Warrant issued after Arkansas woman charged in rape misses court

Woman charged in ’15 assault

Shauna Harrelson
Shauna Harrelson

A Pulaski County Circuit judge has issued an arrest warrant for a female rape suspect who missed a court hearing, two days after her male co-defendant's motion to suppress his recorded statement to police.

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Judge Herb Wright ordered Shauna Gabrielle Harrelson to be held without bail once police find the 21-year-old Conway woman. She was due in court Wednesday for a status hearing on her case.

She and her co-defendant, Miguel Cossio, 29, of North Little Rock, are charged with rape, a Class Y felony that carries a potential life sentence.

Cossio is scheduled to stand trial in August, while Harrelson's trial has not been scheduled.

Cossio and Harrelson were arrested July 14, four days after Little Rock police answered a late-night call to the Pleasant Ridge Apartments, 11702 Pleasant Ridge Road.

Officers found the apartment's tenant naked and crying in her bathroom, according to police testimony.

At a Monday hearing on the admissibility of Cossio's recorded interviews with police, the judge found no wrongdoing by the detectives. His ruling clears the way for prosecutors to play the recordings for the jury.

Wesley Butler, one of the responding officers, testified that when police went into the apartment, Cossio told them that everything was fine and that no one had called the police.

But when asked whether anyone else was in the apartment, Cossio and Harrelson directed officers to the bathroom, Butler said.

Officer Nicole Sumner told the judge she found the woman in the bathroom, curled up on the floor, still on the phone with 911. Sumner described the woman as "hysterical."

After calming down, the woman told the officer that she had been visiting and drinking with the other two people in the apartment when she fell asleep.

She said she woke to find Cossio having intercourse with her, Sumner testified.

The woman said she was going in and out of consciousness but said Harrelson also was groping her and performing oral sex, the officer said.

Officer David Moore said that after police detained Cossio, the man told him that the woman was a stripper at Visions club in North Little Rock and that the three of them had engaged in consensual sex after drinking.

In a 13-minute recorded interview with detective Terry McDaniel that same night, Cossio said the three had been drinking for more than an hour and that the women were showing each other dance moves.

The sex began when the accuser was giving him a lap dance and Harrelson began to kiss her, Cossio told the detective.

Cossio said the woman told him and Harrelson what to do during the encounter, saying that each of them had sex with the woman at her request and that the woman then went into the bathroom.

"And we didn't bother her anymore," Cossio said. "She sounded really bad, so she went to the bathroom. We left her alone and then I asked Shauna to go check on her."

Harrelson left the room, then returned and said that the woman was fine, Cossio told the detective.

He said he dozed off; when he woke up, the woman was still in the bathroom and then police arrived.

Cossio said he'd visited the woman's apartment 10 or 15 times before, but they'd never had sex during the nine months he'd known her.

He told the detective that he'd known Harrelson about four days, saying that he'd let her move in with him after she'd been kicked out of her apartment.

Cossio was released after the interview but was arrested on the rape charge July 14 and agreed to a second interview with police, who had collected photographs of the encounter from a cellphone.

In that 14-minute recording, detective Jacob Pasman challenged Cossio to explain why the woman looked like she's unconscious in the pictures.

Metro on 05/27/2016

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