A woman described to a Grand Court jury on Tuesday how she was allegedly molested by a “friend of a friend” while they both stood in shallow water off Rum Point Beach early one evening last year.
Defendant Khalil Mejia has denied two counts of indecent assault in relation to the allegations.
The woman, in her 20s, who cannot be named for legal reasons, told the court that she, a female friend and two men, one of whom was an off-duty police officer, had been on a Sunday afternoon boat trip to Rum Point on 30 July 2023 when the alleged assault occurred.
After they anchored their boat off Rum Point, a popular weekend spot, she and her friend got in the water and walked around to see if there were people they knew on other boats in the area. A while later, Mejia, whom they knew, came up to them on his jet ski, and the woman asked if he would take her for a ride on it.
She told the jury that she had previously been acquainted with Mejia, and they had exchanged Snapchat messages in 2017 for a couple of months, before she cut off contact with him and blocked him when his messages became sexually suggestive.
Asked by Mejia’s defence lawyer Amelia Fosuhene why, when she had previously blocked him because he had made her uncomfortable with his messages, she was comfortable to get on a jet ski with Mejia on her own, the woman said 2017 was a long time ago and she had gotten to the point where it did not bother her.
However, the woman told the court, Mejia had taken her some distance from the boats and make a sexually explicit comment to her. When she said she had recently come out of a relationship and wanted to focus on herself, she said he responded that they could just “go around the corner”, but she refused, and they returned to the boat.
Later that day, after the sun had set and it was dark, she said her friend felt nauseous and, accompanied by one of the men from the boat, headed towards the shore to throw up, leaving the woman alone in the water. She said, as she made her way back to the boat, Mejia “popped up out of nowhere”.
She told the jurors they chatted for a while and, as she finished the conversation, she moved to give him a “side hug”. She said, at that point, he took her arm, put his hand around her waist and turned her around so her back was pressed against his chest. She said he then touched her crotch over and under her swimsuit.
Asked by prosecutor Ben Brown how this made her feel, she said, “Disgusted.” Since the experience, she said, she has suffered from anxiety.
She told Brown that she froze and could not move or speak during the several minutes she said the alleged assault lasted.
She said after her friend, now back on the boat, shouted her name, Mejia stopped. She said, at that moment, all she could manage to say to him was, “Take me back to the boat.” She said he “cradled” her, by picking her up and carrying her towards the boat.
The woman said she threw up as the boat made the return journey home from Rum Point. She admitted she did not tell any of the three people on the boat at the time about what had happened.
Asked by Fosuhene if she was aware that one of the two men on board was an RCIPS officer, she said she did, but barely knew him and did not feel comfortable sharing the information with him.
Asked by Brown how much she had drank that day, she said she had imbibed four regular-sized red Solo cups of vodka and cranberry, but denied being drunk.
Fosuhene, in her cross examination of the witness, noted that the woman’s current partner was one of the men on the boat, and asked if they were together at the time of the alleged assault. The woman denied this.
Asked if she had supplied the names of all the people on the boat, who were potential witnesses, to the police when she reported the incident at the Bodden Town Police Station the following day, the woman said she did, but at the time of making the report, she only knew the first names of the two men on board.
The investigating officer in the case, who also testified on Tuesday, said he had contacted the female friend, but she had refused to give a statement. He had not been able to contact the men on board the boat, he said.
Fosuhene asked the officer if the complainant had ever let him know that one of those men was her partner. He replied that she had not.
She also asked if he was aware that the other man on the boat was a police officer. He said he did not, as he had only ever been told the man’s first name.
The case continues before Justice Cheryll Richards on Wednesday, 18 Sept.
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