Christina Regusters, mugshot at age 19 in 2013. Credit: PPD
The 7-year-old girl who was allegedly kidnapped from her school in Jan. 2013 and tortured for almost a full day before being left in a playground testified in court Wednesday about the ordeal.
The victim was clear and articulate about the kidnapping by a woman wearing a Muslim kemar, who she left with because she thought it was her mother, she said.
She said she was placed in a bag, and brought to a house where she was blindfolded and kept under a bed and then in a closet.
But she did not describe the rape that Christina Regusters, 21, is charged with.
“I don’t remember,” the victim said when asked by a prosecutor if anything bad happened in the house. “I just remember hurting.”
When the kidnapper didn’t wear her kemar into the house, the girl realized it wasn’t her mother.
“It was a lady from the daycare,” she said.
Regusters formerly worked at a daycare where the victim was enrolled.
The victim, wearing a green tutu skirt, a black shirt, a pink sweater, with her hair in braids and ponytails and wearing glasses, testified that a girl, a woman, a boy and a parrot were in the house, but she didn’t see them.
She saw a picture of the boy on a cell phone.
“She said that he was deaf so keep your voice low,” the victim testified one of the women told her.
The victim, 5, was in kindergarten when she was walked out of Bryant Elementary School by a woman in Muslim garb.
Prosecutors say Regusters acted alone and raped her with an unknown object and left her in a playground the next morning.
The victim’s mother, who also testified Wednesday, described the various, conflicting stories that her daughter told her after the kidnapping about the various people involved in the kidnapping.
“She told me about Rashida, and China, and the white man … I think they [Rashida and China] were the same person,” she said.
“Rashida” is the woman who kidnapped her daughter and who wore Muslim garb as a disguise and who looked pregnant to school staff — but the girl’s belly went down when she pulled out a laundry bag that she put the victim in. The victim told her mother that Rashida spoke in an English accent.
“China” is a 15-year-old girl who let the victim touch her face, but also pulled some of the victim’s teeth out.
Other strange details from the kidnapping include the mother’s recollection that her daughter said she heard a loud bird and was then told “She needed to be really quiet because if she didn’t the man would make the bird eat her.”
The ordeal ended when a young girl, presumably “China” came under the bed, and told her she could escape.
The victim testified that she remembered walking in the cold dark early morning hours of Jan. 15 to a playground, but she testified that she did not recall that she was only clad in an oversized T-shirt.
There a Good Samaritan found her and contacted police.
Trial is scheduled to continue on Thursday.
