‘Monster’ convicted of raping Macon woman, assaulting another cries after sentencing
A Macon man accused in a pair of 2018 sexual assaults, including the hours-long rape of a woman in her apartment while her preschool-age child slept in the next room, was sentenced to at least 80 years in prison Friday.
Jamal Chris Rowe, 30, was arrested Feb. 7, 2018, within 30 hours of the assaults, after a Bibb County sheriff’s investigator spotted him walking near Northeast High School, not far from the scene of one of the assaults.
Rowe’s appearance — his facial hair, a mustache and goatee-like beard, along with a do-rag he had on — matched the description of the women’s assailant.
A jury of seven women and five men in Bibb County Superior Court deliberated for a little more than an hour before reaching a verdict.
The assaults began the night of Feb. 5, four days after Rowe was paroled from state prison after serving a couple of years on a fleeing-and-eluding conviction.
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The first victim, in her 50s, who lived in the area of Shurling Drive and Gray Highway, answered her door and was dragged to her bedroom by her attacker. Her screams alarmed a neighbor who had heard a commotion in her apartment and knocked on her door, scaring off the intruder.
The next assault, a rape that began a couple of hours later about midnight, lasted into the predawn hours of Feb. 6. That attack happened after the second victim answered her door only to have a man with a knife shove his way inside.
As in many cases, the evidence against Rowe was largely circumstantial. The victims said their attacker had condoms. There was no DNA evidence or physical evidence linking Rowe to either assault.
However, the second victim and the concerned neighbor who scared the first victim’s attacker away picked him out of police lineups, identifying the assailant as Rowe.
The second victim also said her attacker took condoms from her bedroom when he left.
When Rowe was arrested there was a condom in his pocket. It was the same brand as ones taken from the second victim’s apartment. Its expiration date matched ones left behind in her bedroom.
Rowe was convicted of rape, attempted rape, aggravated assault and burglary.
In the end, his own honesty may have helped seal his fate. He had told the woman he raped that he was 28, which he was at the time. He also told her hadn’t had sex in two years because he had just been released from prison, which he had, four days earlier.
He had been living with his mother. She lived west of Gray Highway in an apartment a mile or so north of Shurling Drive. Her place sits between the victims’ residences, which were less than two miles apart.
In sentencing Rowe, Judge Howard Z. Simms told Rowe that he was fashioning a punishment to see to it that “you never do that to another woman.”
The rape charge carried with it a life sentence, which amounts to 30 years behind bars before Rowe will be eligible for parole. The other charges were stacked so that Rowe could then serve up to an additional 50 years.
“To basically break in and repeatedly rape and threaten over a period of hours a single mother whose child is asleep in another room,” Simms told Rowe, “is about a horrific as it gets.”
During the prosecution’s closing argument, assistant district attorney Nancy Scott Malcor referred to Rowe as a “monster” and “a sexual predator” who stalked women in the night.
Malcor asked jurors to send a message to Rowe “that we live in a community where women can open their doors.”
Rowe, during sentencing, said little other than that he felt he was “deprived of justice.”
His hands and legs shackled, he sobbed as he was led to a van bound for the county jail.
This story was originally published November 15, 2019 at 1:29 PM.