Man convicted of raping 3-year-old boy

A 26-year-old Spokane man was convicted Thursday of raping a 3-year-old boy twice in October 2002, nearly killing the child on the second occasion.

The evidence against Cory G. Preston was clear and sometimes “overwhelmingly powerful,” Spokane County Superior Court Judge Jerome Leveque said.

In a nonjury trial, Leveque found Preston guilty as charged with two counts of first-degree rape of a child and one count of first-degree assault of a child with sexual motivation. Preston was baby-sitting the boy when the crimes occurred.

Preston faces a standard minimum prison term of 13 1/2 to 18 years, but Deputy Prosecutor Kelly Fitzgerald said she will seek a longer-than-standard term when Preston is sentenced Sept. 2.

Fitzgerald said she will wait for a presentence report before deciding what sentence she seeks. In any event, Preston’s actual maximum will be determined by the state’s Indeterminate Sentencing Review Board.

After Preston serves the sentence imposed by Leveque, the sentencing review board will decide whether he can safely be released. The board can keep Preston behind bars as long as it considers him dangerous.

Preston didn’t testify in his trial, which began Monday. The trial was cut short when both sides agreed to adopt pretrial testimony instead of calling doctors and other witnesses back to the stand.

Lengthy pretrial testimony began July 2 on motions to suppress Preston’s confession and other evidence. Leveque ruled the confession was valid.

During the trial, Assistant Public Defender John Stile called the victim’s mother to testify about the timing of events. On cross-examination, she admitted she misled doctors by failing to report that her son had told her Preston raped him.

That occurred Oct. 8, when the boy was hospitalized with symptoms that mimicked appendicitis. Dr. Paul Thorne said he found fresh-but-slight internal bleeding and a normal appendix during an appendectomy.

Unable to find the cause of the bleeding, Thorne said, he quizzed the boy’s mother about injuries, and she reported only an old playground accident that couldn’t have been responsible. Doctors later concluded the appendicitis-like symptoms probably were caused by an unreported sexual assault.

Earlier on the day of the needless appendectomy, the boy told his mother Preston had performed an act on him that would constitute rape. Testimony indicated the mother confronted Preston and accepted his explanation that the boy was just describing what he saw in a pornographic video Preston was watching.

Although one of her friends had given Preston a bad recommendation, the woman invited Preston to move into her North Side apartment in October 2002 so he could baby-sit her son and 9-year-old daughter while she attended classes.

The boy’s rectum was so severely torn by the second rape, on Oct. 17, that doctors thought he would die of internal bleeding. Preston eventually confessed to raping the boy for two to five minutes with a sex device.

Preston said he was giving a demonstration, first on himself and then on the boy, to answer the child’s questions about scenes in the pornographic video.

Fitzgerald said Preston apparently has only two prior convictions, for thefts that probably would be considered misdemeanors in Washington.

Preston said in pretrial testimony that he grew up in Ohio, Missouri and Mississippi, and had been in “boarding schools” since age 11.