Nineteen-year-old Acacia Raskin has been attending Bodhi Tree’s trial for murder every day. She was best friends with Christina Schwarz, one of the three people Tree is accused of killing last May.

Raskin’s regular presence in the courtroom was the subject of a Times-Standard profile a few weeks ago. 

Yesterday at around 10:30 a.m., as she was heading back to the courtroom, she was sexually assaulted in the full light of day. She was standing on Fourth Street directly across from the courthouse, waiting for the light to change, when a man came up behind and started groping her.

Raskin told the Outpost today that it was a terrifying echo of what allegedly happened in the Bodhi Tree double homicide case in Arcata. That began, prosecutors allege, with Tree assaulting a woman at a party in a similar fashion.

Two police officers witnessed yesterday’s assault on her person, Raskin said, and the Eureka Police Department quickly made an arrest. Damon Patrick Wright was taken into custody and booked on misdemeanor sexual battery charges.

Raskin said she contacted the media this morning because she wanted to shine a spotlight on these kinds of crimes. “I wanted everyone to know that I was a completely innocent person going to the courthouse,” she said. “These cases so often get swept under the rug and not dealt with.”

Wright has been arrested numerous times in the past few years on charges of resisting arrest, failure to appear for a court date and public drunkenness. In 2011, he was arrested when the EPD’s Problem Oriented Policing team raided a methamphetamine dealing operation allegedly operated by his mother. On that occasion, the T-S reported that Wright was booked on previous warrants for battery and petty theft.