LITTLE ROCK — A Pine Bluff man was acquitted at trial Wednesday of attempted kidnapping after an 11-year-old girl testified that her alleged assailant never touched her.
The girl’s testimony contradicted the account she gave to Little Rock police in which she described an assailant who grabbed her arm and tried to pull her into his car.
Pulaski County Circuit Judge Herb Wright, who was hearing the case without a jury, threw out the charge, a Class C felony with a 10-year maximum sentence upon conviction, on a directed verdict motion by defense attorney Jason Kordsmeier once prosecutors closed their case with the girl’s testimony.
The defense asserted that police had arrested the wrong man, and Kordsmeier argued that prosecutors had no case once Damiyiah Ford’s story changed from the account that led to the arrest of 32-year-old Michael Rodrequs Wells.
“He was looking at me,” the fifth-grader testified, saying she started running when the man began getting out of his car.
Questioned by deputy prosecutor Amanda Dillon about what the girl had told police about the man grabbing her arm, Damiyiah said she couldn’t remember what she had told them.She denied that the man had touched her.
The girl was hesitant during her eight minutes on the witness stand and was slow to answer the prosecutor’s questions. Both her demeanor and her testimony contrasted with her more outgoing sister, 9-year-old Dejanae Ford.
The younger girl, in her 18 minutes of testimony, at first said she had seen a man grabbing her sister. When challenged by defense attorney Jessica Duncan whether she was certain, however, the girl said she might not have seen that happen but that she remembered her screaming sister running toward her.
According to testimony, the girls were walking near the intersection of Dreher Lane and Keats Drive on theirway to a nearby gas station to buy candy in October when they realized they had forgotten their money. Dejanae was walking back to their Keats Drive home to get it while her sister waited in the 8000 block of Dreher Lane. A car drove by her and pulled up next to her sister, Dejanae testified.
“I heard her screaming and I thought something was chasing her,” she said. “She was saying, ‘Help, help, help.’ I thought he was going to get my sister.”
Witness Monica Fleming, a passing motorist, said the girls ran screaming up to her car while she was stopped at a stop sign on Keats Drive. Some distance behind the girls, a man was closing the door of a gold car similar to a Ford Focus, Fleming said. She said she saw little more than his arm and that he was wearing a light-blue long-sleeved shirt.
“I didn’t think to follow the car because the girls were screaming, ‘Help me, help me, help me,’” Fleming told the judge.
Both girls described the man as a bald man in a blue shirt and tie, driving a small gold or tan car like a Chevrolet Cobalt or a Dodge Neon. Police searching the neighborhood found a tan Ford Focus parked at the Windamere apartments at 5801 Dreher Lane within a few minutes.
Officers said Wells was arrested when he walked up to them and said the car was his. Wells was tie-less but wearing a blue buttonup shirt, according to testimony. He wasn’t bald but had very short hair, officers Drew Talbert and Stephen Watson said.
But the girls, shown a cellphone photo of Wells’ car, told police it wasn’t the vehicle driven by the man who had approached Damiyiah.
Arkansas, Pages 9 on 02/21/2013