A Howard County judge ordered a man charged with sodomizing a woman while both were patients at a hospital to take a competency exam, after he struggled to answer basic questions.
“You?re perspiring. You?re answering the court slowly ? do you feel all right?” Howard County Circuit Judge Lenore Gelfman asked Jerel Antonio McRae, 27, during a scheduling conference Wednesday.
McRae was indicted in February on three counts of second-degree sex offense and sodomy.
“Because of the defendant?s sluggish appearance and the nature of the charges, I?m ordering two things: a physical evaluation of Mr. McRae and a competency exam,” Gelfman said.
In January, police arrested McRae, of Turnabout Lane in Columbia, after a woman told police he assaulted her in the shower room adjoining the patients? rooms.
The woman is listed as a “vulnerable adult” and remains in the care of the Baltimore County Department of Social Services, police said.
McRae told police he had sex with the woman, whom he described as “a little off” but denied using force, charging documents say. He said he had talked to her a couple of times and knew she was heavily medicated, “because she would look and act like a zombie,” documents say.
McRae is being held at the county detention center on $100,000 bond. He is due in court again in July.
