Women testify in sex assault case against former part-time Mt. Pleasant cop

Two women told jurors Tuesday that a former part-time Mt. Pleasant police officer overpowered them when he attempted to have sex with them in separate incidents in 2014 and 2015.

John Brown, 47, of Mt. Lebanon is accused of sexually assaulting four women in three counties over two years.

“This case is not about sex. This case is about power. This defendant needed to exercise control over women, to take what he wanted,” Westmoreland County Assistant District Attorney Katie Ranker said during her opening statement in what is expected to be a weeklong trial.

A 25-year-old Irwin woman testified Brown attempted to rape her and force her to perform other sex acts before he restrained and choked her on a bed at a Donegal Township home in December 2015.

She told jurors she met Brown through common friends and started a three-month relationship, which included the pair exchanging sexually explicit text messages.

The woman testified she was interested in having a sexual relationship with Brown and conceded she participated with him in multiple text conversations about rough sex. She said when they finally met, she decided she no longer was interested in a sexual relationship and repeatedly told him to stop his advances.

“I kept telling him no, to knock it off,” she testified.

Defense attorney Valerie Veltri asked the accuser about specifics in the text messages, in which she described a desire to be physically dominated and choked as part of a sexual encounter.

“Is this not what he did to you in the bedroom?” Veltri asked.

“There is a difference between rough sex and unwanted sex,” the woman responded.

A second woman testified she met Brown at a wing and rib festival at North Park in Allegheny County in September 2014, when she agreed to go with him to his parked vehicle. She testified Brown demanded she call him her master and forced her to perform oral sex.

The 39-year-old woman from Mt. Lebanon said she at first did not intend to report the incident to police but did so after she read a media account of charges filed against him in the Donegal case more than a year later.

“I read the article, and it made me furious. I am a strong woman, and the fact he it did it to someone else made me even more furious,” she testified.

Veltri told jurors Brown was not guilty in any of the four alleged incidents, which are being prosecuted together in the trial before Common Pleas Judge Meagan Bilik-DeFazio.

In her opening statement, Veltri said Brown served as an enlisted Navy intelligence analyst, worked as a federal air marshal and later a police trainer for a private contractor in Afghanistan. He also worked as a local firearms trainer and as a police officer at multiple local departments, including Mt. Pleasant Borough, she said.

“This is a classic ‘he said, she said’ case, and the evidence will show John Brown is an innocent man,” Veltri said.

Prosecutors described Brown as a serial sexual offender, who overwhelmed his accusers, insisted they call him their master and forced them into sexual activity.

Two other women are expected to testify against Brown. One claims he sexually assaulted her at an Erie bar in October 2015, and another said he attempted to force her to have sexual relations after they attended a concert in Allegheny County in 2014.

“This defendant wanted something from them, and he took it with force,” Ranker told jurors.

Prosecutors this week dropped two other cases involving one woman who claimed she was sexually assaulted by Brown in Allegheny and Beaver counties. Assistant District Attorney Leo Ciaramitaro said “evidentiary issues” prompted those cases to be dismissed.