Man denies abusing and raping child

A 24-year-old man at the center of child abuse and rape allegations has denied the allegations, despite there being multiple DNA matches linking him to the 13-year-old complainant.

When the man initially took the stand in his defense on Thursday April 25, he denied raping the child but accepted that he had met her and had sexual contact with her, assuming she was 18 years old be old.

A court order prevents this Cayman compass prevented from revealing his identity.

Prosecutors believe the man befriended the child on Snapchat, where he learned her age and then groomed her while posing as a child himself before allegedly molesting and raping her.

Thousands of messages

During his first statement, the man, originally from the United Kingdom, told the court that he moved to the Cayman Islands with his parents five years ago and during that time worked as a boat operator offering luxury charters.

Since he was new to the island, he said he decided to make friends through social media.

“I added the (complainant) on Snapchat, she added me back and then I sent a message saying ‘Hello,'” said the defendant, who told jurors his message was the start of months of conversations.

According to the public prosecutor’s office, the defendant and the complainant then sent more than 2,000 messages back and forth. However, because the messages were communicated via Snapchat, the messages were automatically deleted shortly after they were opened.

Police were able to determine the number of messages by partially scanning the man’s phone, but not the content of the messages. However, some messages were accessed via WhatsApp.

“Based on the nature of the conversations we had, I believed she was a mature woman,” said the defendant, who could not name a specific topic discussed.

“You wrote to her that your father was taking you to the cinema and that he said you could bring a friend,” said prosecutor Sarah Lewis. “You asked her if she wanted to come and she said she would have to ask her mom.

“Is that the kind of mature, grown-up conversation you would have with her?” Lewis asked, to which the defendant responded “yes.”

Lewis further asked: “This is clearly the kind of conversation a child would have. After all, why should a grown man have to ask his father for permission to take a friend to the movies, and why should a grown woman need to ask her mother for permission to go out?”

The defendant said that upon his arrival he quickly became accustomed to Caymanian slang and often used the word “daddeh” when typing about his father and believes the autocorrect must have changed it to “Daddy”. .

He did not answer the question of whether two adults would need permission to go to the cinema.

The accused also told the court that he had sent explicit videos at the complainant’s request and that she had willingly sent him videos and images in return.

A “consensual” meeting of “friends”

The jury of three men and four women heard that after several months of daily messages, the man met 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 chatted before the complainant began making advances, according to the defendant.

“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,” the man said.

His lawyer then asked, “Well, not far away in the lobby there were plenty of chairs where the two of you could have sat and had a private conversation. Why didn’t you just go to one of them?”

“That’s a good question,” the defendant replied, before pausing for a few seconds and saying the complainant wanted to be somewhere where no one was around because she wanted to speak to him privately.

According to the man, he was led by the hand into the bathroom, where the complainant then locked the door behind him before undressing.

The man accepted that he let the complainant perform indecent acts on him in the toilet – but added that she had also offered to do so.

He denied raping her in the bathroom.

DNA evidence recovered from the complainant returned matches to the accused.

“A swab (of the child’s genitals) revealed a match that is more than (6 million trillion) times more likely to be you than any other person,” said Lewis, who questioned how the fluid got to places that would require human contact of a sexual nature.

The defendant told jurors he didn’t know, but insisted he did not rape her and that the child may have put it there while grooming herself while “looking away.”

The jury heard that after the sexual encounter in the bathroom, the child left first and a few minutes later the man also left, at a time when the child’s mother arrived – making her suspicious.

According to the defendant, he had a brief exchange with the woman and informed her that he was the owner of the car keys and other small personal items that were lying on the lounge chair with her child’s towel.

Blocked messages “will relieve me”

According to the defendant, there are still messages on his device that would exonerate him.

“The police couldn’t access my phone last time because the two passwords I gave them were incorrect, even though I thought they were correct,” the man said.

However, the messages must not be lost on police as the defendant told the court his phone had facial recognition software and he would be willing to open the device to officers.

Due to a scheduling conflict, the proceedings were then postponed to May 8th.

However, when the matter was reopened on Wednesday, it emerged that the phone had not been examined and no new messages had been received.

During a brief round of re-examination, the defendant’s attorney asked the man why he chose to leave and not speak to the child’s mother who confronted him.

“I didn’t know what was going to happen and at that point I was just nervous and wanted to get out,” the man said. “Looking back now, it’s probably because I went there to meet an 18-year-old girl, only to later realize she was actually 13.”

Now that the man has completed his testimony, the prosecution and defense will make their closing speeches, which will be followed by the judge’s summary.

The defendant remains in custody until the verdict is announced, which is expected in the coming days.