A Silver Spring high school student has been charged with raping a woman who later died as she headed to receive a sexual assault exam.
Marquiz Turner, 16, raped his ex-girlfriend outside the Montgomery County Circuit Court building on Friday after she refused his advances, police said about the alleged attack caught on courthouse surveillance cameras.
Turner and the woman, 19, saw a movie together at the Regal theater on East Montgomery Avenue in Rockville, according to court documents. After they left the film about 11:30 p.m. Friday, Turner pushed the woman into a rough concrete wall of the courthouse, police said. Ignoring that the woman said no, Turner raped her, she told police.
A courthouse security guard saw on a video monitor a struggle between a male and female and asked sheriff's deputies to intervene. Police approached the two young people and Turner, who was pulling up his pants, told police he thought was being detained for indecency, court papers say.
Turner and the woman were interviewed by police, and then the woman was driven to Shady Grove Adventist Hospital for a forensic exam. On the way to the hospital, the woman stopped breathing. She was pronounced dead about 1 a.m. Saturday. Her cause of death is still unknown.
Before the woman died, she told police she and Turner had dated for about a month, but she broke up with him because he frequently pressured her to have sex, police said.
Court documents say Turner told police he sent text messages and Facebook messages to the woman saying he expected to have sex with her when they met, and that he believed she had agreed. When the woman refused his advances, he told police he was "angry" and that he felt she owed him a sexual encounter. Turner admitted to police that he "forced" the woman into sex.
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Turner, a sophomore at Winston Churchill High School in Potomac, Maryland, has been charged as an adult with second-degree rape. He has no criminal record. Turner has not been charged in connection to the woman's death.
"We're leaving all options open," Montgomery County State's Attorney's Office spokesman Ramón V. Korionoff said about possible murder charges. "We need to see what the medical examiner says and if there were any pre-existing medical conditions."
Jean Arthur, an advocate for victims of sexual assault and rape, commented on the arrest.
"This was not about sex," she said. "This was about dominating this woman and telling her, 'You cannot say no to me.'"
