Cecil Powe, a Chattanooga church elder charged with six counts of rape and sexual battery, appears before Judge Barry A Steelman onWednesday. Powe has a pretrial hearing scheduled for Dec. 15 and a trial for March 24, 2015.When an investigator called Cecil Powe Jr. and asked him if he had raped a young female relative, Powe first told the officer he didn’t want to talk about it, an arrest affidavit states.
Then he admitted to the assault, police said.
Powe was in court Thursday for a hearing ahead of his trial on charges of rape, sexual battery by an authority figure, incest and especially aggravated exploitation of a minor.
According to the arrest affidavit, the teenage victim told her mother that Powe, 39, sexually assaulted her while she was sleeping in their Chattanooga home in February 2013. The Times Free Press does not name the victims of sexual assault.
The girl’s mother went to police, and Powe later told investigators the abuse happened five or six times over the course of a month, the document states.