Jury deliberates fate of man in rape case

By Ed Runyan

Deliberations are to resume Monday morning.

WARREN — Could a woman who had been hit on the head five times with a hammer and was now being raped by a relative talk on a cell phone with a girlfriend without letting on that something was wrong?

Defense attorney Brendan Keating told jurors Friday during the rape and felonious assault trial of Charles Lemons III of Warren Township that he doesn’t think so.

“Would anyone sound even a little normal?” Keating asked the jury of four men and eight women during closing arguments of the trial in the courtroom of Judge Peter Kontos in Trumbull County Common Pleas Court.

The jury began deliberations late Friday but went home for the weekend without reaching a verdict. They will resume Monday morning.

Lemons, 52, of Karl Avenue Southwest, is charged with two counts of rape, one of kidnapping, one of felonious assault and one of attempted rape. If convicted, he could get up to 48 years in prison.

He is accused of hitting the then 21-year-old woman in the head with a hammer multiple times in her North Fedederle Drive Southeast apartment and raping her.

A witness said he saw the accuser running from the apartment at about 11 p.m. Oct. 29, 2007, bleeding from her head, wearing only a shirt and screaming. He said he also saw Lemons leave the apartment just afterward holding his shirt and boots in his hand.

Keating conceded that Lemons and the woman did apparently have a fight that caused the woman to suffer serious head wounds, but he asked the jury to consider the possibility that the altercation occurred after the two had consensual sex and after the telephone call was over.

But Gina Buccino-Arnaut, an assistant county prosecutor, said the woman’s story of being attacked with the hammer, being forced to perform a sex act on Lemons and of Lemons’ performing a sex act on her makes sense just the way the woman explained it.

When the phone rang, Lemons ordered the woman to answer it to avoid suspicion, the assistant prosecutor said. Lemons also told the woman if she said anything, he would kill her, Buccino-Arnaut said.

“She’d just been beaten over the head with a hammer. She had the will to live,” Buccino-Arnaut said of her ability to remain relatively calm.

The friend on the other end of the phone, who testified earlier this week, said the accuser “didn’t sound that normal, but I didn’t think anything of it at the time.”

Earlier Friday, Brenda Girardi, a forensic scientist with the Ohio Bureau of Criminal Identification and Investigation, said the likelihood of DNA found on the accuser’s lower stomach being from anyone but Lemons is one in 82 quintillion, which is thousands of times more than the population of the earth.

runyan@vindy.com