A former Marine abducted, raped and tried to strangle a 23-year-old woman with her own scarf before leaving her for dead in a wooded area in February, the woman testified in court Tuesday.
She described the assault at the Arlington County Circuit Court trial of Jorge “George” Torrez, who is on trial for that attack and a separate robbery and attempted abduction that occurred in February in Ballston. Torrez is also implicated through DNA in the 2005 killings of two young girls near Chicago, but has not been charged in that case.
When the woman and a friend were returning to Arlington from a night out in D.C., they encountered Torrez in the driveway in the early morning of Feb. 27, both women testified Tuesday.
They said he forced them into the house at gunpoint and used cords from a vacuum cleaner and iron to tie them up.
One of the women testified that he dragged her into his vehicle and drove to a wooded area in Prince William County. The woman, a 23-year-old graduate student, testified that he forced her to perform sex acts and raped her.
When Torrez climbed into the back seat of the vehicle, he told her, “You know what’s going to happen now,” she testified. She told him that she didn’t, and Torrez said, “I am going to rape you,” the woman testified.
The woman — who described the assault in a mostly clear voice — briefly choked up when describing how Torrez unwrapped the scarf she was wearing and tried to strangle her, tightening the scarf around her neck. She lost consciousness, woke up in the snow and had to drag herself to the roadway to get help.
“I was soaking wet,” the woman said. “I couldn’t use my legs at all.”
Testimony from a Potomac Hospital forensic nurse and photographs shown in court depicted the woman’s raw, torn feet, swollen face, bloody mouth and nose and bloodshot eyes.
The victim in the robbery, a 26-year-old emergency room nurse, testified that Torrez tried to lead her into his vehicle as she was walking from the Virginia Square-GMU Metro station shortly after midnight on Feb. 10. The woman was able to toss him her purse and run, she testified.
