Was Zach Higgins convicted of rape based on the evidence — or because of his past?
Tuesday, June 16th, 2009
Evidence of an offense Zach Higgins committed at age 14 later came back to haunt him.
Editor’s note: It is CL’s policy to withhold the name of a victim of sexual assault.
The young woman was in trouble. Her father was on his way to Atlanta to pick her up and bring her back to their Fayette County home. He had just found out, through her roommate at Georgia Tech, that she’d been hanging out in her dorm room with her boyfriend. That wasn’t allowed. More importantly, the woman’s family deeply disapproved of him.
Once she was back in Fayette County, the woman got into an intense discussion with her parents. They wanted to know why she continued to see someone they didn’t want her to see.
“My parents were asking me why I was acting that way,” the young woman later told a Fayette County jury. “And I just told them because I felt like I wasn’t worth anyone better. And they kept asking me why, until it finally came out.”
She told her parents that her insecurity stemmed from another boy and an incident that occurred almost three years earlier, at the beginning of her junior year at Sandy Creek High School. The two had worked together at a local pizza place, and she admittedly had a crush on him. He showed up at their house one night, while her parents weren’t home. She said at first, they were watching TV. Then, after they started kissing, he forced himself on her.
Upon hearing her story, her parents drove her straight to the police department, where she hand-wrote a statement, dated April 21, 2008, describing the events of that night in 2005:
“I told him that’s enough, he should leave, and I’ll talk to him another day,” the young woman wrote. “But he ignored me and said, ‘I’ll take my pants off, and then you.’ So he unzipped his pants and pushed them down. And that’s when I froze, and I kept telling myself there’s no way he’s going to do that.”
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