The lawyer for a Little Rock man accused of raping a fast-food worker during an armed robbery questioned the woman on Monday about why she didn't immediately tell police that she had been sexually assaulted.
Defense attorney Stuart Vess also suggested that the 37-year-old Mexico native, who had been in the United States illegally, might be trying to take advantage of a program that provides visas to victims of serious crimes.
No one can identify his client, Rahim Lindsey, as one of the two masked robbers, Vess said in his opening statement. He also emphasized that prosecutors have no physical evidence -- DNA or fingerprints -- that could conclusively link Lindsey to the Arby's at 15510 Chenal Parkway, where the woman said she was raped.
Prosecutors say the victim and two co-workers were being held at gunpoint by masked robbers who ambushed them as they were leaving work.
Proceedings resume at 10 a.m. today before Circuit Judge Chris Piazza.
Monday was the first day of Lindsey's aggravated robbery, kidnapping and rape trial. The 20-year-old is one of two men accused of robbing the restaurant in August 2014.
Authorities say the second robber, Troy Sanders, 16 at the time, spent most of the two hours the gunmen were at the restaurant trying to break into the eatery's safe. Prosecutors say Lindsey dragged the woman into a restroom to rape her while Sanders was busy.
The robbers never got the safe open despite beating, gouging, prying, kicking and even shooting it. They fled with two of the workers' cellphones and the night manager's car.
Sanders, now 19, was not charged with rape and pleaded guilty to three counts of aggravated robbery in December 2015 in exchange for a 25-year prison sentence and prosecutors dropping the kidnapping charges. He will have to spend at least 17 years behind bars until he is eligible for parole.
In opening statements, deputy prosecutor Jennifer Corbin called jurors' attention to the purple shoes with neon green laces that Lindsey was wearing when police caught him on the night of the holdup. She said all three restaurant workers told police one of the robbers, the shorter one, was wearing shoes with those distinctive colors.
Also, found in Lindsey's pockets were the stolen cellphones and a black Proflex glove, she told the eight women and four men of the jury. Police found the glove's mate in the restaurant in front of the restroom where the woman said she'd been raped.
Lindsey, who was 17 at the time, was found critically injured lying next to a wrecked 1994 green Chevrolet Caprice, about two blocks west of the restaurant. The vehicle was the same car the robbers had taken from manager Jeremy Jackson, Corbin said.
Testifying through an interpreter on Monday, the woman said that she hadn't immediately told police that she'd been dragged into the women's restroom and raped by one of the masked gunman.
She said she was still coming to terms with how she'd survived the ordeal when police arrived, so she initially said she was unharmed when officers spoke to her.
She said she did tell a detective that night what had happened to her, describing for jurors how the shorter of the two robbers forced her to her hands and knees while he painfully attempted to rape her several times. She said he kept his gun pointed at her, sometimes placing it against her head.
When he couldn't complete the act that way, the man forced her to perform oral sex, she told jurors.
"I told him I didn't want to do it. He said that if I didn't do it, he would kill me, [coworker] Christine [Crumpton] and Jeremy," the woman said. "I had the gun to my forehead. I was very frightened."
She admitted to jurors that she was in the country illegally at the time of the robbery. She said a friend had arranged for her to come work for him in the United States but that it wasn't until after the business failed that she realized the documents he'd provided were fraudulent.
Now a hospital administrator, she acknowledged working at Arby's under a partly fictitious name, telling jurors that was the name her friend had used in the documents he'd given her. She told jurors that she had to stay employed, because by the time she realized she was an illegal alien, she had bought a house and a car.
The woman said she returned to Mexico in June 2015 when her father died and said she has no interest in returning to the United States, even if she can qualify for a special visa. She was granted dispensation by the Department of Homeland Security to return to Arkansas to testify.
Metro on 01/24/2017