Man Convicted in 2016 Rape of a Child

April 1, 2022 – A South Memphis man was convicted Thursday of raping and impregnating an 11-year-old girl in 2016, said Shelby County Dist. Atty. Gen. Amy Weirich.

A Criminal Court jury took less than 20 minutes to find 29-year-old Gregory Hickman guilty of rape of a child. He is scheduled to be sentenced on May 12 by Judge Lee Coffee.

According to testimony this week, the child’s mother said that in October of 2016 she noticed that her daughter’s stomach felt hard. She said her daughter appeared to be pregnant and that at that point the girl told her mother Hickman had raped her earlier that year.

The young girl said Hickman, who was known to the victim’s family, was walking her home from a neighborhood store and suggested they take a shortcut off of Crump Boulevard near Mississippi Boulevard.

She said that when they got to a bushy area Hickman grabbed her, pulled her pants down and forced her to have sex. She said he then grabbed her by the shirt and said he would kill her and anyone else if she told what he had done.

In December of that year the young girl gave birth to a baby. DNA testing showed Hickman to be the father.

Hickman, who remains in custody, has another rape case pending in which the victim was the 13-year-old daughter of his girlfriend.

The trial this week has handled by Asst. Dist. Attys. Dru Carpenter and Alyssa Hennig of the District Attorney’s Special Victims Unit (SVU) which prosecutes cases of rape, child sexual abuse, severe physical abuse of child victims, elder abuse and vulnerable adult abuse. The SVU is an expansion of the multi-agency Child Protection Investigative Team (CPIT).