‘They’ve got the wrong guy’: Why Macon man must wear stun belt at rape trial
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On the night of Feb. 5, 2018, a pair of east Macon women who live a couple of miles apart near Gray Highway were attacked in their homes by someone they later described to the police as a man wearing a black bandanna or do-rag on his head.
The first woman, who is in her 50s, said her assailant barged in after she answered his knock at her door, and that he then grabbed her neck and dragged her to a bedroom. She said the man was about to rape her when her downstairs neighbor, having heard unusual commotion coming from her apartment, went to her door to check on her.
The woman screamed for help and the intruder soon bolted out the door and got away.
Hours later, about midnight, at another apartment complex north of Shurling Drive, the mother of a sleeping preschooler was cleaning up their apartment when someone knocked on her door.
The man who’d knocked shoved his way in, held the mother at knifepoint and, for more than three hours, raped her.
Roughly 24 hours later, about 6 a.m. on Feb. 7, a Bibb County sheriff’s investigator who was working on the case spotted a man walking in east Macon. The man matched the women’s description of their assailant.
Later, the women, along with a man who saw the intruder fleeing the first victim’s apartment, picked the man out in a photo lineup.
That man, Jamal Chris Rowe, was 28 years old and at the time had been out of prison four days.
Now charged with rape, attempted rape and aggravated assault in connection with the alleged attacks on the women, Rowe, 30, is on trial this week in Bibb Superior Court.
Rowe — until he was paroled Feb. 1, 2018 — had served a few years in state prison for a fleeing-and-eluding conviction in Macon. After his release from prison, he was living with his mother on Old Clinton Road. Her residence sits between the sites of the crimes he is accused of committing.
In court on Wednesday, Rowe’s mother sat in the back of the courtroom as her son, dressed in navy trousers and a soft-blue dress shirt with the collar open, was seated with his two attorneys.
Rowe, according to officials, has in the past threatened to harm one of those lawyers, and when Rowe was arraigned in early 2018, Rowe had to be restrained by courtroom deputies who used a Taser on him.
At a hearing earlier this week, a deputy from the Bibb jail where Rowe is locked up testified that Rowe had threatened to disrupt the courtroom at his trial — to, as Rowe put it, “turn it out” to the point of having to be shocked with a Taser.
Because of that, the presiding judge in the case, Howard Z. Simms, ordered that Rowe wear a stun belt under his clothes so that jurors cannot see it. The belt, roughly the size of one that a weightlifter might wear, can be activated remotely by a courtroom deputy if the need arises.
According to bailiffs, only a handful of defendants in court here — perhaps three in the past half decade or so — have been ordered to wear such a belt, and that none wearing one have been shocked.
Through two days in court, Rowe has not acted out.
The case against him hinges largely on eyewitness testimony. No physical evidence or DNA links Rowe to the crimes.
“They’ve got the wrong guy,” Rowe’s lead attorney, Andrew Jenkins, told jurors in his opening statement Wednesday.
Jenkins pointed out discrepancies or inconsistencies in the witnesses’ accounts of the suspect’s height. One witness said the assailant was between 5-foot-10 and 6-foot-2. Another said the attacker stood somewhere between 5-3 and 5-6.
Rowe, according to jail records, is 5-8.
A man who said he was “100 percent” certain that Rowe was the intruder he saw rush out of the first victim’s residence, told the police that night that he figured the suspect was maybe in his 40s. One victim said the attacker was in his early 20s.
Jenkins, the defense attorney, also told jurors “you would expect” some physical evidence — DNA or a fingerprint — to be found in one of the women’s apartments. But there was none.
“Mr. Rowe’s not the right guy,” Jenkins said.
The woman who was raped, however, said he was.
She said her assailant wore condoms during much of the hours-long assault on her.
The woman, in her 20s, said that during her ordeal, with her child asleep in the next room, she went along with her attacker’s commands but told the intruder to leave the child alone.
The woman took the stand Wednesday afternoon and recalled her attacker’s face, saying there was “something off-putting about his eyes.”
Though it did not come up in her testimony, the woman who was raped had told investigators that her assailant was someone who “looks like a young, immature R. Kelly.”
She got a good look at him, she said, adding that at one point the assailant tried to act “sweet,” as if pretending to be a boyfriend, asking her that if they’d met in club would she have liked him. Sure, she said, playing along.
The woman went on to say that the man asked her age. She used the moment to ask his. She said he told her he was 28 and that he hadn’t sex in more than two years because he had been in jail.
Before the assailant left, he smoked a cigarette and drank a cup of water, but the woman said he took with him the cigarette butt and may have washed the cup when he left it in her sink. She said he also took the condoms he used.
“He started to try to apologize and wanted to hold my hands,” the woman testified. “He was like, “Don’t let me take your sense of security like this. I wish it could have happened another way.’”
He told her that he had chosen her as a victim at random, or as she recalled it, using his cold words, like “a random marble ... in a bag.”
This story was originally published November 13, 2019 at 6:16 PM.