A Newton teenager told a crowded courtroom yesterday that she was too nervous and too scared to cry out for help when she was being sexually assaulted by a psychiatric patient at a Boston hospital two years ago.
“I was just afraid,’’ the teenager, now 16, said yesterday in Suffolk Superior Court. “I never thought of running because he was so close to me, and I didn’t want to make him angry.’’
Her testimony, at once emotional and direct, came on the first day of Vernon Thompson’s trial on two counts of rape, stemming from the alleged assault in July 2008. Thompson was a patient at Lemuel Shattuck Hospital in Jamaica Plain at the time, and the girl was a 14-year-old volunteer.
Thompson, 40, allegedly forced himself onto the girl, stuck his hand down her pants, and forced her to perform oral sex.
The Globe is not identifying the girl because she is a juvenile and an alleged victim of a sexual crime.
“It’s this defendant’s deliberate and planful actions that have brought us here today,’’ Assistant District Attorney Leora Joseph told jurors.
Earlier yesterday, Thompson’s lawyer, Joan Stanley, asked jurors to keep an open mind. She pointed out that Thompson was a mental health patient at the time, and said she will argue that he should be found not guilty because he had a diminished mental capacity that prevented him from understanding what he was doing.
“You’ll realize he did not have the capacity to conform his conduct to the requirements of the law,’’ Stanley said.
Thompson, wearing a white dress shirt and a tie, did not say anything during the proceeding, and appeared to keep his head down looking at paperwork. In an awkward moment, the teenager stood only a few feet away from him as she described photographic evidence, visibly trying to look away.
The teenager told jurors that she had started as a junior volunteer at the hospital in the summer of 2008. Her father’s business had been relocated to a building on the hospital grounds, and she thought it would be an ideal summer volunteer program.
Within days she met Thompson, according to her testimony. She had left the hospital’s main building after clocking out at about 2 p.m. and headed to her father’s building, a short distance away, when she encountered Thompson near a bus stop. He stopped her and asked if she was single. She told him he was, and he proceeded to tell her she “was sexy,’’ the teenager said.
“He kept asking me for my phone number,’’ she said. The teenager said she then realized Thompson must have been a hospital patient, because of his casual demeanor and lack of any hospital badge. She agreed to give him the phone number, to quiet him. At one point, she said, he tried to kiss her on the lips, but she kept her head down and he kissed her on top of her head, she said.
“I didn’t know how to react,’’ she said.
Days later, while she was on the phone talking to her step-mother in the lobby of her father’s building, Thompson approached and tried to talk to her, she said. “Your father told me to stay away from you, but I’m not going to,’’ Thompson told her, the teenager testified.
He was tall, intimidating to her 5-foot-2 frame, she said. She told him she had to leave, but he followed her, guiding her with his arm around her shoulders, she said. On a platform of a staircase leading to her father’s basement office, he stopped her, put his arm around her and proceeded to sexually assault her, eventually forcing her down onto the stairs, the teen testified.
At one point, her father’s co-worker came upon the scene and interceded.
Milton Valencia can be reached at mvalencia@globe.com. 
