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Former Edinboro University of Pennsylvania Students to Face Trial

Posted on: Saturday, 1 October 2005, 00:00 CDT

By Tim Hahn, Erie Times-News, Pa.

Sep. 30--EDINBORO -- Three former Edinboro University of Pennsylvania students will stand trial on charges they beat and sexually assaulted another student last spring.

Marlon Gunn, 19, and Tyrell P. Ware, 20, both of Pittsburgh, and Urlene Boisette, 25, of Philadelphia, were bound over to trial Thursday on charges of aggravated assault, involuntary deviate sexual intercourse, sexual assault, criminal conspiracy and unlawful restraint.

Erie County Assistant District Attorney Raquel Taylor withdrew rape charges filed against the three prior to the start of their preliminary hearings before District Judge Denise Stuck-Lewis of Edinboro on Thursday afternoon.

Gunn, Ware and Boisette were initially charged in April with attacking a 19-year-old Edinboro University freshman, with whom they were friends, on the morning of April 20 inside a college dorm room.

The Erie Times-News does not release the names of sexual assault victims.

According to Edinboro police, the victim was beaten by Gunn and Ware and sexually assaulted with a dildo by Boisette over the mistaken belief that the victim had "snitched" to police about the two smoking marijuana.

The charges were dropped on June 1 when the victim failed to appear for the preliminary hearing before Stuck-Lewis, but they were refiled a month later.

Gunn, Ware and Boisette were released on $25,000 unsecured bond after their arraignments on July 6.

The victim, who lives in Bushkill, about 50 miles northeast of Allentown, offered the only testimony in the nearly two-hour preliminary hearing Thursday.

He said he was sleeping in the dorm room of a friend in Shafer Hall on the morning of April 20 when Gunn came into the room, called him a snitch and told him to stay there.

Gunn returned a short time later with Ware and Boisette, when Gunn and Ware called him a snitch again, the victim testified.

He said Gunn and Ware held him down and hit him on the back, on the side and in the face while Boisette urinated in a bucket. Boisette then dumped the urine on him, the victim testified.

He said Boisette also brought into the room a basket containing a dildo, finger condoms and a belt with a pair of handcuffs attached to it. He said the three took off his clothes while continuing to call him a snitch and then Boisette assaulted him while Gunn and Ware held him facedown on the bed.

The victim testified that Boisette stopped the attack, and told the others to do so, because the victim was bleeding.

Gunn and Ware told the victim "that's what you get for being a snitch," he testified.

The victim said he called university police to report the incident that night after talking to his parents.

Under cross-examination by Elliot Segel, an Erie lawyer representing Boisette, the victim said he went to Boisette's dorm room in Lawrence Towers and later took her to dinner and to a movie at Tinseltown in Summit Township before returning to campus and calling police because "she tried to comfort me."

He said he did not mention the attack to two female college students that he and Boisette had visited later that day, but Boisette had told them what had happened.

The victim also revealed under cross-examination that another university student had come into the Shafer Hall dorm room while the attack was taking place and that Gunn, Ware and Boisette had stopped it while the student was there. They resumed the attack when the student left, he said.

The victim said he did not try to run out of the room and did not report the attack to the student because he was crying.

The victim and the accused are no longer Edinboro students.

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Source: Erie Times-News

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