17 CONVICTIONS IN RASH OF SEXUAL ASSAULTS JURY STILL DELIBERATING ON 38 MORE COUNTS AGAINST SMITH.

Byline: KAREN MAESHIRO

Staff Writer

LANCASTER -- A jury reached partial verdicts in a trial of a state prison inmate accused in a series of violent sexual assaults in Lancaster in 2003, convicting him of 17 counts and acquitting him of one.

Jurors continued deliberating Friday afternoon on the remaining 38 counts against Jacob Renald Smith, who was linked to the crimes through DNA evidence and by victims who identified him as their assailant.

The verdicts on the 18 counts were reached Thursday afternoon and read to the court over the defense's objection, court officials said.

The 17 counts Smith was convicted of included forcible oral copulation, sexual battery by restraint, false imprisonment, kidnapping, assault with a firearm, and possession of a firearm by a felon.

Jurors acquitted him on one count of second-degree robbery, court officials said.

DNA evidence against Smith, 23, includes samples found on a white plastic cup from which the attacker drank water and a bandanna that he wore and used to tie a victim's hands, the prosecutor said in opening statements.

Smith, imprisoned since September 2004 for a San Bernardino County burglary, was linked later to the Lancaster sex crimes under a state law that requires all felons to submit DNA to a database that can be accessed by law enforcement agencies throughout the United States.

Smith, who was being held in lieu of $12 million bail, has pleaded not guilty to numerous charges that he assaulted four women, shot a fifth and was defied by a sixth who managed to call 911 on her cell phone despite threats to kill her and her child.

Smith is charged in six incidents in 2003 involving assaults, sex crimes -- including some against women who had small children with them -- and a home-invasion robbery in which a woman in her 60s was shot in the chest.

Interviewed by detectives in June 2005, Smith at first denied any involvement, but then changed his story after being told that DNA evidence linked him to the crimes, prosecutors said.

In one incident, Smith said he and a woman simply got into a scuffle. Smith claimed "it was a case of sex for drugs" with four of the victims, and in the home-invasion robbery Smith claimed the gun went off accidentally, prosecutors said.

Some of the assaults occurred in daylight in public places -- including a park, a coin laundry and a parking lot -- within a 1 1/2-mile radius of central Lancaster, near where Smith lived in early 2003, officials said.

All but two of the six attacks occurred before late March, when sheriff's officials released a composite drawing of the man who had sexually assaulted two women and tried to assault a third.

Two days after the drawing was released publicly, a man fitting the rapist's description bicycled up to the rural east Lancaster home of an elderly mother and daughter and asked for a drink of water and to use their phone. He shot the younger woman and robbed the home.

Then the attacks stopped until August, when a woman walking near Lancaster City Park was forced down the side of an Antelope Valley Freeway overpass and assaulted.

Seven weeks later, Smith was arrested as an ex-felon in possession of a gun, and he was sent to prison for 7 1/2 months. Three months after getting out, he was back in prison on the San Bernardino County burglary conviction.

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