A 44-year-old South Florida man is accused of sexually assaulting a woman visiting on Spring Break outside of a Fort Lauderdale nightclub, police said.
Terrence Style, of Miami-Dade County, was arrested by Fort Lauderdale Police on March 18. He is facing one count of sexual battery of a victim 18 years or older one count of false imprisonment, jail records show.
At the time of his arrest, Style was out of jail after posting bail in a separate, pending sexual battery case from 2022 where he is accused of assaulting a woman in the bathroom at the Broward Mall, court records show.
A bouncer at Munchie’s Nightclub, at 200 SW Second St., witnessed a “very intoxicated” woman walk out the back door of the bar, struggling to walk, according to a probable cause affidavit. The employee then saw a man, later identified as Style, grab her “as if he was trying to help her” and took her toward an alley.
The employee, whose name is redacted in the affidavit, asked a patron nearby to check what was happening with them, according to the affidavit. That person, whose name is also redacted, turned into the alleyway and saw the man assaulting the woman.
When officers went to investigate, Style and the woman were no longer in the alley. Nearly an hour later, officers who were still in the area were flagged down by another witness who said the two were sitting on a bench by the river, according to the affidavit.
That witness, whose name is also redacted, said he had met the woman about an hour-and-a-half before the assault. She was intoxicated and gave her cellphone to him to hold, but he lost track of her and did not give it back. He witnessed the assault in the alleyway and went to report it, but when he came back, they were gone. He continued looking for the woman until he found her sitting on the bench, still with Style, and flagged down the officers.
The witness took officers to the bench, where the woman was sitting with her head down, “appearing to have very little control over her faculties,” Style sat with his arm around her, the affidavit said, with his pants unzipped.
Officers immediately separated the woman from Style, but they weren’t able to get any information from her “as she was clearly and visibly highly intoxicated,” the affidavit said. While doing their preliminary investigation at the scene, the woman said she was sexually assaulted and did not remember much aside from thinking she needed to get home.
Style had a gun, a large kitchen knife and a hatchet when officers detained him, according to the affidavit.
The woman was taken to the Nancy J. Cotterman Center and hours later told officers that she had started drinking about 3 p.m. the previous day and continued drinking throughout the day, according to the affidavit. She arrived in Fort Lauderdale about 9 p.m. from her Airbnb in Hallandale Beach and said she could not remember what happened after about midnight, including how she ended up with Style and when she was separated from her friends.
Style told officers he was in Fort Lauderdale “celebrating a new job” and was hanging out outside of the nightclub when he saw the woman come out of the club, who “appeared to be ‘into him,’” the affidavit said. He told officers he would not talk about what happened in the alleyway without legal representation.
He was held in the North Broward Bureau as of Wednesday.
In a 2022 case, Style is accused of sexually assaulted a woman with autism inside of a bathroom near the food court at the Broward Mall in Plantation, a probable cause affidavit said. He has pleaded not guilty to the charges in that case, which remains pending.