Woman testifies against man accused in 2 overdose deaths and 1 rape, says she woke up drugged
It was the weekend before Memorial Day last year when a Virginia Beach woman went barhopping with several friends.
The group eventually ended up at Seaside Raw Bar at the Oceanfront, the woman testified in Norfolk Circuit Court Tuesday.
The last thing she remembers from that night was sitting at a table, talking with her friends, she said. The next morning, she woke up feeling extremely sick, weak, and groggy on a bed in small, dark apartment. Lying next to her was a man she’d never seen before.
“Do you know how you got there?” Assistant Commonwealth’s Attorney Gordon Fraser asked the woman.
“No clue,” she said.
The woman’s testimony came during the second day of trial for Michael Ebong, 44, who’s charged with raping the woman and causing the deaths of two other women during an 8-month period from November 2020 to July 2021.
The other two — 36-year-old Sheena West and 30-year-old Kelsey Paton — died from drug overdoses in Ebong’s Ocean View apartment. Both had mysteriously disappeared from bars in Virginia Beach the night before their bodies were recovered. And both died from a lethal mix of alcohol, cocaine, heroin and fentanyl.
Prosecutors have alleged Ebong saw all three women at the bars, slipped drugs into their drinks, then took them back to his apartment to sexually assault them. The Virginian-Pilot is not naming the woman who said she was raped by Ebong because she’s an alleged victim of sexual assault.
The woman told jurors Tuesday she struggled to breathe after waking up in Ebong’s apartment. She vomited repeatedly and struggled to speak, stand and walk, she said.
“I was very sick,” the woman testified. “I was having a lot of symptoms like I was on a lot of drugs.” She denied taking drugs on her own.
The woman said the man next to her kept touching her naked body in “places you wouldn’t want to be touched by a stranger.” He then rolled on top of her and raped her, she said. Afterwards, he played with her hair and told her he loved her, the woman said.
The woman said she tried not to say anything that would upset the man and eventually convinced him to take her home later that evening. It took her several days to get over the drugged feeling, she testified.
After a couple of days, she sought medical help and had a sexual assault exam conducted. But she didn’t go to police until two months later, when she saw a Facebook post about a woman named Kelsey Paton who’d died in a strange man’s apartment after disappearing from a Virginia Beach bar the night before.
The post included a picture of Ebong and photos of the outside of his apartment, which the woman said she immediately recognized.
She testified she didn’t initially report the rape because she didn’t think she had enough information to provide, such as the man’s name and address. But once she saw the Facebook post, she said she knew who he was and where he lived and contacted police.
Deputy Commonwealth’s Attorney Scott Miles told jurors during opening arguments that after Ebong was arrested and his phone was seized, police found partially nude photos of the victims on his phone.
In each instance, the woman was arranged in “unnatural” poses, Miles said. DNA recovered from each victim was later linked to Ebong, he said.
Miles told the jury he doesn’t believe Ebong meant for West and Paton to die, but argued the drugs he slipped them caused their deaths.
In his opening arguments, Assistant Public Defender Armon Pollack didn’t deny Ebong had sex with the women. But Pollack argued there was no evidence his client gave them any drugs.
Jane Harper, jane.harper@pilotonline.com
