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A teen tried to rape his friend’s mother at a sleepover — until she pulled a gun, police say

June 6, 2018 at 3:19 p.m. EDT
An 18-year-old has been charged with trying to rape his friend’s mother during a sleepover in Arlington, Tenn. (Video: Fox 13 Memphis)

An 18-year-old, reportedly just out of high school, has been charged with trying to rape his friend’s mother during a sleepover in Tennessee.

Police said Jordan Corter and other “boys” showed up about 8:30 p.m. at the woman’s home in Arlington, outside Memphis. In an interview with WREG, one resident compared the leafy neighborhood to the fictional suburbia of Mayberry, where nothing goes wrong.

She was “awaked at 0230 hours to Jordan Corter knocking on her bedroom door.”

The woman answered the door, thinking something was wrong. “Jordan forced himself into the bedroom and locked the door behind him,” she later told police.

She said he pushed her to the bed and put a hand down her shorts. In a subsequent interview, the affidavit continued, Corter wept and told police “he basically forced her to do something she didn’t want to do,” and “should not be forgiven.”

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He allegedly tried to rape the woman, Fox 13 in Memphis reported, but she broke free, giving herself a black eye in the struggle. She told investigators she kneed Corter in the groin and got to a pistol she kept in the bedroom.

“Police said the woman then placed the gun in the man’s face and told him to leave,” Fox 13 reported.

According to the affidavit, the woman’s boss noticed her condition when she went to work the next day and persuaded her to phone the authorities.

Corter was subsequently arrested, charged with sexual battery and attempted rape and released on bail. He could not be contacted, and a spokesman for the Shelby County Sheriff’s Office told The Washington Post no details would be released while the case is investigated.

A man who answered the door at Corter’s house told WREG he had just graduated from high school and was “a good kid.”

If the police account is correct, then the case is a rare example of a crime victim using a gun to successfully protect herself.

Bystanders killed a gunman who fired into a restaurant. The NRA praised good guys with guns.

Such cases often make the news — as when two men grabbed their firearms and killed a gunman at an Oklahoma restaurant, likely saving other lives, or when an armed bystander chased down the suspect in last year’s Texas church massacre. Aligning himself with the National Rifle Association and gun lobby, President Trump has proposed arming teachers in an attempt to stop school massacres.

But as The Post wrote in 2016, a Harvard University study found that despite the country’s millions of household guns, the weapons were used in self-defense in fewer than 1 percent of crimes during a five-year period.

In those cases, the researchers wrote, they did about as much harm as good. “The likelihood of injury when there was a self-defense gun use (10.9%) was basically identical to the likelihood of injury when the victim took no action at all (11.0%).”

The leader of that research, David Hemenway, wrote in the Los Angeles Times that another study found that out of 1,100 sexual assaults, only one victim used a gun for protection.

Read more:

Bystanders killed a gunman who fired into a restaurant. The NRA praised good guys with guns.

For every gun used in self-defense, six more are used to commit a crime

The best available evidence suggests NRA-backed gun policies are making crime worse