Woman testifies in rape trial

Trace Christenson | Battle Creek Enquirer

A 21-year-old woman testified Tuesday she was raped in February in a Springfield bar.

Then prosecutors told the jury another woman was raped on the same day in the same bar and on the same pool table.

"They didn't know each other and have never met and have never spoken," Assistant Calhoun County Prosecutor Karen Pawloski said in her opening statement.

The 21-year-old woman told the jury she went to the bar Feb. 8 when the man, Ray Cole, sent her a message asking for a ride home.

She said he began asking personal questions and that if anything happened between them the man she had been seeing for a couple of weeks wouldn’t have to know.

“I had no intention of anything happening with him,” she said. “It wasn’t what he wanted to hear.”

She told jurors that Cole, 27, stood in front of her near a pool table, tried to kiss her and then put his hands under her sweatshirt and down her pants and when she sat on the pool table and attempted to move away from him he held her down, pulled down her pants and raped her.

The testimony came during the second day of Cole’s trial in Calhoun County Circuit Court on third-degree criminal sexual assault charges. Testimony continues today before Judge Sarah Lincoln.

“I was scared. I really wasn’t sure what was going on,” the woman told Pawloski. “I wasn’t sure how it escalated to this.”

She testified that she attempted to get away and was screaming for Cole to stop.

“He told me he had a condom on and it was fine because he had a condom on,” she said. “He was telling me it was fine.”

The woman said she continued to scream and “then he just stopped and got off and started to apologize. I was screaming and trying to get up and almost like an instant he stopped.”

The woman, who the Enquirer is not identifying because she is a victim of an alleged sexual assault, told Pawloski and defense attorney J. Thomas Schaeffer that she had only known Cole for a couple of weeks and that was because she had been in the bar a few times with another man she was interested in and some other friends.

She said the night before she was attacked she had been in the bar drinking and became sick and early on that Sunday morning went home with the man she was seeing.

Later that morning the two of them went to the bar for a while to return a wastebasket she had taken in case she was sick.

She testified that the man she was with, Dave Huggett, asked Cole, who worked at the bar, Brady’s Pub at 408 N. 20th St., if he needed a ride home. He said no but then the woman said shortly after she left alone in her own car she received a message from Cole asking for a ride.

She returned and found him alone and not ready to leave.

She told the jury she was not initially concerned until Cole began to touch her.

During cross examination by Schaeffer, the woman said she never flirted with Cole, never commented on social media about the attack and had no interest in a relationship with him.

After the assault she still drove Cole to his home and she acknowledged to Schaeffer she didn’t know why.

“I shouldn’t have,” she said. “But I knew he was drunk and I went up there to take him home so I did.

“I just wanted out of the bar,” she told Pawloski. “I was more or less in shock. I didn’t know how to act. I didn’t know what to do myself.”

She also acknowledged that while she sent a message to Huggett that she had been raped, she did not notify police or anyone else for two days.

“I went home. I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t want to to be in trouble. I was in bed the next two days.”

She testified she reported the attack after learning that another woman, 30, reported she had been sexually assaulted by Cole later that same day.

Cole is charged with sexual assault of the second woman in a separate case. That woman is scheduled to testify in this week's trial after Pawloski argued, and the judge agreed, that the acts were similar and should be heard by the jury.

Schaeffer told jurors that while they would hear from both women, they also would hear from Cole.

"At no time did Ray assault (this woman)," Schaeffer said. "It was consensual."

Contact Trace Christenson at 966-0685 or tchrist@battlecreekenquirer.com. Follow him on Twitter: @TSChristenson