One of two men accused of a violent armed robbery in June will face a jury trial this spring.

Alex Caprice Sanders, 19, and Deshane Keonte Rayton, 21, are accused of robbing a Lawrence woman of hallucinogenic drugs and electronics while her two daughters slept upstairs in her home.

Sanders appeared in Douglas County District Court on Tuesday morning for a preliminary hearing. He faces felony charges of aggravated kidnapping, aggravated burglary and aggravated robbery.

During the hearing the woman identified Sanders and testified about his involvement in the robbery.

Sanders, who is currently an inmate at the Douglas County Jail, sat quietly on the side of the courtroom during the hearing. His mother and 3-year-old daughter were also in attendance.

Early in the morning of June 30, 2015, police responded to the woman’s home in the 2400 block of Alabama Street for a report of a robbery, according to arrest affidavits for Rayton and Sanders.

The woman told the court she heard knocks on her front door and kitchen window just before 1 a.m. Her two daughters — 2 years old and 8 months old — were upstairs and asleep at the time, and her 7-year-old son was sleeping over at a home across the street.

The woman said that at first she found no one outside but that when she checked the front door a second time both Rayton and Sanders forced their way inside.

As they forced their way into the house, she testified, Sanders was unarmed. Rayton, however, was pointing a semi-automatic handgun at her, she said.

“I knocked his hand away from me, and he hit me in the side of the head with it,” she said.

“There was blood down the side of my face. It did stop bleeding on its own, though,” she added.

Once inside, Sanders wrestled with the woman for her cellphone, eventually throwing it across the room and holding her down, she said; in the meantime Rayton searched her bedroom.

Throughout the incident, the woman said, her children remained asleep.

Soon Rayton returned and began choking the woman while asking “where is it at?” she said, in reference to her personal safe.

“I finally told him it was in my room,” she said. “He walked me with the gun pointed at my head to my room, with one of his hands over my eyes. He was nudging me along because I couldn’t see.”

The woman said she opened her safe for Sanders and Rayton, who took a bottle of Phencyclidine, or PCP, a marijuana pipe, a bag of marijuana paraphernalia and some cigarettes that are typically laced with PCP before being sold. The wholesale value of the PCP is somewhere around $400, she said.

Cheryl Wright Kunard, assistant to the Douglas County District Attorney, said in an email that the woman testifying was granted immunity from prosecution in regard to any drugs within her safe.

Rayton and Sanders also took a duffel bag with around $1,700 worth of electronics, she said, including a PlayStation 3, a PlayStation 4 and a laptop computer.

The two men then shut the woman in her bathroom and left through her back door, she said. She then called the police to report the robbery.

The woman told officers she recognized Sanders as someone she had seen on Facebook, the affidavits state. She later recognized Rayton in a photographic lineup.

Sanders was arrested in Topeka on Dec. 3. Rayton had already been in Douglas County Jail for the past five months on charges related to a failure to comply with court orders.

During the preliminary hearing the woman testified that during the incident Sanders did not have possession of the handgun at any point in time.

Afterward prosecutor David Melton moved to drop the charge of possession of a gun by a convicted felon, which was originally filed against Sanders.

After the woman was questioned by both the prosecution and the defense, Judge Peggy Kittel said the prosecution had provided probable cause to believe a felony did occur and that Sanders was involved.

Kittel denied a motion from the defense to reduce Sanders’ bond, maintaining the amount at $200,000. She then scheduled Sanders for a status conference on at 9 a.m. on April 22 and a jury trial at 9 a.m. on May 4.

Rayton is scheduled for a status conference at 9 a.m. on April 1.

Douglas County Sheriff’s Office Sgt. Kristen Dymacek said in an email denying access to Sanders’ booking photo that the photo is “not required to be disclosed under the Kansas Open Records Act.”