Man Convicted of Raping Ex-Girlfriend’s Child

March 17, 2022 – A Criminal Court jury this week convicted a woman’s former boyfriend of raping her 11-year-old daughter in 2015 when they all lived together in a home in Orange Mound, said Shelby County Dist. Atty. Gen. Amy Weirich.

Defendant Willie Lee Brown, 34, was convicted of rape of a child, and is scheduled to be sentenced in May. He is being held in the Shelby County Jail.

In 2019 the girl told her mother that Brown had raped her four years earlier when she was 11 years old. She said her mother was looking through her (the daughter’s) phone that day and that she didn’t want her mother to learn about the assault from notes she had made and stored in the phone.

The girl said she had gotten up in the middle of the night to use the bathroom and that Brown walked in on her and began trying to pull down her pajamas. She said she resisted, but then stopped resisting when Brown told her if that she did not let him “do it’ with her that he would “do it” with her younger sisters. She said she complied to protect her sisters.

The mother testified that soon after she reported the incident to police, she began receiving text messages from Brown in which he referenced the case and threatened her and her daughter.

The case was prosecuted by Asst. Dist. Attys. Alyssa Hennig and Gavin Smith of the District Attorney’s Special Victims Unit (SVU) which handles cases involving vulnerable victims, including rape or severe physical abuse of children, elder abuse, and vulnerable adult abuse. The SVU is an expansion of the multi-agency Child Protection Investigative Team known at CPIT.