A man accused of abducting, assaulting and raping a woman in a Gwynn Oak park a decade ago was found guilty by a jury Friday of seven charges, including first-degree rape, robbery with a dangerous weapon and kidnapping.
Rhasaan Harcum, 31, is to be sentenced on March 15 by Baltimore County Circuit Judge Ruth A. Jakubowski, who presided over the four-day trial.
Seven years after the Sept. 28, 2000, attack, DNA evidence led a police detective to Charnard Demon Jones, 31, and ultimately to Harcum, and both men were charged with multiple counts.
As their trial was about to begin on Tuesday, Jones pleaded guilty to a single count of first-degree rape and was given a life sentence with all but 20 years suspended. Harcum chose to take his chances with a jury.
"We didn't know who he was for the longest time," prosecutor Stephanie Porter said after Friday's verdict, referring to the defendant. "Justice was served in the end."
The woman who was attacked by the two men took the stand on the trial's first day and described a harrowing ordeal at their hands. She said that, after finishing her shift in a downtown Baltimore strip club at about 2 a.m., she was tossed into a car -- which turned out to be a white Acura driven by Harcum and owned by his mother -- and then blindfolded and pistol-whipped.
Driven to Woodlawn Memorial Park, the woman said she was raped by both men, forced at gunpoint to perform sex acts, and threatened with death if she went to the police. Before they left her in the park, one of the men urinated on her and then doused her with alcohol to make it appear, he told her, that she was drunk.
In her closing remarks to the jury on Thursday, Porter's colleague Rachel Karceski said that the victim's occupation as a stripper should not mean she was expendable or that her story about the attack lacked credibility.
"She may not be like you or I," Karceski said, "but she didn't deserve what happened to her."