Victim testifies man acquitted in Phylicia Barnes' murder strangled, raped her in Baltimore County apartment

The victim of a rape and attempted murder case involving a high-profile suspect told jurors during her testimony inside a Baltimore County courtroom on Tuesday that she was terrorized for hours.

She described a terrifying attack inside her apartment in 2024.

Michael Maurice Johnson, the suspect and her boyfriend at the time, was previously acquitted in the widely publicized 2010 murder of teenager Phylicia Barnes in Baltimore City. 

How they met 

After brief opening statements, the victim answered questions from Baltimore County prosecutors, including the foundation of her relationship with Johnson.

She said the couple dated for a little more than a year after meeting in 2023 on Fulton Avenue in West Baltimore.

She was in the foster care system and had just turned 18. He was 40 years old and had stopped his red Tesla Model 3, which she mistook for her Lyft. 

The victim said she got into the Tesla, and Johnson drove her home. 

He gave her $40 and his phone number.

She later described multiple trips they took as a couple, including to Miami, the Bahamas and Puerto Rico.

"He picked her up on the side of the road, and he saw an opportunity," Baltimore County Assistant State's Attorney Dianna Abramowski told the jury at the start of the trial.

Johnson's defense attorney Amy Stone countered in her opening statement, "We may not like this kind of relationship, an 18-year-old girl with a 40-year-old man. Like it or not, it's not unheard of."

WJZ does not identify victims of sexual assault.

The attack 

"I thought I was going to die," the victim told jurors, at times testifying through tears about the brutal attack inside her apartment on July 1, 2024. 

She said it lasted six hours, that Johnson "tortured" her, put her in and out of a chokehold, and she often could not breathe, even urinating on herself multiple times.

"I got tired. I let my body go numb, and I let him choke me," she said.

She also alleged Johnson raped her during the ordeal. 

"I let him do whatever he could just so he would stop hurting me," she said. 

In one chilling exchange, the victim told jurors Johnson later asked her, "Did you think I was going to kill you?" 

She responded that she did. 

"He insisted he wasn't," she said.

Prosecutors presented body-worn camera video of the initial police encounters with both Johnson and the victim.

The victim was so badly injured that she could barely talk and had to write on pieces of paper and use a cell phone to text the police what happened.

After the attack, she went across the street to a convenience store where she was able to use a phone to call her social worker. She also texted about the alarming incident. "Please help me. Michael strangled me over and over again for six hours. He's still here," she wrote.

She said it started hours earlier as an argument because Johnson thought she was texting a boy. She said he was later openly texting other women on her sofa that night.  

She testified that he had been drinking and ingesting psychedelic mushrooms, while she was smoking marijuana to calm her nerves before the incident. 

The victim said she kicked him out of the apartment once they started disagreeing, but he came back "out of nowhere."

Johnson has been locked up since the alleged attack and listened to the victim's testimony along with his attorneys Tuesday, the first full day of a trial that is expected to last for five days.

What jurors won't hear

Prosecutors agreed not to present to the jury any past domestic violence allegations between the couple and Johnson's past connection to a notorious killing, for which a judge cleared him in 2018. 

Johnson went through three trials for the murder of 16-year-old Phylicia Barnes, who disappeared in 2010 while visiting her sister in Northwest Baltimore.    

Fifteen years ago this week, authorities found her body in the Susquehanna River near the Conowingo Dam.    

Barnes' father spoke to WJZ investigator Mike Hellgren when charges were filed in the 2024 case.     

"It just brings back how Phylicia was murdered and what happened to her, her innocence and how her life was taken," her father Russell Barnes said. "We believe she was asphyxiated and was strangled to death after she was raped."

Barnes' murder garnered widespread attention in Maryland and nationwide.

Defense strategy 

Attorneys for Johnson conceded there was an assault inside the apartment in July 2024, but they contended there was no rape or strangulation.

"The evidence will not support these most serious charges," Stone told the jury.

The public defender called the victim "unreliable" and said the rape allegations were "inconsistent."

Both sides plan to call expert medical witnesses to testify.

"He wanted to torture me because he was not trying to end it," the victim said of the lengthy alleged attack.

Testimony in the jury trial resumes Wednesday. Stay with WJZ CBS News Baltimore for updates.