A 24-year-old man at the centre of child molestation and rape allegations has refuted the charges, in spite of multiple matches for DNA linking him to the 13-year-old complainant.
Initially taking the stand in his defence on Thursday, 25 April, the man denied raping the child but accepted that he met and had sexual contact with her, in the belief that she was 18 years old.
A court order prevents the Cayman Compass from releasing his identity.
The prosecution’s case is that the man befriended the child on Snapchat, where he learned her age and proceeded to groom her while masquerading as a child himself before allegedly molesting and raping her.
Thousands of messages
While giving his initial evidence, the man, who is originally from the UK, told the court that he had relocated to Cayman with his parents five years ago, and during that time he worked as a boat operator offering luxury charters.
Being new to the island, he said he decided to try to make friends through social media.
“I added the [complainant] on Snapchat, she added me back and then I sent a message saying ‘Hi’,” said the defendant, who told the jury that his message was the beginning of months of conversations.
According to the prosecution, the defendant and the complainant would go on to send more than 2,000 messages back and forth. However, because they were communicated via Snapchat, the messages were automatically deleted a short time after being opened.
Police were able to determine the number of messages by conducting a partial scan of the man’s phone but not the contents of the messages. However, some messages via WhatsApp were retrieved.
“I believed she was a mature woman based on the types of conversation we had,” said the defendant, who could not point to a specific topic that was discussed.
“You messaged her saying that your daddy was taking you to the movies and that he said you could bring a friend,” said prosecutor Sarah Lewis. “You asked her if she wanted to come and she said that she would have to ask her mommy.
“Is this the type of grown, mature conversation that you would have with her?” asked Lewis, to which the defendant replied, “Yes.”
Lewis followed up by asking, “This is clearly the kind of conversation that a child would have, after all why would you a grown man need to ask your daddy for permission to bring a friend to the movies, and why would a grown woman need to ask her mother for permission to go out?”
The defendant said that he had quickly adopted the Caymanian vernacular upon arrival and would often use the word ‘daddeh’ when typing about his father and believes autocorrect must have changed it to ‘daddy’.
He provided no answer as to the need for two grown adults to get permission to attend the movies.
The defendant also told the court that he sent explicit videos at the request of the complainant, and that, in exchange, she willingly sent him videos and images.
A ‘consensual’ meeting of ‘friends’
The jury of three men and four women heard that after several months of daily messages, the man went to meet the complainant at a resort where her mother worked.
While at the resort, the two eventually went to a hot tub where they sat and talked before the complainant, according to the defendant, begun making advances.
“She straddled me… and a few minutes later she asked if I wanted to go to the bathroom. At first I asked her why, and then she just said again, let’s go to the bathroom, because she wanted to talk and wanted privacy,” said the man.
His lawyer then asked, “Well, there were plenty of chairs in the lobby not far away where the two of you could have both sat and have a private conversation. Why didn’t you just go to one of those?”
“That’s a good question,” answered the defendant, before pausing a few seconds to say the complainant wanted to be somewhere where no one was around because she wanted to talk to him in private.
According to the man, he was led by the hand to the bathroom, where the complainant is said to have then locked the door behind them before undressing.
The man accepted that while in the bathroom he had the complainant perform lewd acts on him – but added that she offered to do so.
He denied raping her while in the bathroom.
DNA evidence recovered from the complainant returned matches to the defendant.
“A swab from [the child’s genitalia] returned a match that is more than [6 million trillion] times likely to be yours than any other person,” said Lewis, who asked how the fluid ended up in places that would require contact of a sexual nature.
The defendant told the jury he didn’t know, but remained adamant that he did not rape her, and that it might have been placed there by the child as she cleaned herself while he “looked away”.
The jury heard that after the sexual encounter in the bathroom, the child left first and a few minutes later the man exited as well, at a time when the child’s mother arrived – causing her to become suspicious.
According to the defendant he had a brief exchange with the woman, informing her that the he was the owner of the car keys and other small personal items on the lounge chair with her child’s towel.
Locked messages ‘will exonerate me’
According to the defendant, there are still messages on his device that would exonerate him.
“The police weren’t able to access my phone the last time because the two passcodes that I gave them were both wrong, although I thought they were correct,” said the man.
The messages, however, may not be lost to police as the defendant told the court his phone has face-recognition software and he would be willing to open the device for officers.
Due to a conflict in schedules, the case was then adjourned until 8 May.
However, on Wednesday, when matters resumed, it came to light that the phone had not been examined and no new messages were forthcoming.
During a brief round of re-examination the defendant’s lawyer asked the man, why he choose to leave and not speak to the child’s mother who had confronted him.
“I didn’t know what was going to happen, and at the time I just felt flustered and wanted to get out there,” said the man. “Now that I look back at it, its probably because I went there to see someone who was 18, only to realise down the road that she was actually 13.”
Now that the man has completed his evidence, the prosecution and the defence will give their closing speeches, which will be followed up by the judge’s summing up.
The defendant remains in custody, pending the verdict which is expected in the coming days.
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