A 16-year-old Silver Spring boy has been charged in the alleged rape outside the circuit courthouse in Rockville of a 19-year-old woman who died shortly after being transported from the scene of the incident, according to Rockville police.
The incident, which occurred around 11:40 p.m. June 12, was captured on the court’s surveillance video, according to police.
Police wrote in charging documents that Marquiz Turner pulled the woman’s shorts down and forced himself onto her on the exterior wall of the courthouse near Maryland Avenue, directly below a surveillance camera. Turner is being charged as an adult in the case.
A security guard for the court saw the struggle on a video monitor as it happened and called police, who responded quickly and arrested Turner.
The woman stopped breathing while being transported to Shady Grove Adventist Hospital, according to the charging documents. Police wrote that although life-saving measures were attempted at the hospital, the woman was pronounced dead around 1 a.m. June 13. At this point, the cause of her death is not known.
Turner, of the 1100 block of University Boulevard, is currently charged with second-degree rape, according to police.
“We await the medical examiner’s full report and autopsy results,” Roman Korionoff, a spokesman for the Montgomery County State’s Attorney’s Office, said in an email Monday. “We will make further charging decisions once the investigation is complete. We want to keep all our options open in this case and being thorough and deliberate is essential to obtaining justice in this matter.”
Prior to the incident, Turner and the woman were walking together outside the courthouse after seeing a movie at Regal Cinemas in Rockville, police wrote in the charging documents.
Turner told police he felt “angry” that the woman declined to have sex with him after the movie and he forced himself onto her. Police wrote that the video shows the woman trying several times to push Turner away, but she was not successful.
Police wrote that Turner admitted to forcing himself onto the woman and that he wouldn’t take no for an answer during an interview with a detective.
Before she was transported the hospital, the woman told police she told Turner “no” before he forced himself onto her. She said that she had dated Turner for about a month, but stopped because he continued to try to pressure her into having sex with him. The two had exchanged text messages and Facebook messages for about a week prior to the incident, according to police.
The woman’s name has been withheld from the article because Bethesda Beat does not typically identify victims of alleged sexual abuse.
