26-year-old mom testifies in Aurora rape case
Sturdy and unflinching for most of the morning as she recounted the rape, a 26-year-old mother of two young girls eventually broke down when she described what she thought were her last seconds alive.
"I couldn't breathe, so I just gave up and stopped fighting," she said through tears during the second day of Cedric T. Flax's kidnapping and rape trial in DuPage County. "I had tried all I could to fight him off."
The woman described the attack and in the aftermath how she tried to escape, first by trying to push her assailant out of a window and then by fleeing from the house where she had been taken. Nothing worked and her attacker finally pinned her on the ground and tried to strangle her with coaxial cable.
The woman testified Thursday that the 19-year-old Aurora man became enraged after she tried fighting him off and was able to turn on a light in the house and see his face.
"He said, 'You saw my face. You know what that means,'" the woman testified.
She said Flax eventually relaxed his stranglehold and began apologizing.
Flax is accused of sneaking into the woman's car that she left running at a gas station on Aurora's west side just before Christmas last year as she ran inside to buy cigarettes before heading to work overnight at a nursing home. When the woman returned to the car, he jammed what police later determined as a toy gun into her head and told her to drive toward his house on the city's east side. Prosecutors allege Flax sodomized the woman at his house in the DuPage County portion of Aurora then drove her around the city in the early morning hours of Dec. 10 before taking her to another house on the city's west side where he tried to get her to fall asleep with him.
The woman testified that once Flax fell asleep next to her, she tried to get up without waking him, but was unsuccessful. He asked where she was going and she told him she was leaving. He eventually gave her back the keys to her SUV and her cell phone then let her go after six hours. She told the jury she didn't know where she was at first, but called her co-workers as she drove away. They told her to go to a hospital. A nurse and police officers also testified Thursday that the woman was disheveled, upset and had markings consistent with a struggle on her body.
"You could tell she had been crying," testified Aurora Police Officer Jordan Hilton. "Her hair was messy and there was bruising on her neck."
Prosecutors Ann Celine O'Hallaren and Anne Therieau earlier had the jury view surveillance video from the gas station showing a man entering her unattended vehicle.
Senior Assistant Public Defender Michael Mara said he plans to call Flax to the stand once prosecutors wrap up their case next week, and Flax will testify that the sex was consensual. Mara spent only a few minutes cross-examining the victim Thursday, but focused on the lack of physical marks on the woman's body despite her claims that she was thrown against a railing, shoved into the floor and strangled.
Testimony resumes today.