st. paul

"Help me! Someone call police! Call 911!"

Assistant Ramsey County Attorney Jill Gerber told the jury in her closing argument Tuesday morning that is where Rage Ibrahim's rape trial began -- with a young woman screaming in the hallway of a St. Paul apartment building for up to an hour last Aug. 21.

It took the jury about 3 1/2 hours to reach its verdict: Ibrahim, 26, was guilty of first-degree criminal sexual conduct.

The victim, now 19, said she had met Ibrahim once before about a year earlier. He called her the night of Aug. 20, and the two drove with Hussein A. Hussein to Wisconsin to buy alcohol, then returned to Hussein's apartment in the 300 block of S. Winthrop Street.

Ibrahim began to touch her sexually, the woman said, and when she told him to stop, he began slapping, punching and throwing her to the floor. The woman fled into the building hallway. Ibrahim followed.

The jury saw surveillance tape from a camera in the hall that showed Ibrahim apparently punching the woman at least a half-dozen times. It also showed some residents peering out their doors. At least five people approached them but then retreated. Ibrahim -- wearing no pants -- chased one man down the hall.

A man who arrived at the building about 2:35 a.m. to pick up his daughter from a baby-sitter finally called police.

When police arrived, they found Ibrahim and the woman, both naked from the waist down. She was crying hysterically and told officers she had been raped.

She told investigators later that Ibrahim had sexually assaulted her, though she had thwarted intercourse by holding her legs tightly together. A nurse who examined the woman at Regions Hospital photographed bruises on the woman's inner knee that resembled fingerprints.

In his closing argument, Ibrahim's attorney, Jerod Peterson, said that if Ibrahim had punched the woman "with all his energy," as she claimed, she would have had more scrapes on her face. Both she and Ibrahim were "drop-dead drunk," he told the jury Tuesday, and she could have gotten the abrasions falling down.

There may well have been amorous activity between Ibrahim and the woman, Peterson said, but there was no rape.

The fight began when the woman took Ibrahim's car keys when he told her he was too drunk to drive her home, Peterson said.

"The question is not whether you agree with what went on in that hallway," Peterson told the jury. "... He cannot be convicted for something he might have done."

District Judge Michael Fetsch set sentencing for March 15.

Peterson later said, "We're disappointed. ... I'll be talking to him about an appeal."

Outside the courtroom, Ibrahim's mother, Fadumo Warsame, said through an interpreter: "He's not guilty at all."

No one was in the courtroom for the victim. She testified last week that she still has not told her mother and brother about the attack.

"I didn't want people to know what happened to me," she said. "I was embarrassed."

Pat Pheifer • 651-298-1551