NEW BOSTON, Texas: A Bowie County jury found a 21-year-old man guilty of two counts of aggravated sexual assault with a deadly weapon Wednesday after less than an hour of deliberations.
The victim testified that she did not know LaDavion White before she looked up and saw him pointing a gun at her head in the living room of her Wake Village, Texas, home at about 3 a.m. Aug. 16, 2017. The woman’s young daughter was spending the night with a family friend and the victim was alone watching television.
“He told me to stop screaming or he’d make my girl an orphan,” the victim testified.
The woman told the jury that when he first approached her, White was wearing a red bandana over his face and a pair of gloves. The woman said White ordered her to her bedroom and forced her to lie on the bed and “talk,” as if they were on a date. White sexually assaulted the woman and then forced her to “cuddle” with him in the living room while he watched a movie on Netflix.
White sexually assaulted the woman again in her living room. She said that before he left her house at about 5 a.m., he asked her to write down her phone number so he could call her.
Jonathan Matlock testified that he was working as a patrolman for Nash, Texas, Police Department when he received a call to respond to the woman’s home a few days before the sexual assault home invasion Aug. 16, 2017. Matlock said he and Officer Jordan Looney found that a window had been broken, that window screens had been removed and that a side door of the house showed “pry marks” as if someone had tried to break in.
Matlock said he discovered a note stuck in the side door as well. The note addressed to, “Dear beautiful,” expressed interest in the woman and asked her to respond by leaving her phone number on the note for him. The victim testified that she and her daughter spent that night at her mother’s home and returned after the window was repaired.
The woman and her daughter had moved into the house on Arizona Drive on Aug. 1. White lived just a few doors down.
Wake Village Detective Todd Aultman said the woman did not know her attacker’s identity but that White was quickly identified as a suspect because of his involvement in a series of auto and residential burglaries around the same time. White served time in prison for burglary beginning in November 2017 and was released in May 2018.
White was arrested for sexually assaulting the woman after DNA results from the victim’s sexual assault examination were returned in August 2018.
White claimed the woman invited him over and encouraged a sexual encounter, under direct examination by Texarkana attorney Derric McFarland. White said he’d met the woman through a cousin days before the assault.
Under cross examination by First Assistant District Attorney Kelley Crisp, White denied he wrote the note officers discovered a few days before. Crisp showed the jury a sample of White’s handwriting on paperwork next to a copy of the note.
White also denied ever having a gun. Crisp asked White what he did with guns stolen during one of the vehicle break-ins he pleaded guilty to committing in 2017.
Crisp and Assistant District Attorney Lauren Richards described White as “every woman’s worst nightmare” during closing remarks.
The jury was told by 202nd District Judge John Tidwell to return to court Thursday morning for the punishment phase of White’s trial. He faces five to 99 years or life in prison on each of the two counts of aggravated sexual assault with a deadly weapon.
