A Lafayette Parish jury on Tuesday found a 21-year-old man guilty of first-degree rape in a May 2022 assault outside a SE Evangeline Thruway business.
Damonta Anderson, of Lafayette, was found guilty of first-degree rape after prosecutors Lance Beal and Roya Boustany concluded their case with witness testimony about the Lafayette Police Department’s investigation of the rape and DNA analyzes completed in the case. The jury deliberated for approximately 25 minutes.
The trial resumed Tuesday after being placed on hold for two days to give Anderson’s defense attorney, Valex Amos, Jr., time to seek writs from the Louisiana Third Circuit Court of Appeal and the Louisiana Supreme Court regarding language in the jury instructions. Both courts denied the writs.
Anderson’s first-degree rape conviction carries a state-mandated sentence of life imprisonment without the benefit of parole, probation or suspension of sentence. The 21-year-old will be formally sentenced April 10 before 15th Judicial District Court Judge Royale Colbert, who presided over the trial.
Anderson was found guilty of raping T.C., who the Acadiana Advocate is not naming out of respect for her privacy.
The victim, now 39, testified Thursday that Anderson, whom she’d never met, approached her armed with a knife while she was waiting for an Uber, punched her repeatedly when she ignored his directive not to scream and brought her to an alleyway behind Acadiana Cars, where he forced her to have sex after threatening to kill her.
Lauren Liu, a sexual assault nurse examiner with Hearts of Hope, testified that she met T.C. at the hospital the evening of May 2, 2022 and conducted her sexual assault examination, which included collecting swabs for potential lab analysis. Several areas of her body were swabbed, including inside her mouth, inside and outside her genitals and her rectum.
Liu said that T.C. initially chose to submit her test kit anonymously, which meant that all her identifying information was sealed inside the kit and the outward labels did not include her name when it was turned over to the police department. Anonymous kits are maintained for a year in case the victim decides to file a report, she said.
T.C. testified Thursday that not long after her assault she consulted with a Hearts of Hope advocate and chose to file a report with the police.
Det. James Gayle with the Lafayette Police Department testified that he had already begun looking into the incident by the time he sat down to interview T.C. because of video evidence turned over to the department. Rebecca Rayner, co-owner of Acadiana Cars, testified Thursday that she called police after seeing the assault on their recordings.
The detective said he did not tell T.C. about the video evidence before their interview. Everything she said in her statement aligned with what was shown on the video. T.C. testified she had not seen the video until it was played in court on Thursday.
Gayle said despite putting out a notice for officers to be on the lookout for a suspect matching Anderson’s description wearing a Looney Tunes sweatshirt, as seen in the video, his investigation initially didn’t turn up any leads.
The Lafayette detective testified that Anderson only came into the picture when the Acadiana Crime Lab, where T.C.’s rape kit was sent for processing, identified him as a potential suspect after his DNA was flagged in a database as a possible match. Gayle then brought Anderson to Lafayette police headquarters, and he provided a DNA sample for comparison.
Before that, Anderson’s name had never come up; T.C. did not know him and he was never identified from a photo lineup or any other means of suspect identification, Gayle said.
Chau Nguyen and Claire Guidry with the Acadiana Criminalistics Laboratory analyzed the DNA evidence.
Nguyen testified that she conducted the initial DNA analysis, which involved taking the swabs from T.C.’s rape kit and swabs of her cell phone, wallet and cell phone case and parsing out the DNA on the samples.
Nguyen said she found evidence of spermatozoa on the vaginal, oral and rectal swabs and seminal fluid on the external genital swab. She input the rectal swab information into a database, which flagged the association with Anderson. The analyst said she was also able to confirm DNA from the oral swab was a probable match for Anderson.
Several pieces of evidence that had more complex mixed DNA profiles were forwarded to Guidry for analysis using TrueAllele.
TrueAllele is a software program created and owned by forensic analysis company Cybergenetics. It uses complex statistical algorithms to calculate the likelihood an individual’s DNA is present on evidence compared to a random person’s DNA, particularly in cases where a mixture of DNA is present and it’s too complicated for a human technician to manually parse out and identify the DNA in the sample.
The process is called probabilistic genotyping.
Guidry testified that the program found Anderson was a probable match for the DNA found on the rectal, external genital and upper chest swabs, though the probability ratio for each of the three samples varied.
Beal said in his closing arguments that the evidence against Anderson was clear cut, from the DNA evidence that identified him as the attacker to the surveillance video that captured the attack in full and showed a terrified woman operating in survival mode while under threat.
“In not one place in the video that we showed was this a lady who willfully did anything,” Beal said.
Amos urged the jury in his closing arguments to approach their decision making with a spirit of mercy toward Anderson. He said he believed his client – if he was in fact the perpetrator — was a different man from two years prior and would be a different man in several decades, when he would still be serving a life sentence.
If the jury had not found Anderson guilty of first-degree rape, they could have found him guilty of a lesser included offense, such as second-degree rape, which carries a lower maximum sentence.
“He is a human being, just like the victim is a human being,” Amos said.