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Groping trial gets under way

Nearly a year after being arrested and charged with sexually assaulting three eighth-grade girls from Cooke Middle School, Aquan Spearman is set to stand trial on indecent-assault charges and a mountain of related offenses.

Nearly a year after being arrested and charged with sexually assaulting three eighth-grade girls from Cooke Middle School, Aquan Spearman is set to stand trial on indecent-assault charges and a mountain of related offenses.

Jury selection began yesterday and was scheduled to continue today in Philadelphia Common Pleas Court.

The assaults on the 13- and 14-year-old students took place in December 2007 and January 2008, all around the kindergarten-through-eighth-grade school in Olney. At the time of his arrest last Jan. 27, police said, Spearman regularly hung around the school.

"He's been charged with grabbing the breasts or buttocks on each of them at different times," Assistant District Attorney Chesley Lightsey said yesterday during a brief interview.

"Under the commonwealth's theory, obviously we think that he is going after these students for a reason and they are all much younger than him," said Lightsey, who alleged that in each of the cases Spearman, 23, flattered the girl before attacking her.

Lightsey said that in December 2007, before the attacks on the Cooke students, Spearman raped a 13-year-old girl near the school but that she did not attend the school.

Judge Susan I. Schulman agreed with public-defense lawyer Rosemary Zeccardi that the rape charge was of a much graver nature than the other charges and thus should be tried separately to avoid prejudicing the jury against Spearman.

He is also awaiting trial on charges that he committed statutory rape of a 14-year-old girl in June 2006 in Northeast Philadelphia.

No trial dates were given for the two rape cases.

Police arrested Spearman after the four victims attacked near the school identified him from a photo lineup.

The first rape victim told authorities that a man she knew as "Q" dragged her behind an abandoned building near Broad and Ruscomb streets and attacked her. The city Department of Human Services alerted police to this attack.

In October 2008 Philadelphia police charged Spearman with armed robbery, but those charges were dropped during his preliminary hearing.