STEUBENVILLE, Ohio – After a night of
partying with friends, Steubenville High School student Evan Westlake
walked into a friend's basement and saw two of his football teammates
around a naked girl.
Westlake, 18, testified during the third day
of the trial for Trenton Mays, 17, and Ma'lik Richmond, 16, that
Richmond was sexually assaulting the girl that night.
“Was she moving?” prosecutor Marianne Hemmeter asked.
“Not at that time,” Westlake said.
“Was she talking?” Hemmeter asked.
“She didn't say anything,” Westlake said. “It wasn't what I expected to see. I didn't know if she was participating or not.”
Mays and Richmond are charged with raping
the intoxicated, semi-conscious 16-year-old girl at parties attended by
dozens of drunk teens in August. Prosecutors said several people who
attended the parties took naked pictures of the girl and posted them
online with crude comments.
The boys deny involvement. Their attorneys
say the girl never lost consciousness or the ability to make decisions.
Mays and Richmond stared at their friend as the prosecutor asked him to
recount the night.
After leaving the house where Mays and
Richmond were with the girl, Westlake went to another house where
friends were hanging out. There he filmed a video, which he later posted
on YouTube, where people were commenting on the “dead” state of the
girl.
During the first two days of testimony
prosecutors called 15 witnesses, including a state computer forensics
specialist who said she recovered tens of thousands of text messages
from 13 confiscated phones from people who attended the parties.
Trent Mays sent text messages to some
friends denying he had sex with the 16-year-old Weirton, W. Va. girl,
but boasted to others that he did, even though the girl was drunk and
semiconscious.
“Yeah, dude, she was like a dead body,” he
wrote in one text, according to JoAnn Gibb, a forensics expert for the
Ohio Bureau of Criminal Investigations.
Two days after the alleged attack, Mays sent the victim's father a text message claiming his innocence, Gibb testified.
“This is all a misunderstanding,” Mays wrote. “I never tried to do anything forcefully with your daughter.”
The victim, meanwhile, told friends she
couldn't remember much of the night. Friends sent texts asking if she
was OK and told her of the rumors that she had been raped.
“I hate my life,” she texted to a friend.
The Tribune-Review does not identify victims of sex assault.
Security remained tight at the justice
center, Jefferson County Sheriff Fred Abdalla said people involved in
the case received death threats. State officials are investigating the
threats, he said, and he declined to specify what the threats were.
The case sparked outrage and drew
international attention in the fall after an online “hacktivist” group
called Anonymous published incendiary evidence online, including the
photo of the suspects carrying the girl by her ankles and wrists.
Protesters wearing masks, the symbol of
Anonymous, gathered outside the justice center during the first two days
of testimony and vowed to return until Visiting Judge Thomas Lipps, a
retired Hamilton County Juvenile Court judge, returns a verdict.
About 40 people are expected to testify. Authorities said the trial will likely stretch into the weekend.
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