Jury finds CC woman guilty of sexual abuse

By Chris Baldus  |  cbaldus@charlescitypress.com

UPDATE at 4:45 p.m.: A Floyd County jury delivered a guilty verdict on one count of third-degree sexual abuse against Brittany Rae Beek, 27, of Charles City. Jurors found her not guilty on a second count.

A sentencing date has not been set.

The guilty verdict handed down was in regard to the accusation that Beek performed a sex act on a 15-year-old girl who had run away from a Waverly treatment shelter with a 16-year-old acquaintance of Beek’s on May 10. Beek brought the two from Cedar Falls to her home after her acquaintance contacted her via Facebook.

That night the trio watched the sexually charged movie “50 Shades of Grey” and Beek then performed sex acts on both the girls, according to their accusations.

The decision indicates that the jury believes Beek committed the acts on the 15-year-old, which was a statutory crime because of their ages.

The other count related to the 16-year-old required the jurors to believe that Beek committed the acts on her acquaintance against that girl’s will or by force.

The maximum penalty for a class C felony is up to 10 years in prison and a fine of up to $10,000.

Judge Colleen Wieland presided over the trial.

Previous story: The fate of a Charles City woman accused of sexually abusing two teenage runaways is in the hands of a Floyd County District Court jury of seven women and five men.

The case against Brittany Rae Beek, 27, was turned over to the jury at about 12:30 p.m. today. Beek is charged with two counts of third-degree sexual abuse, class C felonies.

The closing arguments for both sides were similar in that both attacked the credibility of the trio involved.

Public Defender Nellie O’Mara told the jury that the girls changed their stories from the day they were returned to custody to the day they took the stand in the trial, only Beek told the same story repeatedly.

Ginbey said Beek had changed her story from the day she was first interviewed by Charles City Police to when she took the stand in her defense on Thursday. The girls told consistent stories that corroborated each other despite having no time together to concoct a story after being taken back into custody.

Regarding DNA evidence linking Beek to a lesion on one of the girls’ abdomen, O’Mara said that the girl left Beeks house May 11 wearing one of her shirts. A button from the shirt could have caused the injury and transferred Beek’s DNA when the girl physically fought with an ex-boyfriend as he tried to turn the girls over to police.

Ginbey asked the jurors to take their common sense with them, called the lesion a hickie and said the button theory was nonsensical.

Beek was the last witness to take the stand before closing arguments. She denied doing anything sexual with either of the girls that she retrieved from Cedar Falls. One of the girls who had known Beek for about a year had contacted the Charles City resident asking for a ride and to be able to stay with her.

Beek and O’Mara, went through a Google Chrome record of how and when her Android cellphone had been used the night of the alleged incident in May. They detailed that the girls used the phone throughout the night accessing Facebook and YouTube at time before, during and after the time of the alleged incident. O’Mara had Beek read from the record more than a dozen specific times and tell what the phone was being used for, including whose Facebook pages were accessed.

In her cross examination, Ginbey referred to roughly half-hour gaps in the records. Beek answered, “Possibly, I hadn’t looked at it that closely.”

On the phone topic, Beek testified that she messaged the mother of one girl right away when the girl contacted her, but she didn’t hear back from her until the next day. The girls had her phone from the point after Beek picked them up until the next morning, so they might have responded to the mother.

The mother had testified that Beek had contacted her by message more than once.

Beek testified that she did not know the girls were runaways fro, a youth shelter in Waverly until after they had left her home.
Ginbey noted in a question to Beek that she said in the interview with Charles City Police that the jury watched earlier in the trial that she said she planned to bring the girls back to Cedar Falls because they were runaways.

-20160826-