Man guilty in assault on Virginia Beach teens

VIRGINIA BEACH

The two sisters bought slushes at Sonic that May afternoon in 2009, picked up some doughnut sticks at a nearby 7-Eleven and headed for home.

The teens had made the jaunt many times for the half-priced frozen drinks just after school. But this day turned out differently.

The girls crossed paths with a 17-year-old gunman on a bicycle. Except for their treats, the sisters carried only their mother's cell phone and some change in their pockets. He took it, they testified during the three-day trial of Malcolm Omarr Richards Jr. in Circuit Court this week. He ordered the girls off the road, they said, and sexually assaulted them.

On Wednesday, A judge found Richards guilty of two counts each of abduction and robbery, three counts of forcible sodomy and seven counts of use of a firearm.

Richards, now 19, already is serving a four-year sentence for an armed robbery days after the attack on the girls in the eastern part of Virginia Beach.

He faces up to seven life terms plus 35 years on the new convictions.

The Virginian-Pilot generally doesn't identify victims of sex crimes, and is withholding other identifying details.

Richards had been standing over a bicycle when the girls first saw him, the older sister testified this week.

They were minutes from home. He got on his bike and passed them, headed the other way.

The older girl said she thought nothing of it. But then he came back. She heard the bike fall to the ground, she said. He put a gun to her younger sister's neck and told her to walk.

They stopped in an area between fences, the older girl said, and she stepped up to do what the gunman demanded, to spare her sister.

"I'm the oldest. I didn't want my younger sister doing stuff like that," she testified. Still, both were sexually assaulted before the ordeal was over.

DNA evidence later linked Richards to the crime, said prosecutor Lyla M. Zeidan.

Richards' attorney, Robert Neeley, said the girls had given conflicting accounts of the encounter and there was no evidence to prove the assaults had taken place. The sisters accused another young man they saw days after the attack, Neeley said, but surveillance tape proved he was elsewhere at the time.

Richards did not deny meeting with the girls that day but said what happened was consensual - and initiated by one of the girls. He said he was a drug dealer and had offered marijuana in exchange for the sex acts.

"I was talking to one. I was going to leave the other one for my friend," Richards testified. "I'm flirting with her. I finally asked her how she felt about me."

Judge Stephen C. Mahan convicted him on all 14 charges he faced. Sentencing is Aug. 2.

Kristin Davis, (757) 222-5131, kristin.davis@pilotonline.com