Teen to stand trial in violent rape

Calling the evidence presented during Wednesday's court hearing the most "brutal" and "heinous" he'd ever heard, a Carson City judge found there was sufficient evidence to try a 16-year-old youth for a violent August rape.

Brandon Leigh Hubbard, certified as an adult in October by a juvenile court master, is charged with four counts of sexual assault, two counts of battery with intent to commit sexual assault and kidnapping.

The rape victim, a single mother, testified in court Wednesday she had had at least six beers and several shots of Jack Daniels whiskey on the evening of Aug. 2. She first met Hubbard, who is 6 feet tall and weighs 200 pounds, at a Carson City bar on Telegraph Street that night.

Later, after she had gone to another bar on Winnie Lane, Hubbard appeared as she sat outside. The two talked and walked across the street into a darkened parking lot.

"He seemed like a really sweet guy," she said. "I don't know how (the situation) got from me sitting on the curb and it being normal to him on top of me."

She struggled to get away, she said.

"It was about 45 seconds until he hit me the first time," she said, tearfully. "I felt blood pouring down my face. I could feel it in my eyes."

She said when she begged him to stop hitting her, he began quickly twisting her head to the side as if to snap her neck.

"What happened when he did that?" asked prosecutor Trina Dahlin.

"I just saw white," the victim said.

Once she stopped struggling, the woman testified, Hubbard raped her as she lay in the bushes. After a few minutes, she said, he helped her up and took her arm. He told her he would kill her if she tried to get away, she said.

For the next three hours the two walked the darkened streets of northwest Carson City, where he assaulted her twice more in an apartment complex laundry room. The two ended up in the back yard of a home on Michael Drive.

As the sun rose, Hubbard's demeanor changed, she said.

"He started getting more scared when daylight came, and I started getting nervier."

When Hubbard told her to perform oral sex, the woman said, she refused.

"I said you can do whatever you want. You can kill me. I'm not doing that. You're disgusting.

"He'd already beaten me, he'd already hit me, he'd already tried to snap my neck," she said.

At one point, the woman said she'd grabbed Hubbard's face and forced him to look at her like a "human being."

"I have a son. Look what you did to his mother," she recalled saying to him. Hubbard apologized and began to cry, she said.

"He said, 'I'm not going to hit you. I'm not going to chase you. You can go.'"

The woman said she ran from the back yard and jumped a fence, flagging down a motorist, who picked her up about 6:30 a.m.

Hubbard was apprehended a short time later with the woman's underwear, cellular phone and credit card.

Police found her blood in the bushes across from the bar and in the laundry room.

She was treated for a broken nose and scrapes at Carson-Tahoe Hospital.

"This case right here is the most brutal, heinous crime that I've ever heard," said Justice of the Peace John Tatro to Hubbard, who sat at the defense table and slowly nodded his bowed head.

Tatro raised the teen's bail to $500,000.

"I wouldn't be able to sleep at night if I knew Mr. Hubbard got out of jail on the bail where it is now," the judge said.

No trial date has been set.

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