Barenz convicted in Jim Creek sex assault

PALMER — A jury convicted a 34-year-old Chugiak man Thursday of sexually assaulting a 15-year-old girl at a Jim Creek campsite last August.

Ralph L. Barenz II was charged with one count each of first-degree sexual assault, second-degree sexual assault of a minor and two counts of third-degree assault. Barenz is scheduled for sentencing at 8:30 a.m., Sept. 11.

Barenz raped the girl in the early morning hours of Aug. 5, after several hours of drinking vodka and smoking marijuana with the victim and her 16-year-old sister. After the girl entered Barenz’s tent, and the two engaged in kissing and touching, Barenz asked for sex. When she refused, Barenz choked the girl and threw her to the floor of the tent.

Finally, in fear for her life, the girl told Barenz to “do it,” at which point, Barenz sexually assaulted the girl.

Photos showed during the closing arguments phase of the trial Wednesday showed four parallel scratch marks on Barenz’s neck.

Photos of the victims injuries show petechiae spread across the victim’s face — small pinpoint dots sometimes caused when capillaries under the skin bleed, sometimes as a result of strangulation, according to the Mayo Clinic. She also reported injuries to her genitals and back.

When the encounter was over, the girl ran to a nearby campsite and talked for an hour about largely inconsequential matters until she told a married couple in the trailer she had been raped.

The victim had trusted Barenz, prosecutor Melissa Howard said.

“Now everybody on the jury knows how that trust ended,” she said. “That trust ended in a violent sexual assault of a 15-year-old girl.”

The jury’s central judgment surrounds whether the victim is telling the truth, Howard told jurors.

“If you believe (the victim), the defendant is guilty of all the charges,” she said.

Public defender Jeffrey Bradley told jurors investigators hadn’t sought enough evidence to convict Barenz beyond a reasonable doubt.

For example, the victim claimed that her sister had soiled some bed sheets, so she went to the tent to sleep, Bradley said. The sheets weren’t tested for urine to confirm this detail, he said. The attorney argues that Barenz was heavily intoxicated at the time of the rape, and became confused about who entered the tent with him.

“You are judges of the credibility of the witnesses,” he said. “That is not something our culture is comfortable with. Being called a judgmental person is not a comfortable thing.”

Contact Brian O’Connor at 352-2269, brian.oconnor@frontiersman.com, or on Twitter @reporterbriano.