A Cook County jury deliberated less than an hour today before convicting a former postal worker in the abduction and rape of a 16-year-old girl on Chicago’s South Side.
The five-man, seven-woman jury found Tommie Naylor, 43, guilty of aggravated criminal sexual assault, aggravated kidnapping and criminal sexual assault in the November 2008 attack after deliberating for just 45 minutes.
Naylor, seated at a defense table dressed in dark suit and tie, showed no emotion as the verdicts were read.
The three-day trial centered on testimony from the victim –- now 18 -- as well as testimony from two other girls that Naylor is charged with assaulting under similar circumstances. Naylor has been charged with kidnapping and raping a total of five girls between 2003 and 2008.
The other victims were allowed to testify under an Illinois statute allowing evidence that demonstrates a defendant has a "propensity to commit sex offenses."
One victim, who was 16 at the time she was raped in 2006, testified she 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 she later identified as Naylor suddenly grabbed her by the arm as he brandished a screwdriver.
"He said, 'Get in the car or I will kill you,' " she testified.
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.
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.
Naylor is due back in court on June 3. Four other sexual assault cases against him are still pending.
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