Editor’s note: This story includes graphic language.
LAWRENCE, Kansas — It was an emotional second day in Terrence Shannon Jr.’s rape trial as his accuser took the witness stand and described for a Douglas County jury the night she said the Chicago native and University of Illinois men’s basketball standout penetrated her vagina with his finger while at a crowded bar near the University of Kansas campus.
“I was terrified,” the woman, now 19, told jurors Tuesday, tears welling in her eyes. “I was scared and I was shocked.”
Shannon faces one count of rape or an alternative count of aggravated sexual battery, also a felony. He has denied the allegations, which stem from a September trip he and two others took to Lawrence to watch an Illini-Jayhawks football game. His NBA hopes — some prognosticators believe he could be a first-round pick in this month’s draft — likely hinge on the outcome of a trial that is scheduled to conclude two weeks before the NBA draft.
The woman’s testimony took up much of the morning’s court proceedings. The afternoon was largely focused on testimony from the Lawrence police detective who led the investigation into her allegations, and included black-and-white surveillance footage that appeared to show Shannon and the woman moments before — but not during — their alleged encounter inside the Jayhawk Cafe’s Martini Room.
Shannon’s criminal defense attorneys argued the police investigation had been sloppy in failing to interview possible witnesses and an alternative suspect who had been accused of a similar crime, two weeks earlier, in the same spot in the Martini Room where Shannon’s accuser said she was assaulted.
Members of Shannon’s family, a few friends and his agent sat in the courtroom gallery as the woman recounted an encounter she said started around 12:15 a.m. when she and her friend and roommate returned to the Jayhawk Cafe, known locally as The Hawk.
In the Martini Room, one of two bar areas in The Hawk’s basement, the woman, then 18, said she had three sips of vodka and Red Bull, which she testified was her first drink of the night.
“I thought it would be a good time,” she responded when asked why she went to the bar despite saying she didn’t particularly like crowds or drinking.
The room was hot and crowded and loud, she told jurors, and she wanted to leave. As she and her friend maneuvered through the masses, she said she saw a man wave her over to him. He was tall, she said, had different colored dreadlocks and wore a mustard-yellow shirt.
She thought he was cute, she told jurors, and with her friend’s encouragement, she went back in the room.
That’s when she said the man grabbed her and pulled her to him. She said she thought they would talk and exchange phone numbers or Snapchats. Instead, she said no words were exchanged. With a drink in one hand and a phone in the other, both arms pressed near her chest, she said she looked straight ahead as she felt the man’s hand move under her skirt to her butt.
“I was definitely uncomfortable,” she told jurors. “I don’t know why I didn’t (walk away). But I wish I did.”
Next, she said, she felt his hand move her underwear to the side and a finger inside her for what she estimated to be no more than 10 seconds.
“I didn’t react,” she said. “All I did was stand there in shock.”
When his hand left, she said, she pushed through the crowd to leave and to look for her friend. The two eventually left the bar. By then, she said, she was too hysterical to drive.
Back at her apartment, she started to search for the man’s identity. She remembered that the man had been standing by a KU basketball player at the bar. She eventually identified Shannon, she said, after searching online for photos from rosters for football and basketball teams at KU and Illinois.
She did not immediately call police, she said, fighting back tears, “because I didn’t want to end up here.”
One of Shannon’s criminal defense attorneys, Tricia Bath, spent part of her cross-examination questioning the woman about possible inconsistencies in her statements. For example, the woman told the jury Tuesday that she believed Shannon first grabbed her arm or wrist to pull her to him that night. But, Bath noted, the woman testified in a May preliminary hearing that he did not grab her arm or wrist. She also did not remember telling a nurse that he groped her vaginal area, despite telling jurors that such a groping did not take place.
Later in the proceeding, Detective Josh Leitner of the Lawrence Police Department took the stand. A nearly 17-year veteran police officer, Leitner led the department’s investigation of the Shannon case.
Jurors watched a clip of video surveillance from one of the cameras inside the Martini Room. At least one other camera in the bar was inoperable. The black-and-white footage did not have audio. It showed two people, identified by Leitner as the woman and her friend, as they slowly made their way through the throngs of people and toward an exit door near where she said the alleged assault took place.
A man Leitner identified as Shannon was seen on the video entering the room from that open door. He headed out of view on the right side of the image frame, and the woman eventually vanished from view in that same area.
The footage did not show the two together. It did capture portions of another person whom Shannon’s attorneys previously identified in court filings as a “third-party defendant.” The Chicago Tribune is not naming him because he has not been charged in connection with the woman’s alleged rape.
Two weeks before the alleged encounter between Shannon and the woman, that third-party defendant was accused by a different woman — also 18 — of touching her vagina outside her pants, without her consent, in the same area of the Martini Room. He was not charged in connection with that accusation.
Leitner said he had no reason to suspect that third-party defendant, given the woman’s certainty that Shannon had been the person who grabbed her that night.
But one of Shannon’s attorneys, Oakbrook Terrace-based Mark Sutter, grilled the detective about his decision not to question that person despite the past allegations against him.
Sutter also pressed the detective to explain why he sought a probable-cause affidavit against Shannon before DNA testing had finished and before he interviewed other possible witnesses: other KU men’s basketball players in the bar that night, Shannon’s teammate and the graduate assistant who drove with Shannon from Champaign to Lawrence for the football game.
The detective’s investigation, Sutter said during questioning, seemed to exclude any possible evidence that wasn’t “falling in your lap.”
The trial will continue Wednesday.
