Victim’s friend testifies in case of 1990 sexual assault

A good friend of the victim of an alleged 1990 home invasion and sexual assault testified in court Wednesday about how her phone rang just hours after the incident when she was told by the victim, “I was raped.”

The friend, who testified by video from Calgary during the Superior Court trial, detailed how at the time — around 8 a.m. — she rushed by cab from her Ouellette Avenue apartment to attend to the victim at her Marentette Avenue residence.

John Thomas Wuschenny, 56, is on trial charged with break and enter, sexual assault with a weapon, forcible confinement, uttering threats, robbery and wearing a disguise with intent to commit a crime.

Wuschenny, a former Windsor resident, was not arrested until 2016, after police pulled decadesold evidence out of storage, including a T-shirt, and sent it for forensic testing.

Police did not initially have Wuschenny ’s DNA profile in 1990. But after committing a crime in British Columbia, police took a sample of his blood for the national DNA databank.

To protect the identity of the victim, the friend who testified Wednesday cannot be named. Under questioning by assistant Crown attorney Walter Costa, the friend detailed the alleged assault as told to her by the victim. The friend, who testified that she was a former law and security student, indicated she was hopeful there would be DNA evidence on the scene.

Court was told previously by the victim how she intentionally spit out the attacker’s ejaculate at the culmination of forced oral sex so that his DNA could be captured. “I said good, at least there is some evidence,” the friend testified of her conversation with the victim after the attack. Wuschenny’s defence lawyer, Andrew Telford-Keogh, attempted to show that the women’s initial statement to police in 1990 and subsequent statements she provided in 2016 were inconsistent — especially around the victim allegedly spitting out the evidence. Telford-Keogh said that detail was never mentioned by the woman to police in her 2016 statement, which she provided a couple of weeks after Wuschenny was arrested in connection with the DNA on the T-shirt. Telford-Keogh asked why the woman failed to do so, since it was so important to her in the moments after the original incident. “If it was so relevant, why didn’t you mention it (to police)?” he asked.

“I didn’t make a choice not to tell them,” the witness responded. “I thought it was evidence they already knew.”

The defence lawyer also questioned whether the motivation to support her friend in court had anything to do with a $2.5-million civil lawsuit the victim has filed based on the assault and police investigation.

The witness told the court she was unaware until recent weeks about the civil lawsuit, but TelfordKeogh confronted her by saying, “I would suggest you are not being truthful.”

The woman countered: “I’d say that is very false.”

The trial is scheduled to continue on Thursday.