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May 26, 2014
After deliberating for less than two hours, an Orleans Parish jury found two cousins guilty of taking part in the gang rape of a home health nurse in Zion City.
Glenn Elliott, 19, and Jermaine Rumley, 23, face mandatory life in prison after being convicted of aggravated rape, aggravated kidnapping and armed robbery.
As Judge Keva Landrum-Johnson read the verdict aloud, each defendant, clad in starched white collared shirts, stared straight ahead expressionless. The victim, a 55-year-old mother of four, closed her eyes and clung to a relative who had slung an arm around her.
Elliott’s and Rumley’s family members began crying and rushed into the hall outside the courtroom, where their sobs were audible.
During closing arguments, the victim, who has lost two children, often rested her head on a relative’s shoulder and at times dabbed her eyes with a tissue.
Elliott and Rumley used different strategies to try and beat back the charges they were involved in abducting at gunpoint, raping and robbing the woman. Elliott, whose DNA linked him to the woman, claims the sex was consensual. Rumley, who was linked to the crime by at least two witnesses, claims an alibi: that his mom had taken him to Kenner to look at a possible new home.
The evidence showed only “that a sexual act occurred and subsequently she changed her mind, that four to six men attacked (her) and there was no proof of that,” argued defense attorney George Gates, who along with David Capasso, is representing both defendants.
The victim shook her head as Gates spoke.
Prosecutors argued that Elliott only started claiming the sex was consensual after he learned his DNA was found on the victim’s underwear, pants and in her rape kit.
Assistant District Attorney Robert Moore said that Elliott’s recorded jail telephone calls, which jurors heard, show he did not believe the sex was consensual. He asked, “Who ratted on him,” Moore said. “He doesn’t say, ‘This is crazy, we had a consensual relationship. Why she saying I raped her?'”
A TV screen behind Moore flashed photographs of the victim’s scratches, scrapes and bruises all over her back, legs and body. The photos were taken at Interim LSU Hospital.
“It offends me and I hope it offends you too,” Moore told the jury. “I have never sat through anything like this and I feel embarrassed and I feel hurt. The argument that she consented to this make absolutely no sense.”
A few of the jurors nodded their heads.
Elliott and Rumley are the first two of five total defendants to take the case to trial. Darren Holmes, now 21, who prosecutors describe as the ringleader, pleaded guilty and received a 40-year sentence for both the gang rape and a separate jailhouse rape in which Elliott and a third man are also accused. Brian Beasley, 24, is set for trial next week.
David Quinn, now 20, denied taking part in the rape but pleaded guilty to armed robbery in exchange for an 18-year sentence, contingent on his testimony in the case against his accused accomplices. He denied taking part in the rape after looking at the woman’s face and seeing how old she was.
Quinn testified Thursday that the group of young men was smoking marijuana in a vacant apartment complex around 3:30 p.m. on Jan. 26, 2012, when his friends brought up the fact that he had never robbed anyone with them.
Quinn said he agreed to commit an armed robbery, and actually pointed out the home health nurse as a potential victim, while she parked her car and talked on her Bluetooth outside her patient’s house.
He testified that Holmes approached the woman with his gun, forced her to drive around the corner and then brought her into an abandoned house in the 1300 block of South Gayoso Street, where Holmes raped her. Quinn said Elliott raped the victim and Rumley forced her to perform oral sex on him.
The closing arguments came after four days of testimony, including the victim spending an hour on the witness stand on Thursday. She said she followed all their instructions so she could stay alive for her children. She wasn’t sure how many rapists there were, since they ordered her not to look up. She had initially guessed to police there were five to eight men.
“I heard someone say, ‘Oh I think she likes it,’ whatever demeaning thing they could think of to say,” she testified. “That was the only point where I really screamed and cried. I could hear myself and I tried to stop. … It just hurt so bad.”
The jury began Friday with a tour of the crime scene, walking around the abandoned house with boarded-up windows.
The defense had requested the scene tour, in an apparent effort to show the impoverished neighborhood where the defendants live. Gates, the defense attorney, argued to the jury that the prosecutors were overreaching and wanting to target poor black men.
“You may ask the question: ‘Why?’ Why wasn’t one life in jail, one person in the jail for the rest of his life, enough for the state to move on instead of using their strength to negatively affect the lives of young African-American men?” Gates said.
Jurors also heard from the last of several witnesses for the defense on Friday.
Ed Anderson, whose mother was the elderly patient the nurse was going to take care of that day, testified on behalf of the defense that he didn’t notice the victim’s pants to be soiled or her hair disheveled. But, he said, “She seemed upset.”
Earlier in the trial, Rumley’s mother, Oneka Rumley, testified that she was with her son the day of the crime. They looked at a home in Kenner where she wanted to move.
But there were holes in her story, prosecutor Moore pointed out: she claimed it took her an hour to drive from New Orleans to Kenner, she was unable to provide the housing application she said she completed, a prosecutor pointed out to jurors. And Rumley’s sister, who was supposedly with Rumley and the mom in Kenner, was actually clocked in at work at the time of the assault, her employer testified for the prosecution.
Assistant District Attorney Payal Patel urged the jury to find both defendants guilty of all charges: aggravated rape, aggravated kidnapping and armed robbery.
“This is something so horrific that has happened to her that she’s no longer even able to work,” Patel told the jury of the victim. “And she told you that every day of her life is consumed with these horrific events.
“Now you all have the power of justice in your hands. And with your verdict you can bring justice to (the victim). With your verdict you can bring justice to Glenn Elliott and Jermaine Rumley for participating in this horrific gang rape.”
