Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: WEDNESDAY, February 10, 1993 TAG: 9302100325
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: B3 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: JANIE BRYANT LANDMARK NEWS SERVICE
DATELINE: PORTSMOUTH LENGTH: Medium
MOTHER ACCUSED OF ROLE IN GIRL'S RAPE CONVICTED
Kathy Barnes will never forget the day she turned 9.Just after midnight, she watched the minutes tick away on a bedside clock as her mother held her down and her stepfather raped her, she testified Tuesday.
Later that day, the same woman gave Kathy a birthday party.
On Tuesday, Kathy (not her real name) hugged a prosecutor after she heard that her mother had been convicted of rape and sodomy as a participant in the March 3 attack.
The 27-year-old mother, whose name is being withheld to protect the child's identity, faces life sentences on each of two counts of rape and two counts of sodomy. She could get another 10 years on one count of parental child neglect.
After Circuit Judge Johnny E. Morrison delivered the guilty verdicts, the child's stepfather gasped and sighed several times before slowly walking out of the courtroom. He will be tried on two counts of rape, two counts of sodomy and one count of child abuse on April 14.
Kathy, now living with a foster family, was brought into the courtroom twice to take the stand. She told about two times last March that her mother had participated in the attacks.
On March 3, she testified, her mother tied her to the bed and gagged her. The next day, she said, she asked her mother why she had done it but received no answer.
"She would say if I told anybody she would kill me," the girl said from the witness stand.
But once Kathy had gone to spend time with her father in another part of the state, she did tell.
The child was returned to the area in August and examined at the Children's Hospital of the King's Daughters in Norfolk. A pediatrician who specialized in child abuse testified that there was evidence of sexual penetration.
Her light-brown hair caught up at the top in a ponytail, Kathy gave unswerving accounts of the sexual abuse and her mother's participation. The 9-year-old remained calm even when a defense attorney asked her if she had been sexually active with a 12-year-old a year earlier.
She said no. The attorney, Reginald Harding, warned the child he would produce a witness who would testify that she had.
But the only witness the defense attorney produced was Kathy's mother, who testified that her daughter had started her menstrual period at the age of 8 and the same year had become sexually involved with the 12-year-old son of the mother's then-boyfriend.
Questioned by a prosecutor, the woman said she did not take the child to a doctor or consider legal action at the time.
The mother, a twice-convicted felon, said her daughter was angry at her because she believed her mother "loved her little brother more than her."
"She had stated to me . . . she hates me for loving him more," the mother testified. She added that her daughter also was resentful because she had left her with relatives for long periods of time.
"She said, `I'm going to get you back for coming in and out of my life,' " the mother testified.
Harding told the judge, "I just can't conceive of a mother doing anything like this."
He added in his closing statement that he could not believe a child would go through the ordeal and not tell a friend or teacher or police officer.
But the prosecutor, Cheryl Footman, while agreeing that the crime was "horrible," said the child had been "very credible."
"I don't think she hesitated in what happened to her," Footman said. "She didn't waver at all."
The mother will be sentenced April 2.