Drinks, friends and cellphones — a woman reconstructs the night she says she was raped

She said she met friends and had drinks.

That was the last thing the woman at the center of the Anthony Holmes case told the jury on Tuesday she remembered until she said she was raped.

Holmes, 26, of Harrisburg, faces felony counts of rape and sexual assault stemming from the July 11, 2015 incident. The woman who made the allegations walked jurors through her recollections on day two of the trial.

The first day of the trial concluded Monday with testimony by friends of the woman and lengthy testimony and cross examination of the State College Police Department’s investigation into the alleged incident. The investigation would eventually lead to charges against Holmes.

Cross-examination by Holmes’s attorney, Bryan Walk, into the investigation headed by Detective John Aston continued Tuesday, as Walk probed into several phone calls made between the woman and Holmes that night. Previous testimony had shown that the woman was unable to find her cell phone after the incident at about 4 a.m., and had received calls from Holmes at that time in an attempt to find the phone.

Walk pointed out that Holmes had also called the woman at about 2 a.m., though the woman said she could not recall receiving those calls. A friend of the woman’s testified Monday to trying to contact her at around that time, but she had reported she was at the Lion’s Den or an apartment near the club.

After the alleged incident, according to the woman, she and Holmes had driven around State College for an indeterminate amount of time before he dropped her off near her friend’s apartment. She then ran to the apartment, scaled an outside wall to the balcony — saying because she knew the balcony door would be unlocked — and told her friend, who had called 911.

Jurors were also played a recorded phone call between the woman and Holmes in which she attempted to ask him about that night. Holmes was heard denying he had been in State College that night, and also denied knowing who the woman was.

On cross-examination, the woman couldn’t state why her phone had called Holmes’s phone at 2 a.m., saying later that she could not remember anything happening between about 12:30 a.m. and 4 a.m. She could also not explain how or why her phone had been turned off prior to 4 a.m., or when the phone had been turned on again.

The trial was expected to conclude late Tuesday.

This story was originally published January 30, 2018 at 1:24 PM with the headline "Drinks, friends and cellphones — a woman reconstructs the night she says she was raped."