Once again Darrell Oliver got on the witness stand to claim the woman he’s accused of raping wanted to have sex with him.
It’s worked for him in the past when he was acquitted of rape and attempted rape in January 2019, January 2020 and September 2020.
This time it didn’t. After a Richmond County Superior Court jury deliberated Thursday night and Friday morning for about an hour total, it found Oliver guilty of rape, kidnapping with bodily injury and burglary.
Finding Oliver’s Nov. 27, 2021 attack on a mother of three particularly cold and calculating and violent, Judge Jesse Stone imposed the maximum possible sentence — two life in prison sentences plus an additional 20 years. Oliver will be eligible for parole after 30 years.
Assistant District Attorney Deshala Dixon said this had been a particularly difficult and haunting case. As her co-counsel, Justin Mullis, said in the opening statement, Oliver’s behavior was that of a monster, she said.
On the night of Nov. 27, the victim was in her own home at Villa Marie apartments with her children. She was curling her hair for church in the morning, standing in her bathroom with a curling iron when she sensed a presence and looked up to find a man dressed in black with the top of his hoodie pulled tight around his face.
For the victim, Friday, Sept. 30, mark a new beginning for her and her children, she said.
“I hope he believes in God. God can forgive him. (But) I’m not God,” she said.
Many women do not report sexual assaults because they fear they will be blamed, Dixon said to the jury in her closing Thursday.
“It’s time to stop the victim blaming and look at the person who did this,” she said.
In her closing, defense attorney Jennifer Cross argued that the victim’s story didn’t make sense because she didn’t suffer physical injury. The bleeding in her vagina could have been due to several reasons, Cross said, and it wasn’t documented by the doctor who did the rape exam. And the woman was supposedly screaming but the neighbors hadn’t heard her, Cross said.
Oliver testified as the final witness during the trial. “I did what she told me to do,” he said. She had told him to come through the window. When he walked into her bedroom, she told him: “You can have sex with me any time you want.” It was after they finished that she said she was going to call the police and that’s why he ran from the apartment after jumping out the window he used to get into the apartment.
The prosecutor asked the jury to remember what the victim had done when Oliver finished with her and headed toward her daughter’s room — she ran after him screaming “No, no, no.” The mother told the jury this week that she feared he was going to go after her 11-year-old daughter. Her screams were on the recorded 911 call, Dixon said.
Richmond County Sheriff investigators had nothing to go on at first. But fingerprints found on the outside of the opened bedroom window matched Oliver’s prints. Oliver provided more links when he posted on his Facebook page about being in Augusta that weekend after Thanksgiving last year, and about his new white car, Investigator Sean Morrow testified.
Investigators found that Oliver had stayed that weekend at a hotel close to the Villa Marie apartments on Deans Bridge Road. Security video at the hotel and at the apartment complex showed a man dressed in a black hoodie and pants with white canvas shoes. The hoodie had a white logo on the chest for a business in Columbus where Oliver had moved.
Sandy Hodson is a staff reporter covering courts for The Augusta Press. Reach her at sandy@theaugustapress.com.Â
