Local News - February 2003

Denver man found guilty in rape trial 

Judge sentences Gray to lengthy prison term

By JEREMY ASHTON, LTN Staff Writer

February 3, 2003 - Kevin Dale Gray didn’t have to wait long Friday to learn how he’ll be spending the next few years of his life.

After hearing more than a week of testimony, a jury needed just 50 minutes to find Gray, 31, guilty of second-degree kidnapping and second-degree rape in the sexual assault of a then 25-year-old woman in her home off Buffalo Shoals Road. Gray was acquitted of two other charges, second-degree sex offense and first-degree burglary.

Superior Court Judge Timothy S. Kincaid sentenced Gray to 11 to 14 years in prison for the rape charge and an additional four to five and a half years for the kidnapping.

For the victim, who had details of her private life openly discussed in court, the verdict brought an end to an 18-month ordeal.

“I am relieved that he is off the street and that no other woman will go through what I went through at the hands of Kevin Gray,” she said.

Before the trial, Gray turned down a plea bargain offered by the district attorney’s office that would have carried a longer sentence than the one he received. District Attorney Bill Young was satisfied, however, with Gray’s punishment.

“On serious cases such as these where violence is involved, I am not going to make a plea offer unless the person would get substantial time,” Young said. “Even in this case, the defendant received a substantial number of years.”

Defense attorney Theodore Cummings said Friday he had yet to confer with Gray about appealing the verdict. He did indicate that he had little reason to dispute the jury’s decision.

“Given the evidence that they had to deal with, I think the jury did a commendable job,” he said.

According to testimony, Gray went to the woman’s house on the night of July 28, 2001, and knocked on the front door. After looking through the peephole to see an unfamiliar man standing on her porch, the woman cracked the door open and answered a question he had. Gray then forced his way into the house and raped her.

At the time of the attack, the woman thought she would be part of a large group of rape victims who don’t survive.

“Nothing will ever supersede the fact that I’m a survivor, that I made it out of that situation alive,” she said.

The woman testified she had never seen Gray before that day but noted that he looked a lot like her neighbor, Derek Gray, the defendant’s brother.

Early in the trial, the 10 women and two men who sat in the jury box were shown a video filmed by Lt. Dean Abernathy at Gaston Memorial Hospital in the hours after the attack, chronicling the injuries the victim suffered.

The jurors also heard experts from the SBI lab in Raleigh testify that intact sperm found on the victim’s body likely came from Gray. Without that evidence, Young said, Gray likely would not have taken the witness stand.

Gray gave a very different version of events during his testimony, claiming he and the victim had met on a couple of previous occasions in his brother’s neighborhood. He said what happened on the night of the incident was consensual sexual intercourse and that the woman kicked him out of the house when he told her he had a girlfriend.

Two people, Charles Earnhardt and Mark Finley, testified that they had seen Gray talking to the victim before. Both are friends with the defendant and his brother and worked for Gray’s mother, Wilma Jean Matti, at some point.

The victim said she hopes that by going through the experience of the trial she encouraged someone else to speak out.

“Rape is not a crime of the victim; it’s a crime of the perpetrator,” she said. “It’s never the victim’s fault.”

© 2001 Lincoln Times-News  

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