AUBURN – The state and prosecution both rested Monday afternoon in the case of a 43-year-old man accused of following a 13-year-old Lewiston girl into the woods behind a downtown Lewiston store last July, forcing her down on an old concrete slab, then performing oral sex on her.

Witnesses testified that when they spotted the pair moments after going behind Dee’s Variety on Blake Street in Lewiston, the girl tugged up her swimsuit bottoms and ran off while Raul Castro Zepeda maintained, “She’s my girlfriend,” but didn’t know her name.

The trial started Monday morning in Androscoggin County Superior Court.

Assistant District Attorney Deborah Cashman said the state would prove that Zepeda was guilty of unlawful sexual contact and gross sexual assault. Defense attorney Verne Paradie questioned the evidence and the girl’s changing account.

The girl, now 14, took the stand and described in a low voice how she first saw Zepeda standing next to the candy rack at Vicki’s Variety on the morning of July 8, a Saturday. She ordered a breakfast pizza and chocolate milk, and while she waited, heard Zepeda whisper to her something about $20 – she didn’t catch what he wanted.

She saw him later that day, while leaving the swimming pool at Kennedy Park. He followed, staying several steps behind.

Jackie McBurnie of Lewiston was on her grandmother’s porch on Bates Street when she saw the pair walk by.

“He was motioning her to wait a minute, wait a minute, wait a minute,” McBurnie testified. The girl didn’t react. “She just kept walking.”

When McBurnie spotted a friend coming out of Dee’s Variety, she asked him to follow the girl around the corner of the building, just in case. She used his cell phone to dial 911, she testified.

That friend, Donald Giusti, and Melissa Duprey, who works at Dee’s, both walked down the alley beside the building, toward the woods.

Duprey said she saw a girl lying on a towel, and “A man was between her legs.” When Paradie asked if the girl appeared to be in distress, Duprey said no. After the girl bolted, Giusti testified that Zepeda began “nonchalantly” walking away.

“First I yelled, ‘What are you, stupid?’ He looked at me, he said, ‘What? She’s my girlfriend,'” Giusti said. So he asked Zepeda what her name was and how old she was. The defendant didn’t know, Giusti said.

“I told him that he needed to get out of the woods before I broke his neck,” he said, then punched Zepeda, who did not try to flee.

George Gosselin, the owner of Dee’s Variety, said he heard the commotion and went around the other side of his building. Gosselin said Zepeda turned to him and said, in clear English, “If a girl wants to —-, you —- her.”

The girl admitted she denied to police and a nurse at Central Maine Medical Center that day that Zepeda had performed oral sex on her.

“I thought that people would think I was gross,” she said.

The girl’s mother testified that on Aug. 31, as they headed to a meeting with the district attorney, she told her daughter that if she’d left out some detail before, “This was the time to tell anything.” That’s when the girl recounted the oral sex.

She also allegedly said before that her swimsuit bottoms had fallen down when she fell on the concrete, not because he tugged on them.

“The story is just completely changed,” Paradie said.

The girl said Zepeda had raised his hand as though to hit her and had tried to touch her breasts.

Paradie asked, “Did you say anything while this was going on?”

She whispered, no.

He questioned why she hadn’t gone inside Dee’s for help if she felt threatened instead of veering down the alleyway.

When Cashman asked the same question later, the girl answered: “Because I saw it on TV how, where there was this girl running from a guy, she lost him in the woods,” the girl said.

She broke down in sobs when she got off the stand.

A Spanish interpreter sat beside Zepeda, relaying each word of the trial. He elected not to testify.

Zepeda wore a striped blue Oxford and khakis and stood at least a foot shorter than Paradie. Court records show he has a history of sex crimes.

The trial will resume today with closing arguments before the case goes to the jury.

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