Ex-postal worker on trial in string of Chicago rapes

The young woman nervously shook her hands, breathed erratically and fanned herself as she recounted Tuesday for a Cook County jury how she was abducted and raped five years ago on the South Side.

The woman, then 16, was standing at a bus stop on 75th Street on her way to a shopping mall in the middle of the afternoon when a man suddenly grabbed her by the arm as he brandished a screwdriver, she said.

"He said, 'Get in the car or I will kill you,'" testified the woman, stopping to dab sweat from her neck with a cloth.

As he drove through an alley, she pleaded with him to let her go. He promised he wasn't going to rape her, saying, "I'm better than that," the woman recalled. But he soon stopped the car and sexually assaulted her, she said.

Tommie Naylor, 43, a former postal worker accused in the rape, gazed at her from across Judge Stanley Sacks' courtroom in the Criminal Courts Building.

Naylor is on trial for a separate South Side attack of a 15-year-old girl in 2008. He is charged in five rapes of teenage girls. Three of the alleged victims testified Tuesday under an Illinois statute allowing evidence that demonstrates a defendant has a "propensity to commit sex offenses."

Naylor was arrested in 2009 at the south suburban mail-sorting facility where he worked. Detectives had matched his vehicle to a partial license plate number from one alleged victim. DNA matched him to each of the five sexual assaults, prosecutors said.