To make her 6 a.m. shift at Dunkin’ Donuts, the young immigrant from Nepal — just 4 feet, 10 inches tall and 96 pounds — made sure to be waiting for the 5:35 bus. She did so the morning of Oct. 6, 2017, walking from her home in Gaithersburg and taking a spot near a man she’d never seen before.
What suddenly happened to her — grabbed and thrown down a dark embankment into the woods, cocaine shoved in her face, beaten unconscious and then raped — is something she lives with every moment.
“Before the crime, I was a very strong and independent person. This incident changed my whole life,” she wrote recently.
It also led to a four-year investigation and prosecution, concluding this week with an hour-long hearing in Montgomery County Circuit Court when the assailant, David Lee Williams, 31, was sentenced to 45 years in prison.
During the attack, court records show, Williams choked, bit and used an unknown object to carve lacerations into her back. She awoke naked, bloodied and covered in dirt, with her clothes, phone and belongings gone. She tried to rise but fell, got back up, and stumbled home to call the police.
“He forced her to expose her entire body to the public after violating her in the worst way,” prosecutors wrote in court filings.
Calling the crime “vicious and heinous,” Judge Steven G. Salant noted that there seemed to be no explanation for it: “There’s no suggestion that there was a mental health problem or an impairment of judgment [or] that someone was under the influence of a mind-altering substance or some delusional-producing substance. This was an act that was carried out deliberately.”
The victim, in her mid-20s at the time of the rape, spent seven days in the hospital, followed by eight months of physical therapy. She remembers only segments of the attack. “That part also makes me cry and scream at night,” she wrote.
The hearing this week, which followed Williams’s guilty plea earlier this month, included discussion of both his and the victim’s lives before and after the rape.
The woman and her husband met as children in Nepal and immigrated to the United States in 2016 “in the search for the American Dream [having] actually won a lottery to come here,” Assistant State’s Attorney Adrienne Ferrell said in court.
The woman enrolled in college to continue her education. She got the early-morning job at Dunkin’ Donuts.
“As soon as she got here, she did everything right,” Ferrell said. “She did all of this to build a better life for her and her family.”
Her husband also took a morning-shift job at a Dunkin’ Donuts, this one in the opposite direction in a different part of the county. He drove there, and would wave at his wife if she was still at her bus stop. On the morning of the attack, when he didn’t see her, he assumed she’d already boarded.
She was, in fact, out of view and at the bottom of the embankment, according to prosecutors.
Williams was born in D.C., where he lived before moving to Kensington, Md., and attending Bethesda-Chevy Chase High School, where he played soccer and basketball and ran track, according to his attorney, Steve Mercer.
“He was an outgoing, well-liked, normal person who was respectful of women and had a girlfriend and who was a popular young man,” Mercer said in court.
Williams went off to college in Florida, returning to the area to help take care of his father after he’d suffered a stroke, Mercer said. He married in 2014, the attorney said, to a woman who still supports him, and they have two young daughters. Other family members remain close to him as well.
“Of course they see the side of David that is beyond this case itself,” Mercer said. “They know that David is more than this case, and which is why it’s so hard to reconcile who they know of David with this case. And so it’s a struggle, your honor. It really is. But they love him. They support him.”
On the morning Williams and the woman came together at the bus stop, he said hello, and she said hello back and returned to her own business.
“The defendant, out of nowhere, attacked her,” Ferrell said. “He grabbed her. He threw her down the hill so she wasn’t visible to the street anymore, and he threatened to kill her.”
As she recovered physically, she said in her statement, a debilitating fear remained constant: Because the attacker took her ID and credit cards, he could learn who she was and attack again.
“Whenever I go outside,” she wrote recently. “I only go with my husband and relatives.”
Detectives arrested Williams in 2019, after connecting his DNA found at an unsolved attempted burglary scene to what was collected in the rape case. As part of his plea agreement with prosecutors, he maintains his right to appeal a previous court ruling against his attorney’s efforts to exclude DNA findings from the case.
Investigators were deeply affected by what happened to the woman, as were paramedics and nurses who treated her the day she was raped.
“Those people did not have to look at their notes to remember this case,” Ferrell said. “They were able to remember every detail of their interactions with the [victim] and what she looked like on that day, because this case was just that bad and it was just that brutal.”
