By Jeff Lehr

jlehr@joplinglobe.com

A Joplin mother testified Monday that she caught Craig Cargile in the act of sexually molesting her 8-year-old daughter last year in a shed behind their home shortly after she had been smoking methamphetamine with him.

The woman followed her daughter to the witness stand at the start of the 32-year-old Cargile’s trial in Jasper County Circuit Court in Joplin on a charge of first-degree statutory sodomy. Cargile is accused of molesting the girl on April 8, 2006.

The defendant’s attorney, public defender Nicki Neill, told jurors during opening statements that the girl’s mother misinterpreted what she saw because she was high on meth. She said what actually happened was that Cargile had found the girl and her younger cousin in the shed with their pants down and when the cousin saw Cargile he ran to the house.

“He admits he was smoking meth,” Neill said of her client. “But he didn’t touch the girl. He loves (the girl).”

The girl’s mother testified that she returned home from work on the evening in question to find her daughter, nephew and Cargile’s older daughters there, along with Cargile. She told the court Cargile was in an upstairs bedroom smoking meth, and she joined him in using the drug.

He soon went downstairs while she remained there smoking meth, she said. When she did come downstairs about 30 minutes later, Cargile’s daughters had left to go skating, she said. She spotted her nephew walking around the house and asked him where her daughter and Cargile were, she said. He told her they were in the shed in their back yard, she told the court.

She went to the shed and started to enter it, she said. But Cargile slammed the door shut and held it shut against her for several minutes, she testified. She told the court that when she first opened the door slightly, she saw her daughter lying back on an inflatable Barbie chair, and Cargile kneeling down in front of her.

She said she became upset and began to yell at him to let her in, but he kept the door pinned shut for several minutes. When he did finally let her get her daughter, he told her that “it was not what it looked like,” she testified.

She said she asked him what was it then, and he told her: “Oh, what the hell, get the hell out of here.”

She testified that she took her daughter and young nephew and left, walking them down to a convenience store where she tried to call her parents. A woman subsequently gave her a ride to her parents’ home in Kansas, and they helped her to take the girl to a hospital and to report the matter to police, she said.

The mother acknowledged on cross-examination by Neill that she was eight months pregnant when she smoked meth with Cargile and got high. She also acknowledged that it was dark in the shed and that she and Cargile were not on good terms at the time. But she denied having any knowledge that he had been seeing his ex-wife and that the ex-wife and Cargile had plans to get together that night.

“I didn’t know she was coming over,” she testified. “But I knew what I saw in the shed.”

The girl, now 9, had testified before the mother took the witness stand that her cousin had entered the shed with her and Cargile, but Cargile had told him to leave. She told the court that Cargile exposed himself to her while they were in the shed alone and told her to touch him.