Navy Man Is Arrested in Rape, Robbery

A 21-year-old Navy yeoman stationed at the Seal Beach Naval Weapons Station has been arrested on suspicion of committing a robbery and rape at Huntington Beach Mall in December, police said Thursday.

Amos Dwayne Stevenson was arrested Wednesday while in the Navy brig in Long Beach for an unrelated assault, said Huntington Beach Police Lt. Charles R. Poe.

Poe said Stevenson is also a suspect in two other Huntington Beach robberies that occurred last year at automated teller machines.

Poe said police concentrated their investigation on the Seal Beach naval station after the purse of a robbery victim was found on the base.

Police questioned Stevenson in February, and he agreed to a blood test, which linked him to a Dec. 13 rape and robbery at Huntington Beach Mall, Poe said. Police also confiscated a gun from Stevenson.

In the 5 a.m. attack, two women were talking in a car parked in the 7000 block of Glencoe Avenue when Stevenson allegedly ordered them at gunpoint to drive him to an ATM at a Security Pacific Bank in Huntington Beach.

When the women told him that they did not have an ATM card, Stevenson ordered them to drive to the Huntington Beach Mall parking lot, where he locked one woman in the trunk of the car and raped her companion in the back seat.

Stevenson is also suspected of forcing a man and woman to withdraw money from an ATM on Sept. 21 and sexually assaulting a woman on Dec. 8 after forcing her to withdraw $300 from an ATM.

Stevenson is assigned to the Mobile Mine Assembly Group, which conducts training sessions on naval mines, said Richard Williamson, a public affairs officer at the Seal Beach Naval Weapons Station. A yeoman is a naval administrative clerk, Williamson said.

He said that Stevenson has been in the Navy for two years and 10 months and has been stationed in Seal Beach for two years.

Stevenson was being held at Huntington Beach Jail on suspicion of kidnaping, robbery, false imprisonment and rape.