The Joplin Globe, Joplin, MO

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June 26, 2008

Rural Webb City man ordered to face trial in sex-abuse case

By Jeff Lehr

jlehr@joplinglobe.com

A rural Webb City man was ordered bound over for trial Thursday on charges of sexually abusing a girl two or three years ago when she was 9 or 10 years old.

Associate Judge Richard Copeland found probable cause for Joseph W. Mort, 49, to stand trial on two counts of first-degree statutory sodomy after a preliminary hearing in Jasper County Circuit Court in Joplin.

The alleged victim, now 12, testified that Mort touched her inappropriately on several occasions.

Under direct examination by Assistant Prosecutor Jeremy Crowley, she said she could not remember exactly the last time the defendant had done this, but she thought it was “about two years ago.”

She recalled for the court an occasion when she was sleeping in a bedroom, and he came in and touched her. She said she later told her mother about it.

She also recalled an occasion when she and another underage girl were playing in a computer room, and the defendant and another man, Chad E. Elliott, 49, who has a Fenton address, were “all high and drunk.”

“He (Mort) was like offering us money and stuff to do things,” she testified.

She said both men touched both the girls’ genitals on that occasion. But the charges on which Mort was bound over pertain just to the alleged abuse of the girl who testified Thursday.

Elliott was charged in September 2006 with sexually abusing the other girl. An investigation by the Jasper County Sheriff’s Department eventually led to the discovery that the girl who testified Thursday allegedly had been sexually abused as well by both Elliott and Mort.

The same girl testified in February 2007 at a preliminary hearing for Elliott and gave a similar account of sexual abuse by both men in the computer room of a home. She told the court then that the men were playing betting games aimed at getting the girls to pull down their pants. She testified at both hearings that neither of the defendants took off any of their clothes.

Testimony at Elliott’s hearing revealed that the girl was interviewed twice in 2006 at the Children’s Center in Joplin regarding the sexual-abuse allegations.

Elliott was ordered bound over for trial more than a year ago, and his case is still pending before the court.

The judge set July 7 as the date for Mort’s first appearance in a trial division of the court.

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