3 guilty in rape, robbery of USD students in 2006

[John in Woodbridge]

Three men were convicted yesterday in a rape and robbery home-invasion case in Mission Beach that horrified just about everyone who heard about it.

Local politicians quickly paid for new security cameras and more lighting to calm residents in the boardwalk community where college students, tourists and crime intersect.

Willie Louis Watkins, 32, Donald Duante Smith, 20, and Antonio Washington, 19, were convicted on all counts, a total of 76 felonies. Sentencing was set for March 17; the men are facing life in prison.

After two days of deliberations, a jury determined the three gang-raped two 18-year-old women while holding their friends, two men ages 18 and 19, at gunpoint.

“This is the worst sexual-assault case I've ever prosecuted,” Deputy District Attorney Patrick Espinoza said outside the courtroom. He cited the number of sex acts and the number of defendants.

One juror, who declined to give her name, said the guilty verdicts were easy to reach thanks to DNA evidence, confessions by Smith and Washington and testimony from the victims.

“I feel pleased with the way the jury handled the case,” the 43-year-old San Diego woman said. “It was very difficult subject matter.”

Defense attorneys and relatives of the defendants did not address reporters, but family members clearly objected to the verdicts. Some wept in court and while leaving one shouted: “White jury! Everything is white!”

Although the victims are white and the attackers are black, race was not a main issue during the two-week trial. The jury wasn't all white, but it did not include any black members.

The attacks occurred at 2:30 a.m. on Oct. 15, 2006, inside a Mission Beach condominium that rents for $2,000 a month and is a stone's throw from the beach.

The victims attend the University of San Diego. They took some time off after the attacks but are back in school, three at USD and one in Arizona. One of the men lived in the condo with a roommate, but they moved out the day after the attacks.

The only victim in court yesterday leaned forward in her seat while her father rubbed her back and the judge announced each verdict.


The aftershocks


Deputy District Attorney Patrick Espinoza prosecuted the case.
The case may be ending, but the attacks left a mark on Mission Beach and USD, a 10-minute drive from the coast.

San Diego police held a series of town hall meetings and beefed up patrols in Mission Beach after the attacks. They now monitor five security cameras along the boardwalk.

Police crime rates show people are much more likely to be victimized in Mission Beach than they are in San Diego's other beach communities. Even so, San Diego's beaches attract 22 million visitors a year, and the neighborhoods that touch sand are relatively safe when compared to most inland communities.

Incidents in Mission Beach account for 1 percent of San Diego's crime. Mission Beach is home to 5,400 people – or less than a half-percent of the city's 1.3 million residents, according to police.

With a seaside wooden roller coaster and kitschy shops and bars, Mission Beach attracts a range of people looking to unwind, have fun and live near the beach.

A new beachfront condo complex, for example, is selling its last unit for $3.4 million. The complex is next to the building where the students were attacked.

Some locals, including Andreas Heyde, 36, see Mission Beach as paradise. But others hold a different view.

“It's somewhat of a dangerous area,” said USD senior Kyle Canepa, 22, who lives in the four-unit complex where the attacks occurred.

On campus, the case still terrifies students such as Amanda Fernandez.

“It freaked me out, and every time I go to the beach, it comes to mind,” said Fernandez, a 20-year-old sophomore.

Although Fernandez reports being “100 times more vigilant,” she admitted that last year, she and a friend let their guard down when they walked back to a Mission Beach home to retrieve her cell phone after a party. It was 3 a.m. The door was unlocked and everyone inside was sleeping.

Fernandez said students who are 21 and older, and those with fake IDs, tend to hang out in Pacific Beach. Everyone else “flocks to Mission Beach. There, or TJ (Tijuana),” she said.

School officials held a meeting for students after the attacks.

“You don't want to scare them,” USD spokeswoman Pamela Gray Payton said. “But you do want to make them aware that there are bad people in the world.”

Boardwalk robbery

Thirty minutes before the students were raped and robbed, the defendants and as many as seven other men met near Belmont Park and robbed three young men on the adjacent boardwalk, according to court testimony.
At least two of the robbers were armed with pellet guns.

The testimony described what happened next.

Watkins, Smith and Washington split from the group. They soon came upon the condo on San Fernando Place, which borders the south side of Belmont Park.

When the defendants peered through a window, they saw a man and a woman seated on a couch. The other two students were in an upstairs bedroom.

One of the three men turned the door handle. It was unlocked.

The woman on the sofa, a freshman at the time, testified she was watching a movie, “The Breakfast Club,” and chatting on her cell phone when the front door burst open. Two strangers walked in and started shouting.

“Both of them had guns in their hand,” the woman testified.

Police didn't recover any weapons.

The intruders ordered her and the man beside her, a USD sophomore, to lay face-down on the kitchen floor.

“They kept asking us where the money was,” the woman testified. “I kept telling them that I just had my phone.”

A third man entered the condo and everyone soon moved upstairs. The women were repeatedly raped and forced to commit other sex acts. One of the women was sodomized and one of the male victims was forced to have sex with one of the women.

“I just kept asking them to stop,” one of the women testified.

The other female victim said she told the intruders to take her car. She also gave them directions to an ATM, along with her debit card and the pin number.

“I just wanted them to leave,” she testified.

Eventually the men did leave, taking cash, credit cards, cell phones, a 37-inch television, an XBox 360 console, video games and DVDs, authorities said. Two of the intruders left with the women, forcing them to walk about a half-block.

The men ran away when they saw police, who were in the area investigating the earlier robbery on the boardwalk.

Smith and Washington met up with two juveniles in a nearby car. Within seconds, they were gone.

While in the car, a 17-year-old identified as Smith's roommate, used one of the victim's cell phones to call his brother. San Diego police traced the call, tracked down the juveniles and arrested them.

The juveniles testified they met up with the defendants again at a home in City Heights the night after the attacks. Watkins, the juveniles said, bragged about the rapes and told everyone to keep quiet. Watkins and Washington are from City Heights. Smith lived in Point Loma.

Defense attorneys argued in court that the juveniles could not be trusted because they struck a deal with prosecutors in exchange for their testimony.

Originally, the teens faced a string of robbery charges and a maximum sentence of 25 years in prison in connection with the boardwalk robbery. But prosecutors agreed to try them in Juvenile Court on lesser charges, and both received probation.

Smith and Washington admitted to police that they raped and robbed the students, authorities said. Watkins admitted only to stealing a television.

Espinoza argued that DNA evidence linked all three men to the rapes. The female victims were examined by specially trained nurses who collected traces of bodily fluids on cotton-tipped swabs.

In laboratory tests, Watkins, Smith and Washington could not be excluded from many of the swabs taken from the victims, prosecutors said.

In court, defense attorneys argued that many of the DNA tests were inconclusive.

They also said the victims were never able to positively identify their attackers, who wore hoodies and bandanas to cover their faces.

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