BY MIKE FUHRMAN

Testimony is scheduled to resume Tuesday morning in Iredell County Superior Court in the rape trial of a former Mooresville High School student.

Jericho Montrell Neal, now 22, is charged with raping a 14-year-old classmate in the Magnolia Building on March 6, 2018, when he was 16.

Before the trial recessed for the holiday weekend on Friday, Neal’s accuser completed her testimony.

During cross-examination, defense attorney Ken Darty continued to question the young woman about inconsistencies in her statements to Mooresville police investigators, her mother, a Dove House forensic interviewer and her trial testimony.

The defense attorney asked why she deleted Skype messages between herself and Neal and ripped up a note that she wrote to her mother about the events of March 6, 2018, with questions she had about the incident.

“Not word for word, I wrote down, ‘What happens if people had sex but it wasn’t wanted by one of them?’ ” she testified.

Darty also asked why she agreed to meet Neal in that stairwell that afternoon if, as she testified, Neal had inappropriately touched her during class during the months before the alleged sexual assault occurred. She did not report the earlier event to school officials.

“I wouldn’t have thought that he would try something like that again,” she told the jury.

During opening statements, Darty told the jury that his client had consensual sex with his accuser on the morning of March 6, 2013, at the school, and denied sexually assaulting her that afternoon.

But, according to the testimony of former Mooresville police Investigator Alicia Sinclair — and an audio recording played for the jury, Neal denied having any sexual contact with the accuser when he was interviewed by Sinclair on March 14, 2018.

During that interview, Neal also said he had “never seen” his accuser in the stairwell where she said the assault occurred. A security video entered as evidence in the trial showed the accuser entering that stairwell about 2 p.m. on March 6, 2018, followed shortly by Neal. There are no video cameras in the stairwell.

During questioning by Assistant District Attorney Regina Mahoney, Sinclair said she obtained a warrant charging Neal with second-degree forcible rape in December of 2018 after receiving an analysis of evidence indicated that Neal and the accuser had sexual contact.

The decision to file charges, Sinclair said, was based on “the totality of everything,” which included medical reports, injuries on the accuser’s knees, witness statements and the defendant’s denial of any sexual contact.

The defense attorney also attempted to discredit the MPD investigation by questioning why investigators had not identified and interviewed another student who walked down the steps around the time of the alleged assault or searched Neal’s cell phone for Skype and Google hangout messages between the accuser and Neal. He also implied that investigators had not conducted a thorough investigation because they had not interviewed the accuser’s classmates and her teacher about her demeanor when she returned to class after the alleged assault.

The accuser’s mother also testified on Friday. She detailed how distraught her daughter was on the afternoon of March 7, 2018, when she told her she had been assaulted by a classmate in the stairwell. The mother took her to Levine Children’s Hospital that day for medical attention.

The trial is scheduled to resume at 9:30 a.m. Tuesday. Judge R. Stuart Albright told the jury of seven men and five women that the trial would likely run through Thursday.

Related

♦ Jury selection begins in trial of former Mooresville High School student accused of on-campus rape
♦ Testimony in rape trial of former Mooresville High School student begins in Iredell County Superior Court
♦ Accuser testifies in rape trial of former Mooresville High School student