Witnesses testify at rape trial

By Ed Runyan

The defendant previously had been in prison for rape.

WARREN — An 18-year-old city man was living with his sister at an apartment on North Feederle Drive Southeast on Oct. 29, 2007, when he arrived home and saw his sister’s roommate running from the apartment, bloody, half-naked, screaming.

“Help me, help me,” Daniel Hoolihan recalled her saying as she ran up to his car and pounded on the window.

The woman was bleeding from her head and wearing only a shirt.

The woman, 21 at the time, ran to another vehicle looking for help and eventually made it to a home, where someone called the police.

At about the same time, Hoolihan said, he saw “Chuckie” — Charles Lemons III, the girl’s relative, coming out of his sister’s apartment carrying his shirt and boots in his hand and buckling his belt.

“He said, ‘I’ll turn myself in,’” Hoolihan said. Lemons also said, “‘Asia, I’ll kill you,’” Hoolihan said, referring to the victim.

Hoolihan testified Wednesday in Trumbull County Common Pleas Court in Lemons’ rape and assault trial, along with a doctor who treated the woman at St. Joseph Health Center, friends of the victim and a police officer.

While Sgt. Manny Nites of the Warren Police Department was on the witness stand, Gina Buccino Arnaut, an assistant county prosecutor, showed photographs on a projector to the jury of the alleged crime scene.

The pictures showed blood on the floor of the upstairs bedroom, on the landing just outside the bedroom, on walls, furniture, clothing and sheets.

There was also a bucket with a mop inside. The water was blood-red, Nites said, as if someone had tried to clean up some of the blood.

Nites wore gloves as he held up the bloody clothes that he found on the bathroom sink. He also held up a broken wooden handle that authorities believe was part of a hammer that Lemons used to hit the woman.

Lemons, 52, of Karl Avenue Southwest in Warren Township, who spent 25 years in prison from 1979 to early 2005 for raping a Warren Western Reserve High School student in May 1978 and abducting four other students, could get up to 48 years in prison if convicted.

In the 1978 crime, Lemons, then 21, abducted the five teenagers, who were skipping school, and demanded that they go to a vacant house in the Southwestern part of the city, where he ordered them at gunpoint to disrobe. He raped the 16-year-old girl. Lemons was arrested hours later.

Dr. Ronald Khoury, a trauma surgeon at St. Joseph Health Center, said the woman in the 2007 case came into the emergency room with lacerations and bruising to her head and face, plus bruising to her chest, back and arm. She spent two days in the hospital, he said.

Kristen Thompson, the victim’s roommate, testified that she talked to the victim that afternoon on the phone. The victim said she and Lemons were burning a CD on the computer.

In a phone call at about 11 p.m., the victim told her “Chuckie just beat me over the head with a hammer,” she testified. Another friend who talked to the victim just before that said the victim told her Lemons also had raped her. The victim testified earlier.

runyan@vindy.com