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“Everyone did the right thing in this case,” prosecutor Sarah Nordgaard told the jury at the beginning of a trial of William Korn, 37, who allegedly got his 13-year-old stepdaughter drunk before sexually assaulting her while her mother was at work in December 2016.
“Everyone did the right thing, except the defendant,” Nordgaard said.
Korn is charged with sexual assault on a child by a person in a position of trust, which is a class 3 felony.
It took more than a year after the alleged incident for police and prosecutors to investigate the girl’s claims, and Korn was arrested in February 2018.
The girl told a friend about the alleged molestation in a Facebook message several months after it occurred, and that girl’s mother read the messages and encouraged the victim to tell her mother, according to prosecutors.
Korn is also charged with contributing to the delinquency of a minor for allegedly supplying the girl with an “alcoholic beverage that tasted like candy,” Nordgaard said.
Public Defender Elise Myer said that the story is too inconsistent to be accurate.
“This case is built on inconsistencies, and the inconsistencies will show you that the allegations are not true,” Myer told the jury in an opening statement.
The assault allegedly occurred at Korn’s home in Parachute on Dec. 12, after Korn dropped off his common-law spouse at work, according to prosecutors. On the way back, Korn and the 13-year-old stopped at a liquor store, and gave the girl some of what he bought.
When they returned home, he allegedly took her into the bedroom, and they laid on the bed.
“He started to have the sex talk with her, described the changes she would start to see in her body,” before assaulting her with an object, Nordgaard said.
Myer said the alcohol is one of the many details that doesn’t fit. The 10-ounce bottles contain 4.8 percent alcohol, “And on the way home, (the girl) says she drank four, if not five of these bottles,” Myer said.
Myer said the girl told a forensic interviewer that her mother worked in Silverthorne that day, but payroll records indicate she worked in another Colorado town.
Nordgaard said that the girl’s DNA was found on an item retrieved as evidence, but Myer said testing was flawed and uninformative. The third DNA test was finished Jan. 21, the first day of jury selection.
The girl also may have had motive to make up a story, Myer said, because she didn’t like Korn’s discipline, and considered him lazy.
