Man charged with violent rape

PALMER — A 33-year-old man has been charged with the violent rape of a 25-year-old woman.

According to an affidavit Alaska State Trooper investigator Curtis Vik filed in the case against Carl Brattain, troopers were alerted to the case about 12:30 a.m. Sept. 3 when a woman called dispatchers to say she wanted to speak about domestic violence and that her neck was bruised.

Vik said he interviewed the woman in Anchorage where she was undergoing a rape exam.

She told him that she and Brattain had met in 2006 and started dating later that year. She said they lived together for two years but broke up in February of this year. They were trying to work through some of their differences but weren’t getting very far.

The day before she called dispatchers, the woman told Vik, Brattain hung out with her at work. She gave him a ride home shortly after midnight.

The woman told Vik she drove Brattain to his home in Wasilla and accepted an invitation to come inside. They laid in bed and talked about their relationship. She rebuffed a mild sexual advance and he left to smoke a cigarette.

That’s when things took a turn, the woman told the investigator.

“When Carl returned to the bedroom, he closed a window, came over to (the woman) and grabbed her by the neck and pushed her against the top of the bed,” Vik wrote.

The woman told Vik that Brattain started asking questions about a man who’d given her a ride home from the Mug Shot Saloon the day before. The woman told troopers Brattain started trying to beat the answers out of her but she wouldn’t talk.

At some point along the way, he started trying to force sex on her and eventually digitally raped her. She was thrown up against a wall and choked until she started seeing flashes of light, Vik wrote based on the woman’s account.

Finally, she made up a name, the woman told Vik.

“(She) made up more information about the male to satisfy Carl. Carl then took (her) blackberry cell phone and checked her inbox but found nothing in the inbox. Carl then threw the cell phone against a wall,” Vik said.

The woman told Vik that Brattain later smashed the phone with a hammer. He eventually let her leave, Vik wrote, but followed her outside and threatened to break her car window if she didn’t open the door. He took her keys and bent one of them so it wouldn’t work, the investigator wrote. She said Brattain finally let her go — for real this time — at about 2:15 a.m.

Vik wrote that he listened in on a phone call between Brattain and the woman in which Brattain seemed suspicious but, “admitted that he had put his hands around (her) neck and strangled her, he had hit her, broken her cell phone, and caused injury to (her).”

The woman’s medical exam turned up signs of rape. Her face and neck were bruised, swollen and reddened, the trooper wrote.

On Sept. 10, Vik wrote, he tried to interview Brattain, who declined to speak without an attorney present. Troopers searched Brattain’s home, Vik wrote, and found the battered cell phone and a pair of boxer shorts the woman said Brattain was wearing at the time.

Brattain was jailed at the Mat-Su Pre-Trial Facility on $10,000 bail, charged with sexual assault, criminal mischief and three counts of assault.

Contact Andrew Wellner at andrew.wellner@frontiersman.com or 352-2270.