Sex assault cases weighing down police

A teenage runaway who told Colorado Springs police she was abducted and raped last October waited nine days before a detective was sent to interview her.

By then, her alleged assailant had already been locked up. On suspicion of murder.

Police say El Paso County sheriff's investigators tied Fort Carson Spc. Robert Hull Marko to the rape and killing of a Security woman whose throat was cut a week after the teen runaway says she was attacked.

That worst-case scenario demonstrates what can happen in a city with hundreds of rapes every year and a dozen detectives available to investigate them.

Last year, police tallied 338 rape complaints in Colorado Springs, a 30 percent spike from three years ago and the highest toll in at least a decade.

With 12 detectives and four nonsworn investigators who assist police, each detective in the sex crimes unit oversees an estimated 20 investigations at a time, police said, leading to tough decisions about how quickly new complaints are examined by detectives and how much attention they receive.

"Not every case that comes into my office gets assigned, and I have to make some of those decisions," Sgt. Hugh Velasquez said.

Rape victims in Colorado Springs wait an average of two weeks before detectives are available to speak with them, police said. Victims advocates say it can be much longer: between four and six weeks.

Police say those numbers don't account for the most urgent cases on which they respond immediately. Their average response time has improved, police said, since the unit grew last year from nine full-time detectives to its current level.

They devote the bulk of their resources to child victims, who police say are the least able to protect themselves against recurring attacks.

Children are also most likely to be at the center of complex probes involving family members where new custody arrangements may be needed.

Only two full-time detectives are assigned to adult sexual assaults, though police say they are adding a third by the end of the month to help stem the rising tide of rapes in Colorado Springs, bringing the unit to 13 detectives.

Police say they prioritize each new complaint according to urgency and what they call "solvability": How recently was the crime committed? Is the victim still in danger? Can he or she identify the attacker, or merely provide a description? Is there a chance the rapist will strike again? What is the likelihood of making an arrest? Will it hold up in court? Can physical evidence still be obtained? Could drugs or alcohol have shaped the victim's account?

The answers to those questions and others mean that some complaints are investigated immediately while others get sent to the bottom of the pile.

Meanwhile, the rate at which the detectives made sexual assault arrests last year dropped nearly 15 percentage points in the past two years. Velasquez said the unit was forced to raise its standards on when police pursue charges, focusing efforts on cases detectives believe will hold up in court.

In the Oct. 5 case of the teenage runaway, police say they didn't have enough information to lead them to Marko, who was linked to the attack only after he was suspected in the Oct. 10 rape and killing of 19-year-old Judilianna Lawrence in the foothills west of Colorado Springs.

Marko, a 21-year-old Iraq war veteran, is fighting the allegations in court.

The 14-year-old girl said in taped testimony last week that she had just escaped from a psychiatric in-patient program at Cedar Springs Hospital on Southgate Road and went to the Southgate shopping center to look for someone who could offer a place to stay.

Marko, who was working on a laptop outside Panera Bread, approached and offered to take her to Denver, she told police. When she declined, he grabbed her by the wrist and forced her into his Jeep, she said.

The girl testified that Marko drove her into the woods and raped her.

She said he returned her to the shopping center and released her with this chilling farewell: "Consider yourself lucky."

She immediately reported the ordeal to a security guard, and she was taken to Memorial Hospital to be examined by a sexual assault nurse and interviewed by a Colorado Springs police patrol officer. She described her attacker as a man named Robert who wore his brown hair in a buzz-cut, had three dog tags hanging from a chain on his neck and drove a yellow Jeep splattered with mud.

A sex crimes detective did not follow up on the girl's complaint until Oct. 14, while El Paso County sheriff's deputies were building their case against Marko in the rape and slaying of Lawrence, who suffered from a learning disability severe enough that she was unable to drive.

Velasquez defended his department's handling of the case.

He said nothing in the girl's account could have led to a suspect.

Finding a "Robert" who drove Jeep would be "daunting" in a county of 576,000 people, assuming the assailant lived in the area, he said.

Velasquez said the man's dog tags could have been jewelry and didn't necessarily mean he was in the military.

To determine if he was in the service, a detective would have had to check with all of the area's military installations as part of a probe that would take several days, Velasquez said.

"That's a pretty broad parameter to narrow down without further information," he said.

There was "no way" the unit could justify running down that information under the volume of other cases they were investigating, Velasquez said.

"It wasn't enough information at that time to bump it up past other crimes, such as sexual assaults against children in their home where a known perpetrator is there. We've got to work on those cases in which we've got to get them out of harm's way right away."

Velasquez said it was "not a reasonable expectation" to assume that detectives could have tracked down Marko even if they began immediately.

Yet the girl who said she was raped became upset after her first talk with an officer at Memorial because "she felt that police didn't believe her," the nurse who examined her testified last week.

That's a common reaction for women who don't fit the profile of "good victims" under the categories police use to prioritize their work load, said Andrea Wood, the director of advocacy at TESSA, a nonprofit that assists victims of rape and domestic violence.

With studies suggesting that 60 percent of rape victims don't report assaults, Wood fears that delaying investigations into difficult cases could have a chilling effect on women's decision to step forward.

"They feel judged," she said. "They still feel like there's an expectation of how they should act when they're a victim."