Two girls, ages 7 and 13, who have accused a 33-year-old Little Rock man of rape will be allowed to testify against him at his trial on the rape allegations involving a third girl, who is now 9, a Pulaski County circuit judge has ruled.
Ambrose Bernard Williams, who has prior convictions for firearm possession, domestic battering, theft, commercial burglary and robbery, is charged with rape in two separate cases involving the daughters of two women he had dated.
Judge Barry Sims ruled Thursday that all three of Williams' accusers will be allowed to tell their stories to the jury that will decide the accusations brought by the 9-year-old girl. Sims made his ruling Thursday after hearing the 7-year-old and the 13-year-old testify about Williams abusing them.
Williams, who has also lived in North Little Rock and Sherwood, did not testify. He did not appear to watch much, if any, of the girls' testimony as he pored over law books and paperwork while they were on the witness stand.
Defense attorney Leslie Borgognoni argued against allowing those two girls to give evidence at Williams' trial on Thursday, complaining that her client has not been charged over the 7-year-old's claims.
She also said the two girls' stories fail to meet the evidentiary standard to be allowed at trial because the accusations they have made are not similar enough to the 9-year-old girl's story.
Even if their claims could meet that standard, she said, their testimony should still be barred because it would do more to make Williams look bad than it would to prove Williams' guilt in the rape charge for which he will be on trial.
The judge also rejected Borgognoni's motion to dismiss the 9-year-old girl's case on the grounds that authorities had waited too long to charge Williams.
Police say the girl was molested by Williams on Nov. 24, 2010, but it was not reported until Aug 10, 2011. Formal charges were not filed until this March, almost 6½ years later, the defense attorney stated.
Waiting so long to charge Williams violated his constitutional rights, she said, because so much time has passed that he doesn't have a good recollection of that time frame, which has prevented him from finding witnesses who could support his version of events. The girl's medical records showing her condition at the time of the accusations are also missing, she said.
Questioned by deputy prosecutor Melissa Brown, the 7-year-old girl told the judge that she was 5 when Williams, whom she called "B," assaulted her in April 2015 while she was watching TV at her mother's home in Jacksonville. She said he came into the family living room, turned her over and pulled down her pants, describing oral sex for the judge.
The second-grader testified that she told her mother but that the woman did not believe her and made her apologize to Williams. She said she told investigators at one point that her 11-year-old brother had touched her because her mother told her to say that.
The girl appeared to have some difficulty understanding all of the questions she was asked. When asked how often Williams visited her mother, she said "kind of a long time."
She was diagnosed and treated for chlamydia, a sexually transmitted disease, but said she didn't remember what medicine she was given. Williams did not have chlamydia and was never charged over the girl's claims, his lawyer said.
The girl testified she was placed in foster care "for a little bit of time" but now lives with her father "because he's not going to let B in his house ... because he's not going to let that happen again."
The 13-year-old girl testified that she and Williams were "close friends" while he was dating her mother last year. She said they teased each other and engaged in horseplay sometimes when he visited her mother's North Little Rock home. He did not live with the family, she said, but was at the house regularly and would help out with errands or cook dinner. She said he'd been dating her mother about three or four months.
The eighth-grader said Williams molested her the evening of Nov. 16, testifying that he had been "play wrestling" in the living room with her younger brother and that she had joined in when she could not get them to stop.
She said she was wearing a "onesie," a jumpsuit-style of pajamas with feet in them, and that when her brother went into the kitchen to get a drink of water, Williams took a crochet needle and was poking her with it, tearing a hole in the pajamas.
Her brother returned for a bit, then went into her sister's room, she said, describing how Williams put his hands through the hole he'd torn to grope her while the boy was out of the room.
Her mother was in her own room watching TV, but the girl said she never called out to her, instead leaving their home to go and tell the next-door neighbors what had happened.
Pressed by the defense on why she didn't tell her mother first, the teen struggled to explain. She told the judge she didn't think her mother would believe her, but could not say why she thought that.
Williams is scheduled to stand trial in the 13-year-old's case in November.
Metro on 10/04/2017