NO BAIL FOR MAN WHO FLED ILLINOIS RAPE CHARGES (Fugitive surrenders to FBI agents in Albania)

Adrian Missbrenner, 20, was acquitted of charges he raped a 16 year old Naperville girl, who is now 20, in an assault captured on videotape during a 2002 party in the family's Burr Ridge home. Missbrenner was 17 at the time of the assault. The verdicts come after Missbrenner fled in 2004 to Serbia while free on bail. He returned voluntarily May 2005 and has been jailed since then. Jurors left without commenting on their deliberations or the case, which drew national attention, particularly after Judge Kerry M. Kennedy on threatened Missbrenner's accuser with contempt charges after she refused to watch the videotape in court. That warning outraged crime-victim advocates and Kennedy backed off a day later ruling that the woman didn't have to watch the tape during her cross-examination by Missbrenner's lawyers. The tape all along showed she was consenting. She was participating, Dobrila Missbrenner said, blasting prosecutors for filing criminal charges not only against her son, but against two of his friends who also were accused of assaulting the girl. One of those men, Christopher Robbins of Brookfield, was acquitted in 2005 of all charges. A third man, Burim Bezeri of Lyons, also was charged with assaulting the girl, but he vanished in September 2004 but turned himself in to federal authorities in Albania in December 2006.  Sonny Smith, 21, of Brookfield, pleaded guilty to child pornography charges for running the video camera. He was sentenced to a boot camp and released. But in 2005, he received a six-year prison sentence for a curfew violation of his parole, said John Gorman, spokesman for the Cook County state's attorney's office.

(Chicago, Illinois)