell phones, including at least two cell phone photos showing the victim naked. (Mays has also been accused of child pornography charges for allegedly distributing nude photos of the girl through text messages.) Through Thursday morning testimony, the officers, along with witnesses who work for local cellphone service providers, testified on the process of gathering the phones in evidence by detectives. Ohio Bureau of Criminal Investigation analyst JoAnn Gibb testified that 17 phones were confiscated by the Jefferson County Sheriffs Department, with thousands of text messages on them. She found 61,000 text messages on one phone and 21,000 on another. It is unclear if all of the texts are related to the case.
And, as I said months ago, the rumors of widespread corruption and a conspiracy have been pretty much put to rest.
These quotes are from the Ohio State Attorney General, who has been investigating the alleged crime since August...
NY Times:
As for the case itself, Jane Doe took the stand earlier today. She testified that she didn't want to press charges. Her father forced her to go to the police. However, I'd say it isn't looking too good for the defendants at this stage.
There are three eye-witnesses that say they digitally penetrated the girl while she was unconscious. However, the defense still has not begun their arguments. They will try to argue that, while drunk, the girl was not too incapacitated to consent and that the witnesses received immunity and thus were compelled to testify a certain way.
It is an interesting case, no doubt, but without the widespread corruption and conspiracy angle, it is really not an uncommon crime, unfortunately. That is what compelled this to be an interenational story in the first place. The Local Leaks article in the OP has been thoroughly and completely debunked.
Last edited by RedBlackAttack : 03-16-2013 at 06:43 PM.
Haven't really been following this story, but I'm seeing that they only fingered her. Was she absolutely unconscious beyond reasonable doubt?
The actual trial revealed the rape consisted of the girl being digitally penetrated in the car ride to the 3rd party and at the 3rd party, a party which consisted of five kids.
I'm not surprised the two were found guilty. I said in my post yesterday that I thought that was the likely verdict. I never argued that these guys were innocent. My thing was always the absurdity of the coverup angle and the obvious lies spread by Local Leaks. I ended up being right on both accounts.
Last edited by RedBlackAttack : 03-17-2013 at 04:48 PM.
Re: "Rape Crew" in small town Ohio
