A child molester from Little Rock on trial for failing to report his living arrangements to authorities cut his throat Wednesday, producing a bleeding but minor scratch, after a Pulaski County jury found him guilty as charged at a one-day trial.
David Lynn McEuen, 52, who has a history of self-harm and suicide attempts, inflicted the injury with a fingernail as Special Circuit Judge Ralph Wilson read the verdict of the six men and six women of the jury, who deliberated about 43 minutes to convict McEuen of failing to report a change of address as a sex offender.
As jurors watched, court staff tried to bandage the bleeding wound as McEuen grew disruptive, yelling at deputy prosecutor Melissa Brown, "You want my life, Melissa? Hey, Melissa, do you want my life?" Brown did not respond or turn to look as bailiffs Lynn Berry and Jimmy Ellington removed McEuen from the courtroom, a red smear visible across his neck.
McEuen, after promising to behave, was allowed to return for sentencing. He received the maximum sentence quietly, and declined an offer to address the court.
The charge is a Class C felony with a 30-year maximum for McEuen, who has nine felony convictions, including two counts of rape in California in 1990 and a 2008 sexual assault conviction involving an underage girl in Lonoke County. He will be parole eligible after serving five years.
The verdict comes about five months after McEuen was acquitted by another Pulaski County jury of rape charges based on the accusations of two teenage girls, both runaways from the Little Rock Youth Home. The girls, ages 13 and 14, said McEuen had befriended them, then had sex with them in a North Little Rock warehouse where he was living in a camper in July 2017.
His defense attorneys said then that McEuen had taken the girls off the streets to help them but that they had lied about him to get out of trouble for running away from the youth psychiatric facility.
The investigation into the girls' claims led State Police to a gated warehouse at 1302 E. Eighth St., where they arrested McEuen, wearing only shorts, at a camper inside the building October 2017. Testifying Wednesday, Sgt. Ryan Jacks with the State Police told jurors he found what appeared to be a home in the camper, which had a bed, electricity, a microwave and food, when he took McEuen into custody.
According to trial testimony, McEuen did occasional maintenance and groundskeeping for the property owner, and had received permission to keep the camper at the warehouse, although he had been told to move it.
Convicted sex offenders are required to regularly report their living arrangements to local police, and offenders who claim to be homeless have to check in monthly with law enforcement. McEuen had been telling Little Rock police for years that he was living in his pickup, and his last notification to authorities, delivered about three weeks before his arrest, was that he was spending his nights in the parking lot of Riverdale Shopping Center on Cantrell Road.
In his closing argument, defense attorney Lee Short told jurors there was no real evidence that McEuen ever lived at the warehouse. No one ever saw McEuen there at night and what police had done was arrest a homeless man in the middle of the afternoon while he was at his job, Short said. What investigators found was where McEuen managed to keep what few possessions he could hold onto, including a broken-down camper that McEuen was trying to restore, Short said.
A conviction should be based on "where you sleep at night, not where you are at Tuesday at 3 o'clock," he said.
Brown, the prosecutor, told jurors to recall the circumstances of McEuen's arrest wearing only shorts. She said the photographs of the camper and its contents -- all kept within a locked warehouse on a gated property -- were all they needed to see to know that McEuen was living there, Brown said.
"David McEuen was at home. That's where his stuff was. That's where he was living," said Brown, who was assisted by deputy prosecutor Whitney Ohlhausen. "When a person lives somewhere, what does it look like?"
The defense was able to persuade the judge to prevent the testimony of one of McEuen's teenage accusers about how she had stayed several days with McEuen at the warehouse in July 2017.
Short, the defense attorney, complained that he had not been given sufficient notice that prosecutors would call the girl as a witness. He also said that although the girl would not be able to repeat her rape accusations against McEuen to the jury, the testimony of a teenage girl claiming she had lived with McEuen would do more to make his client look bad than it would prove that McEuen had broken the law.