A Little Rock man on parole for robbing a woman downtown in 2014 has accepted a 15-year prison sentence for another downtown attack on a woman, the September 2019 sexual assault of a Canadian woman who was rescued by an off-duty police officer and a bus-station employee.
The 35-year-old woman, visiting Little Rock from Quebec on business, was attacked by 48-year-old John Sylvester Withers, who knocked her down, punched and groped her near the intersection of Rock and East Fourth streets.
The late-afternoon attack, which was captured on surveillance video, occurred about a block from her River Market hotel. The woman told police she had been walking to a Main Street restaurant when Withers, whom she'd never seen before, jumped her on the sidewalk.
Sentencing papers filed on Tuesday show Withers, who has been diagnosed with schizophrenia, pleaded guilty as charged to second-degree sexual assault and misdemeanor battery in exchange for the 15-year term imposed by Pulaski County Circuit Judge Barry Sims.
The plea agreement, negotiated by Deputy Prosecutor Jennings Morgan and Public Defender Jordan Compton, allows for his latest prison sentence to run concurrently with the remainder of the 15-year sentence Withers received after pleading guilty to robbery and second-degree battery in March 2015. Parole records show Withers had been approved for early release in June 2019.
Records show parallels between the attacks. In March 2014, Little Rock officer Mark Ison was working off-duty at a wedding at the Junior League building on South Scott Street when he heard a woman calling for help. Ison ran to her rescue and found Withers holding the 71-year-old woman in a headlock and punching her in the face. Ison pulled Withers off her and arrested him. The woman said he'd been trying to take her purse. She suffered serious bruising and a cut to her right index finger that required stitches, court records show.
The Canadian businesswoman was also rescued by an off-duty officer, Sgt. Dennis Moore, along with Allen Washington, a Rock Region Metro bus supervisor. The men had been watching Withers on a security camera from the River Cities Travel Center, 310 E. Capitol Ave. Court filings show they saw Withers prepare to attack the woman but could not get to her from the bus station in time to stop him.
The woman told detectives she was a regular visitor to Little Rock and had been going to meet co-workers for dinner, walking by the Hilton Garden Inn, when she saw the man who attacked her. She said he didn't seem dangerous, and she assumed he was a hotel worker until he started staggering toward her.
She said he grabbed her dress and started punching her, sticking his hands under her clothes and groping her as he pushed her against a window.
She fought his efforts to pull her clothes off, screaming for help and crouching down to keep him from raping her. The woman said that she could not protect her head in that position, and the attacker battered her head against the window. No one came to help her until Moore and Washington intervened, the woman said. Moore used a stun gun on Withers when he refused the officer's commands to surrender, court filings show.
Moore and Washington had been watching Withers by camera because he had just left the bus station, where a driver had told Moore that Withers appeared to be smoking drugs from a soft-drink can.
They saw the woman walking toward him on East Fourth Street, and Washington told detectives Withers paused at a driveway by the hotel then squatted behind a bush as if he was waiting for something. It was then that he and Moore scanned the area and saw the woman walking toward him, he said.
They suspected he was going to attack her and left the bus station to intervene but got to her too late, Washington said, describing finding Withers with the woman with some of her clothing ripped off.
Detectives wanted to question Withers after his arrest, but he was too intoxicated for questioning. Withers opened his pants and began to touch himself, court files show. Records show Withers behaved similarly when he was arrested in 2014. He sexually propositioned officers then and unzipped his pants at one point, behavior that kept investigators from questioning him.
In court-ordered mental evaluations conducted in 2014 and 2020, doctors diagnosed Withers with schizophrenia but concluded the mental illness did not prevent him from knowing the difference between right and wrong or compel him to act the way he did.
The latest sentence is Withers' fifth trip to the penitentiary, court records show. His role in two burglaries in August 1987, one of them at Gibbs Elementary and the other at a nearby cleaners on Ringo, by a then-15-year-old Withers and another teenager, resulted in Withers' first felony conviction for burglary, a five-year suspended sentence and an incarceration in the Division of Youth Services until he turned 18 or the agency decided to release him.
Withers' next arrest came in May 1990, about two months before his 18th birthday, by Little Rock police investigating a burglary alarm at Central High School. Officers discovered eight classrooms had been broken into and found Withers with two bags full of property taken from the rooms. His guilty plea to burglary resulted in an eight-year prison sentence, his first.
In April 1992, while on parole, Withers was responsible for two robberies. In one of them, Withers broke a woman's nose when she resisted his efforts to steal her purse in the Salvation Army store parking lot at Roosevelt and Maple Streets. Two passing motorists chased him down, and Withers hid under a nearby home until Salvation Army workers talked him into surrendering. Withers was sentenced to 35 years after being convicted at trial on two robbery counts.
His third prison sentence, a three-year term, was for an August 2003 arrest for crack cocaine possession during a traffic stop.