Woman testifies ex-trooper sexually assaulted her
WEST CHESTER » When she was a pre-teen in the early 2000s, the girl at the center of a child sex abuse trial involving a former Pennsylvania state trooper took a trip with her sisters to Six Flags Great Adventure amusement park in New Jersey, chaperoned by the man she knew as a father figure.
But when they arrived, it appeared that she was too small for many of the attractions. So off her sisters went, and she and the older man instead went back to the massive parking lot and climbed into the back seat of his red Infiniti. There, as he had been doing for some time, he molested her.
In her testimony in Judge Jacqueline Carroll Cody’s courtroom, the witness, now a 20-something-yearold mother of two, said the man, Darren Lawrence, pulled down her pants and performed oral sex on her for about 30 minutes to an hour, before stopping and heading back to the park.
“Then we went in and got on a few rides,” the woman told the jury listening to the case against Lawrence in Common Pleas Court on Tuesday.
Lawrence, of Wilmington, Del., is charged with multiple counts of child sexual abuse in the trial that began Monday. The 61-yearold Lawrence served as a trooper at the agency’s Media barracks from 1982 until he was dismissed in 2000 after an arrest for tax evasion.
The woman, who is a daughter of a family friend of Lawrence’s who would
leave her alone with him when she was between 9 and 12 years old, testified that Lawrence would regularly molest her during that time period, both at his home on Mill Road in Kennett Square and the home she shared with her family on Baker Road in Londonderry.
She said the abuse took place when there were other people in the house, including times when he would fondle her even as her mother was in the same room, but unaware as to what was going on. There were times they would almost be caught, and other times he would engineer ways of getting her alone — like saying he was taking her for ice cream or meeting her in a neighbor’s house while they were away — so he could have sex with her.
Under questioning from Deputy District Attorney Erin O’Brien of the D.A.’s Child Abuse Unit, the woman — whose name is being withheld by MediaNews Group because of the nature of the crimes alleged — said the sex between them occurred with regularity. They would kiss and “make out;” he would perform oral sex on her; he would fondle her; and once he tried unsuccessfully to have intercourse.
“Just about every chance he got when my mother wasn’t around,” he would molest her, she said. “It was kind of a normal thing.” How many times, O’Brien asked. “Too many for me to remember,” the woman said.
The woman said that although she felt uncomfortable about what was happening between them, she did not object and continued to look at Lawrence as a family friend. It was not until after he moved away to Texas around 2010 and she grew older and started a family of her own did she begin to realize how inappropriate it was.
“I loved him like a father, and I thought I was doing the right thing, because it was what he wanted,” she said when asked how she felt about their interactions. But how did she feel today, O’Brien probed. “I wouldn’t want anything like that to happen to my kids,” she answered.
The woman — dressed in a black shirt and white jeans — testified before the panel of nine men and three women for about two hours, hesitantly at first and then with more assurance. She was able to provide details of where and when incidents took place, even though they occurred more than a decade ago — an unfinished basement in his house, a time when he left her a key to get in her home, how startled they