A Louisiana woman who met a man on the Plenty of Fish dating app found herself in an hours-long standoff with the man, whose genitals she bit when he tried to rape her in his home, police said.
John Wesley Patton, 54, of Westwego, is charged with second-degree rape, aggravated sexual battery and false imprisonment, according to WDSU in New Orleans. Westwego is a suburb of the Crescent City located in Jefferson Parish.
Westwego police officials said in a news release that Patton and the 50-year-old victim met on the dating app and agreed to meet in person Friday at a daiquiri shop, but Patton asked the woman at the last minute to come to his home to meet him and his sister.
When the victim arrived at the house, Patton told her to walk to the end of a hallway to meet his sister, but she found no one else in the home, the news station reported. When the woman turned around, Patton is accused of putting his hand over her mouth and forcing her into a bedroom.
Patton implied that he wanted sex and the woman agreed out of fear, police officials said. She told investigators she begged him not to hurt her.
When Patton was unable to perform, he demanded oral sex, investigators said. Instead, the woman bit him and fled the room.
Patton is accused of grabbing a knife from the kitchen and trying to cut the woman, causing wounds to her hands, investigators said in the news release. She disarmed him and used a coffee table to barricade herself in a corner after he retrieved a second knife.
"She was just cowering in the corner with the table," Lt. Eric Orlando, a spokesman for the Westwego Police Department, told NOLA.com. "He approached several times (with a second knife) and she fought him off with it."
Eventually, Patton unlocked the door and told the woman to get her belongings and leave, NOLA.com reported.
“She refused. She was afraid to go back to the bedroom,” Orlando said.
The victim instead repeatedly demanded that Patton get her belongings and bring them to her. He did so around 9 a.m. the next morning, retrieving her purse and clothes. She fled and drove to a nearby business, where she called 911.
Police officers tried to contact Patton at his home, but he wouldn’t come out.
"We knocked on the door, made phone calls and were sitting in front of his residence on the (public address) system, calling for him to come out," Orlando told the news site. "He refused to make any contact."
After seven hours of attempts, the department’s special response team threw a canister of gas into Patton’s home. He surrendered 10 minutes later, NOLA.com said.
Patton was being held without bond in the Jefferson County Jail.
Besides the charges stemming from Friday's incident, he is also being held on a parole violation out of Texas, NOLA.com reported. He was serving a 99-year sentence for aggravated possession of cocaine but was released on parole, Orlando said.
Patton was on parole until 2092 in that case, the news site reported.
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