Emotional Testimony Opens Whitley Trial

Described as bubbly and outgoing, the 17-year-old girl struggled to keep her voice high enough for all the adults in the room to hear.

Fighting back tears at one point, the Rolling Meadows High School senior maintained her composure for nearly two hours as she recounted the January 2010 night when two former  football players forced her to have sex with them inside a car in a secluded church parking lot.

“I was yelling and crying and telling them to stop,” the girl testified Monday, referring to Pierre Washington-Steel and a second person Steel called his cousin.

The “cousin,” according to prosecutors, is Demarco Whitley. His bench trial on five counts of sexual assault opened Monday, Oct. 3, before Cook County Judge Thomas Fecarotta. . Steel died almost a week after the 2010 incident from injuries sustained in a DuPage County crash just hours after the assault.

Whitley’s attorney, Donna Rotunno, tried to poke holes in the girl’s version of events by comparing her testimony to statements she gave to police and nurses. Rotunno described a scenario where the girl consented to the sex, but claimed she had been raped out of guilt because she had a boyfriend at the time who was then a college freshman.

“Never one time did she say no,” Rotunno said.

Rotunno, who said Whitley will take the witness stand, denied prosecution claims that Whitley admitted the girl said no to sex. Rotunno said his injuries in the car crash made him unable to remember what happened that night.

“The police are the ones who filled in the blanks,” Rotunno said in her opening statement, lamenting police “grabbed [Whitley] from school” to arrest him.

When the girl took the stand she recounted her initial meetings with Steel in 2009 when they would drive around and talk, but those meet ups ended after an incident when, smelling of marijuana, Steel laid down on a bed in her home and exposed himself. After that, she hadn’t heard from him again until Jan. 29, 2010. They exchanged calls and text messages to arrange a night out that would include Steel’s cousin, she testified.

Asked by Assistant State’s Attorney Maria McCarthy what she expected to do that night, the girl responded, “Just hang out.”

The three were only in the car for a couple of minutes when Steel pulled his car into a parking lot behind a church. McCarthy, in her opening statement, called it the “perfect location.”

“It was dark out…and there was no one in that parking lot,” McCarthy said.

Once there, Steel began suggesting the girl have sex with his “cousin” – a term Steel used even though he and Whitley are not related. The girl never used Whitley’s name, only calling him Steel’s cousin, and did not identify him in a police photo array.

“Pierre said I should hook up with his cousin…have sex with his cousin,” the girl said. “I said I didn’t want to.”

What she originally thought were playful comments by Steel quickly turned aggressive, which caused her to worry. She feared what might happen if she tried to get out and run, and thought they would eventually tire of her saying no.

“I thought they would just leave me alone,” the girl told the court.

They didn’t.

Whitley, who moved to the back seat next to the girl, exposed himself and asked her to touch him. She declined, according to her testimony, but things got worse when she reached over a forward-reclined passenger seat to grab her jacket and cell phone on the center console toward the front of the car.

At that point, Steele grabbed her by the back of the neck and forced her head into his lap to perform oral sex. The cousin—Whitley—then pulled down her leggings and underwear to fondle and then have sex with her. The girl noticed that he used a condom, which he tossed outside the car, and sodomized her, she testified.

The girl could not specify how long the sex acts lasted, but told Fecarotta she made a call to a friend as Steel started the car up to drive her home. As they left the parking lot, Whitley forced her to perform oral sex on him and told Steel to drive around a bit longer, she testified.

The girl made it to a friend’s house and, eventually, home that night. Her mother testified the girl returned home looking “very, very upset.” She asked her mother for advice for a friend who had gotten into a car with two guys and had been assaulted.

After talking to her mother, the girl sent several texts to her boyfriend, including one Rotunno seized upon where she stated the sex “wasn’t rape” but “wasn’t consensual.” The girl, during questions from McCarthy, said she thought rape was a harsh term reserved for crimes where women are drugged in clubs or young girls are snatched into dark alleys.

The next morning, the mother asked her daughter if she was actually the one who had been attacked.

“I didn’t know it had been my daughter that had been raped,” the mother said, breaking into tears on the witness stand. “I felt my life was shattered.”

Fecarotta briefly paused questioning to allow the mother to regain her composure. Whitley sat at the defense table listening to Monday’s testimony in a gray suit with his hands folded.

Testimony resumes Tuesday morning.