He tricked her, then he trapped her.
He touched her and he told her not to tell.
That’s how Merrimack County attorney Wayne Coull said a former police officer and Pines Community Center janitor sexually assaulted a wheelchair-bound woman with special needs for more than a year.
The first of three trials for Robert Magoon, 74, of Tilton, who is accused of groping and sexually assaulting eight victims at the Northfield community center, began Tuesday in Merrimack County Superior Court. Magoon was indicted in September on 13 counts of aggravated felonious sexual assault and one count each of felonious sexual assault and simple assault. Prosecutors say he assaulted seven girls and a woman with special needs between August 2012 and May 2016 while working as a maintenance supervisor at the Pines Community Center in Northfield. Prior to working at the Pines, Magoon served as a police officer in Concord and Franklin.
This trial deals with whether Magoon assaulted a woman who “has a disability that renders her incapable of freely arriving at an independent choice as to whether or not to engage in sexual conduct,” between January 2013 and April 2014, according to indictments. Magoon allegedly performed sexual acts on the woman and tried to have her do the same.
The trial began with jurors touring the community center, a wood-clad building located just off Interstate 93’s Exit 19. Inside, jurors were asked by both sides to pay attention to a particular conference room located at the end of a hallway, where the assaults against the woman allegedly to have occurred. Jurors were asked to look at the windows facing outside and the window on the door, which did not have a shade, and that the door handle could only be locked from the outside.
These were factors defense attorney Hanna Kinne later asked jurors to consider during opening statements, arguing there was no way Magoon’s assaults would have gone unseen by others and that the woman could not have been locked in the room against her will. She argued Magoon, who suffered a heart attack several years ago, would have been unable to move the woman out of her wheelchair.
And then Kinne turned to the victim’s credibility: She said the woman’s cognitive disabilities, which are caused by a lack of connective brain tissue, often caused her to lie, perhaps because she could not grasp the significance of her actions. Kinne said the woman had also accused another disabled adult man of assaulting her in the local library’s bathroom, something her mother said could not have occurred because the woman was with her aide the entire time. She also said the woman’s accounts of how often and when the alleged assaults occurred varied.
The defense questioned why the victim’s mother, who testified on Tuesday, did not report an incident where a disabled man tried to kiss her daughter and persuade her to go into the local library’s bathroom. When the daughter told the mother about the incident, the mother and the victim’s aide agreed to change her schedule so she would not have to see the man at the library anymore.
However, when the daughter brought up another incident a few months later that included kissing and genital touching, the mother said she did not report it to the police. She explained she could not get enough information from her daughter about whether she was referring to the library incident or something else. She said she did not believe it was related to the library incident because both her daughter and the man have aides, who would have seen anything happening.
Coull said Magoon’s three separate alleged assaults began with a trick: Magoon would lure her into a room with promise of a treat, trap her there because she could not escape without her wheelchair, then assault her, followed by instructing her not to tell.
For the victim, whom Coull described as being “childlike,” this was an easy enough task.
“She’s a black-and-white person,” he said. Later, he added, “She likes Disney movies, and going out to dinner, watching the news and looking at the weather. She also has no interest in boys or sex.”
Coull said the woman, who was slated to testify later in the day but did not end up on the stand, might be hard to understand, because she has to breathe through her mouth due to a blocked nasal passage and her cerebral palsy. Her memory, too, can be hard to follow, and she would probably have to repeat herself multiple times, he said.
But Coull asked that the jury do one thing:
“Listen carefully,” he said.
The trial continues Wednesday at 10 a.m.
(Caitlin Andrews can be reached at 369-3309, candrews@cmonitor.com or on Twitter at @ActualCAndrews.)