Woman testifies in WCU frat rape trial

WEST CHESTER >> She was so excited that her “on-again, off-again” boyfriend had invited her to a “Date Night” party at the West Chester University fraternity that he was pledging for that she called her mother and told her, then went shopping with her for a new black dress to wear that night.

“I’d never been invited to go to a date party together,” with the man she had known for two years, the woman said during more than four hours of testimony in the rape trial of Gettysburg native Mauricio Sanjuan-Martinez in Common Pleas Court Wednesday in Judge Anthony Sarcione’s courtroom. “All the girls wore dresses and the guys wore suits.”

But the morning after the alcohol-fueled bash at Kappa Delta Rho fraternity in West Chester was anything but a celebration for the 21-year-old WCU senior.

Instead, she was being given a “rape kit” examined by doctors and nurses at the Chester County Hospital for signs that she had been sexually assaulted by a man she barely knew in the dark bathroom of the fraternity house.

“I was thinking of all those times that people warned me, that my mother told me, that this stuff happens,” said the woman, whose name is being withheld by the Daily Local News because of the nature of the charges in the case. “I thought ‘this is really happening.’”

Sanjuan-Martinez, 21, is charged with rape, aggravated indecent assault, sexual assault,

The morning after the alcohol-fueled bash at Kappa Delta Rho fraternity in West Chester was anything but a celebration for the 21-year-old WCU senior.

and indecent assault stemming from the encounter that he allegedly had with the woman at the fraternity hose in the 600 block of South Walnut Street the morning of March 29, 2015. The jury of seven men and five women is expected to hear evidence through Friday in the case.

The woman testified on direct examination by First Assistant District Attorney Michael Noone for about two hours in the morning, and then faced about two hours of cross-examination by defense attorney Peter Kratsa of the law firm of MacElree Harvey of West Chester, who is representing Sanjuan-Martinez. The defense contends that the woman had consensual sex with Sanjuan-Martinez, although she thought it was her boyfriend.

The defendant appeared subdued during the course of the day, wearing a light gray suit and white dress shirt. He was accompanied in the courtroom by several family members. The woman, dress in a maroon sweater with long brown hair, introduced herself as a resident of Montgomery County who plans to go into public relations work after graduating this year from WCU, where she is a communications and IT major.

She said that the evening

of the party on March 28, 2015, she and her boyfriend — whose name is also being withheld so as not to identify her — started drinking vodka at her house in the borough around 8 p.m., then continued at a “pre-game” get together at a friend’s apartment before going to the frat house for the party. They arrived between 10 p.m. and 11 p.m., she told Noone, and continued to drink for much of the night.

Noone showed photos of the house and the basement where the party was held to the jurors, depicting a sometimes grungy and filthy environment — with graffiti-covered walls and a makeshift bar where the woman said the frat members had set up bottles of “every type of alcohol you could think of,” and purple and gold plastic cups littering the floor.

She said that as the evening wore on, she and her boyfriend went into a first-floor bathroom in the house and had sex, then continued to party. “Were you enjoying yourself?” asked Noone. “Yes,” she said. “I was having fun. I was pretty drunk.”

Sometime after midnight, the woman said she and her boyfriend sat down on a couch in the first-floor living room and fell asleep. She awoke later to find her boyfriend had moved, and then later woke up on the floor of the bathroom, sitting on her knees leaning

over the bowl as thought she was going to throw up.

She noticed that there was another person in the room, which was dark.

“I turned around and said, ‘You’re not (her boyfriend).’ He said something … and he came up behind me and started having sex with me,” she said.

“Did you want that person to have sex with you?” Noone asked. “No,” she answered. “I started screaming.”

The woman said she was able to break free and open the locked door. Outside she tried to wake up her boyfriend, who was passed out cold, and finally told another man what had happened. She saw the man who had been in the bathroom come out, and pointed at him. “I said, ‘that’s him.’ He said, ‘That’s Mauricio.’”

On cross-examination, Kratsa spent time going over the woman’s testimony about how much alcohol she had consumed that night, where she had been in the bathroom where she had sex with her boyfriend, and inconsistencies between her testimony and statements she gave to West Chester police.

He also questioned her on her lack of memory concerning many of the details of the alleged attack.

“You have no memory of how the sex began, do you?” Kratsa asked. “It all happened so fast I am not sure,” the woman answered.

Testimony is expected to continue today.

To contact staff writer Michael P. Rellahan call 610-696-1544