For one Berklee music scholar, a summer season night time out in 2019 was presupposed to be for taking within the season finale of The Bachelorette — however it ended with the lady waking in a Lyft removed from residence after the solar had risen and feeling she had been raped.
The driver of that Lyft, Joseph Piard, 26, of Mattapan, appeared in Suffolk Superior Court Thursday for the primary day of his trial. Piard faces two counts of rape and one rely of indecent assault and battery on an individual over 14.
Prosecutor Erin Murphy laid out a case that Piard took benefit of a younger lady who was so drunk that she handed out within the backseat of Piard’s compact Mitsubishi sedan on her experience residence. Piard then drove her removed from her Back Bay condominium to the world round his own residence in Mattapan the place, Murphy mentioned, he raped her in two manners and likewise grabbed onto her breast.
As the alleged sufferer recalled on the stand — although she mentioned that a lot of the night time was “super fuzzy because I was so drunk” — by the point she woke from the experience between two addresses in Back Bay that “should just be a minute,” the solar had risen and “it was morning.”
She mentioned she felt “shocked, confused. I don’t know how to explain how it feels to wake up in a stranger’s car, drunk still.”
It is Herald coverage to not identify victims or alleged victims of sexual assaults.
Piard defined in an interview with Boston Police Detective Jesse Goff that he allowed the lady to stay handed out in his backseat for roughly 5 hours in a single day for her personal security. After he did not wake her as much as drop her off, he mentioned, he feared reporting her to the police as a result of she may get in hassle together with her faculty. So he sat together with her as she slept till she awakened.
“DNA testing told a different story,” Murphy mentioned. A vaginal swab from a rape equipment, she mentioned, matched DNA samples Piard voluntarily offered. “When confronted with that information, the defendant admitted he did it.”
Defense legal professional Robert Fox, in his opening argument, mentioned that he’ll present proof that the lady was not all that drunk, and that the lady began to the touch Piard and requested to hang around, through which the 2 started to make out after which had consensual intercourse. He additionally mentioned that Piard was underneath loads of strain to admit in his third interview with police.
The lady didn’t look towards Piard all the time she was in court docket, and her solely reference to him was “that guy over there” at one level. But her emotions had been overt when Fox questioned her over eager to make “some money off of this” in her civil fits towards Lyft and Piard.
“Well, I can’t kill him and it’s the closest thing I can do,” the alleged rape sufferer mentioned.
Source: www.bostonherald.com”