Jury: Men guilty in Spring Break sexual battery

PANAMA CITY — The two men charged in what law enforcement officials have called a “gang rape” during Spring Break 2015 were found guilty of sexual battery with multiple perpetrators after a lengthy trial Thursday.

Ryan Austin Calhoun, 23, and Delonte Martistee, 23, both former students at Troy University, were placed into handcuffs, fingerprinted and taken into custody after the jury returned a guilty verdict after two hours of deliberation.

Jurors listened to over seven hours of testimony from the state and defense, hearing from law enforcement officials, friends of the accused, the defendants and the victim herself. They watched several versions of a video depicting the incapacitated victim — identified by her initials, N.H. — lying on a beach chair while the two defendants and another unknown male sexually fondle her.

George Kennedy, the victim’s boyfriend at the time, bowed his head as the loud, and at times graphic, video played on the four television screens throughout the courtroom. Kennedy spent the bulk of the morning’s session on the witness stand, saying he watched N.H. leave with Calhoun after giving her money to purchase the recreational drug “molly”, only to return stumbling, incoherent and at one point falling almost unconscious, coming to only when the defendants started digitally penetrating her.

“She looked up at me at one point — I think that’s when they started with the sand ù and she said, ‘Get me out of here,’” Kennedy said during his testimony.

Kennedy originally was arrested in connection with the incident, which was referred to as a “gang rape” by law enforcement officials, though preliminary charges against him were dropped in January. The defense needled Kennedy during their cross-examination, claiming he waived his right to a speedy trial so he could testify for the prosecution and potentially dodge any future charges related to the case.

Later in the trial, N.H. took the stand, testifying she remembered very little about the incident at the beach behind superclubs Spinnaker and La Vela, only being handed a drink and “blacking out” for the rest of the afternoon. She and Kennedy formed the bulk of the state’s case, which contended N.H. could not possibly have consented to the actions in the video, as she was unconscious or severely impaired at the time.

Rudolph Shepard and Jean Marie Downing, lawyers for the defendants, painted an entirely different picture of the March 8 incident, with both Calhoun and Martistee taking the stand saying N.H. had aggressively come onto them looking for “molly” and continued her advances when they didn’t have the drug at the behest of Kennedy, who they said urged her on. They said N.H. flitted between the two of them before guiding their hands — first Calhoun’s, then Martistee’s — between her legs, while clearly giving consent.

“I don’t just violate a woman like that,” Martistee told Capt. Jason Daffin with the Bay County Sheriff’s Office in a sworn statement taken a month after the incident.

The high-profile case quickly ignited a firestorm once the video reached law enforcement, and served as one of the two major crimes used by officials to justify a slew of new Spring Break-related laws, including a ban on alcohol on sandy beaches during the month of March. The other was a shooting at a Spring Break house party.

Family members struggled to keep their composure as they were told Calhoun and Martistee would be held without bail until Sept. 23. They will be sentenced Oct. 21.