To make her 6 a.m. shift at Dunkin’ Donuts, the young immigrant from Nepal made sure to be waiting for the 5:35 bus the morning of Oct. 6, 2017, taking a seat next to a man she didn’t know in Gaithersburg.
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What suddenly happened to her — grabbed and pushed down a hill into the dark woods, cocaine shoved in her face, and then raped before being left naked and unconscious — is something she lives with every moment.
“Before the crime, I was a very strong and independent person. This incident changed my whole life,” she wrote recently.
It also led to a four-year investigation and prosecution, concluding this week with an hour-long hearing in Montgomery County Circuit Court when the assailant, David Lee Williams, 31, was sentenced to 45 years in prison. During the rape, court records show, Williams choked, bit and beat the woman, leaving her with 27 wounds.
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“This could have happened to any woman sitting at the bus stop that day,” prosecutor Adrienne Ferrell said in court Wednesday.
Calling the crime “vicious and heinous,” Judge Steven G. Salant noted that there seemed to be no explanation for it: “There’s no suggestion that there was a mental health problem or an impairment of judgment [or] that someone was under the influence of a mind-altering substance or some delusional-producing substance. This was an act that was carried out deliberately.”
When the victim awoke in the woods, she tried to stand but fell back down, prosecutors said. She could find only her socks and underwear. She made her way home and called the police. Doctors kept her in the hospital for seven days, which were followed by eight months of physical therapy.
The hearing this week, which followed Williams’s guilty plea earlier this month, touched on both his and the victim’s lives before and after the rape.
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The woman and her husband immigrated to the United States in 2016 “in the search for the American Dream,” Ferrell said, having “actually won a lottery come here from Nepal.”
She enrolled in college to continue her education. She got the early-morning job at Dunkin’ Donuts.
“As soon as she got here, she did everything right,” Ferrell said. “She did all of this to build a better life for her and her family.”
Earlier: Detectives arrest Williams by working backward from burglary case
Williams was born in Washington, D.C., where he lived before moving to Kensington, Md., and attending Bethesda-Chevy Chase High School, where he played soccer and basketball and ran track, according to his attorney, Steve Mercer.
“He was an outgoing, well-liked, normal person who was respectful of women and had a girlfriend and who was a popular young man,” Mercer said in court.
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Williams went off to college in Florida, returning to the area to help take care of his father after he’d suffered a stroke, Mercer said. He married in 2014, the attorney said, to a woman who still supports him, and they have two young daughters. Other family members remain close to him as well.
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“Of course they see the side of David that is beyond this case itself,” Mercer said. “They know that David is more than this case, and which is why it’s so hard to reconcile who they know of David with this case. And so it’s a struggle, your honor. It really is. But they love him. They support him.”
On the morning Williams and the woman came together at the bus stop, he said hello, and she said hello back and returned to her own business.
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“The defendant, out of nowhere, attacked her,” Ferrell said. “He grabbed her. He threw her down the hill so she wasn’t visible to the street anymore, and he threatened to kill her.”
Williams attacked and raped her and fled. She woke up and realized she hadn’t just had a nightmare.
As she recovered physically, she indicated in her statement, one awful reality of the incident only grew: Because the attacker took her bag and belongings, she was terrified he’d find her and attack again.
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Detectives arrested Williams in 2019, after connecting his DNA found at an unsolved attempted burglary scene to what was collected in the rape case. Investigators were also deeply affected by what happened to the woman, as were paramedics and nurses who treated her the day she was raped.
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“Those people did not have to look at their notes to remember this case,” Ferrell said. “They were able to remember every detail of their interactions with the [victim] and what she looked like on that day, because this case was just that bad and it was just that brutal.”
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