Jury Views Video of Child's Forensic Interview in Grape Creek Sex Abuse Case

A preteen girl with short, brown hair sat on a couch and toyed with a stuffed bunny she called CJ. Clad in jeans and a school spirit T-shirt, the 10-year-old told the woman to her left that she knew why she had been brought to San Angelo’s Hope House.

“’Cause this guy named Tucker [McCrea] was touching me in places he shouldn’t be,” her voice carried over the speakers in Judge Barbara Walther’s small courtroom Tuesday. Meanwhile, the panel of jurors watched the girl’s forensic interview projected on an opposing wall. “One time, he (McCrea) stayed the night…He told me I could either take a shower or go to bed…” the girl continued, noting that her dad’s “roommate” had given her the option of watching a movie. “I watched a movie, then I took a shower, and then the guy, Tucker, came in and started touching me after I went into the shower.”

At the time, the girl was either 6 or 7 years old. Her mother, who was away at prison when the alleged abuse occurred, estimates that the incident took place in the summer of ’09, a few short months before her daughter’s seventh birthday.

As jurors watched the video, their brows furrowed, and a few spared a glance in the defendant’s direction. McCrea, 33 and clad in a white striped shirt and synthetic brown vest on Tuesday, attentively watched the screen as the video was played into the evidence against him. It was the second day of the trial for McCrea, who has been charged with the continual sexual abuse of his close friend’s daughter between June 1, 2008 and June 1, 2010.

McCrea, a current San Angelo resident, had been living primarily at a double-wide in Grape Creek, owned and occupied by the little girl’s father, the victim (born in 2002), her brother (born in 2004), and the father’s female “roommate”. McCrea had met the girl’s father in 2007 at a convenience store and quickly became a regular at the house, eventually taking up residence on one of the home’s two couches.

“He (McCrea) was living there,” the girl’s mother testified. “His clothes were there; he slept there; he ate there; he brushed his teeth there.”

While varying accounts were given as to the frequency with which McCrea stayed at the trailer, all conceded that he had spent increasingly considerable time at the residence between meeting the father sometime in 2007 and the mother’s release from prison in 2009. After her release that August, the children’s mother moved in as well and kindled a romantic relationship with McCrea that lasted roughly one year.

According to her testimony, the mom began noticing some “red flags” in her child’s behavior sometime after the breakup in June 2010, but had never suspected that McCrea had anything to do with it until her daughter made an outcry on Sept. 25, 2013.

“He was like a big kid,” the mother described McCrea’s relationship with her children. “They would horse around, play together, have a good time. He would play with them in the swimming pool. Tucker—the more alcohol you have in you, the more water sounds like a good idea.”

And alcohol was always present in excess when Tucker McCrea was around, witnesses said.

“Did he ever leave [the trailer]?” 51^st Assistant District Attorney John Best asked.

“To get beer,” the victim’s mother responded. She said he “drank every day until he couldn’t stand up,” and he would go on a binge “as soon as he woke up until he passed out.”

“I’ve seen him put away two 18-packs a night,” the girl’s father confirmed when he was called to the witness stand.

The mix of alcohol and pool time seemed to consume McCrea’s daily schedule, according to witness testimonies. After one such round in the pool, the victim told Hope House forensic interviewer Melody Jeter, McCrea approached her in the shower.

“He was just touching me everywhere he wasn’t supposed to be touching me, and it made me feel bad,” she said on the video. “[He touched] all of my private places, all my girl parts. I don’t really like to talk about it. I think I was 6 years old.”

As the jury watched the video, recorded two days after the little girl’s outcry, the victim said she had been scared because McCrea had told her to keep the abuse a secret or something bad would happen. She also named several different instances when the defendant allegedly touched her, either in the shower or elsewhere in her father’s trailer home when her dad was asleep or at work.

On one occasion, the victim said, McCrea had asked her to touch him on “his bad spot,” but she quickly ran away and locked herself in her bedroom.

“I didn’t feel comfortable touching him,” she said. “I didn’t want to touch him, and I really didn’t want him touching me, so I just ran away and locked it (the door). Now that I told someone, I really do feel safe now.”

Within roughly three months of her release from prison, the victim’s mother, McCrea, the two children and their father’s “roommate” moved into a house together on Glass Road.

The stay was short lived and lasted only until about June 2010, when the couple had an explosive fight that ended their relationship. Afterward, the mother, children and roomie moved back into the double wide, and the mother took steps to avoid her ex when he came over to visit with the children’s father. Around that time, the roommate stated she noted a change in the girl.

“[Her] behavior—she used to really like the guy (McCrea) and then suddenly stopped,” the woman testified. “She didn’t even want to be around the guy.”

The child’s mother said she had never suspected McCrea would have done something to hurt her daughter, but when the family moved out and away from San Angelo, she did begin having suspicions that something was wrong.

“She was having some weird behavior,” the victim’s mother said. “I let her on my phone to a play a game…I went into her room to ask her a question and she hid the phone real quick…She finally tells me what she was doing: She was looking up rape videos on my phone.”

The child’s mom said she’d contacted a doctor and the school, who had shrugged it off as likely something a kid had heard at home and begun talking about at school. She also told the girl’s father and other family members, but nothing ever came of it. Around that same time, the mother testified, she found a journal her daughter had been keeping in her room that contained an entry with alarming sexual references.

The girl’s father as well found a journal in the girl’s Grape Creek bedroom with a sexual entry, he said. The girl’s father did not state when he discovered the journal entry, but it wasn’t until September 2013 that the child finally made an outcry.

Much of the defense at Tuesday’s trial centered on defining timelines, an element the state has to prove. Having kept the abuse a secret for four to six years, the child was unable to place an exact date on which any specific instance of abuse occurred. She knew that it was in the summer the first time because they weren’t in school and had been swimming; she supposed the last time was a day or two before her mother and McCrea had the huge fight that ended their relationship.

Dates and approximations for when and how long McCrea lived at the Grape Creek double-wide varied by the witness, but there was consistency in that each reported the frequency of his overnight stays had increased as time went on. Despite state’s prosecutor John Best drawing up a timeline for the jury, the witnesses were somewhat foggy on the dates of some of the events; however, their responses were close in range and within the time frame set out in the indictment.

Defense counsel Jimmy Stewart also pressed the mother on the inconsistencies in the testimony she’d given outside of the presence of the jury the day before, pointing out that she hadn’t been able to definitively answer when she’d first heard about the shower incident and highlighting the fact that she’d given conflicting testimony.

Stewart also honed in on the mother’s living arrangements from 2010 forward, asking about who had dwelled in the handful of different residences she and her children occupied, whether there were men in the house, and if she’d had any overnight male guests.

He verified that from Sept. 25 to April 11, 2014, the mother had heard nothing more of the abuse, until a new story surfaced on that latter date that was not explored on Tuesday.

At just before 5 p.m. Tuesday the court heard testimony from Sergeant Investigator Martha Ibarra from the Tom Green County Sheriff’s Office on Tuesday, who had investigated the case and composed the initial reports. The trial is set to resume on Wednesday morning at.