ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Wednesday, April 10, 1996 TAG: 9604100084
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: C-3 EDITION: METRO
DATELINE: BEDFORD
SOURCE: RICHARD FOSTER STAFF WRITER
Charges were certified to a grand jury Tuesday against a Bedford County man accused of abducting a 10-year-old girl and raping and sodomizing her in an abandoned house.
The man, who was described in court as an old friend of the girl's family, is not being named to protect the girl's identity. He is charged with aggravated sexual battery, forcible sodomy, forcible rape, abduction with intent to defile and taking indecent liberties with a child. If convicted, he could face life in prison.
At a preliminary hearing Tuesday in Bedford County Juvenile and Domestic and Relations Court, the girl's mother testified that the man called her at 11:30 p.m. on Saturday, Jan. 21, to ask if he could pick the child up so she could spend the night with his daughter and go to a birthday party the next day.
The girl's family lives outside Bedford County. The mother said yes, woke her daughter, and helped her pack.
"I trusted him," the girl's mother testified. "He just never showed signs of being like that. I never thought anything like that would happen. When my 4-year-old was born, he watched my kids while we went to the hospital.''He's never done anything like this before."
Clutching a stuffed rabbit in her hands as she sat on the witness stand, the girl, now 11, testified that the man drove her to various places that night before he pulled into the driveway of an old house in Stewartsville. The girl said that she had never been to his house before and that he told her this was where he lived. "I figured that his daughter was already asleep because all the lights were off," she said.
While outside in the driveway, she said, the man offered her drugs. "He pulled out this white pipe kind of thing and this bag of leafy stuff, and he asked me if I had ever gotten high or something," she said. "He said, 'I want you to try it so you'll never do it again.'''
The girl said she refused, and he smoked the pipe. "His eyes were rolling around and his head went back, and I got kind of frightened."
The man took her to a side door of the house, untwisted a wire that was holding the door shut, and guided her into a room with trash on the floors and boarded-up windows, she said. The man then exposed himself to her and raped and sodomized her, she testified.
In a statement to police, the man denied raping the girl, but admitted taking her to the house so she could use the bathroom. He said he slept at a rest stop on the way and that they didn't arrive at his house until the morning of the next day.
The girl said she watched a video of "The Lion King" with his daughter, whom she had met only once before, had breakfast, then the man took her home. She never went to a birthday party.
In the car, she said, the man told her, "I lied to your parents. I really brought you down here so I could be with you. ... Don't tell anyone. This is our little secret."
After she got home, the girl said, she told her mother what had happened. Her mother called the police and took her to the emergency room of a nearby hospital.
A doctor from the hospital testified that the girl's body showed signs of sexual trauma. The man is being held in the Bedford County Jail. A grand jury will decide May 7 whether to indict him.
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