photo by: Kim Callahan/Journal-World

Reston Phillips, left, appears with his defense attorney, Joe Huerter, Tuesday, May 13, 2025, in Douglas County District Court.

In 2017 they were four young men on the cusp of adulthood, celebrating KU graduation at a weekend house party. “The whole gang” was there — drinking, smoking marijuana, barhopping, hanging out — with no inkling that by Sunday morning the house would become a crime scene and that eight years later, to the day, they’d be testifying in the case of a former friend accused of rape.

On Tuesday in Douglas County District Court, the four men, now in their 30s, shared with a jury their recollections of May 13, 2017, with most acknowledging that the passage of time had somewhat eroded memory. They were all clear on one thing, however: Reston Phillips, once a good friend, was no longer so.

Phillips, of Topeka, is standing trial for allegedly raping a young woman at the house party as she slept on a couch near a different couch where he was supposed to have slept. The woman, on Monday, recounted how she had come to Lawrence to celebrate her best friend’s graduation and was staying at the home of the friend’s boyfriend in the 1200 block of Louisiana Street, where Phillips was also a houseguest, among others.

She said that she awoke that night to Phillips raping her from behind. She pushed him off, she said, and he immediately said he was sorry but followed her around until she threatened to call police. Later that morning she reported the incident and went to the hospital for a rape kit.

The four men who testified Tuesday were also in Lawrence for graduation weekend, and all had known Phillips since high school, saying that they participated in various extracurricular activities, including swimming and playing drums at Topeka High School. They all said that they had spent the night at Phillips’ house while in high school, one of them saying he had done so hundreds of times.

All of the men, in answer to a question from Deputy District Attorney David Greenwald, testified that they had never observed Phillips sleepwalking. The relevance of the sleepwalking question wasn’t immediately clear, but is expected to become so when Phillips’ attorney, Joe Huerter, gives his opening statement later this week. Potential jurors on Monday were questioned rather extensively about their experiences sleepwalking and what kinds of behaviors can occur during it.

The four men, despite being at the house that night, did not witness the alleged crime by Phillips. One man said the walls of his room were very thin and that he could hear everything in the living room, including “crying” from Phillips, but Greenwald did not immediately pursue details about that. Judge Amy Hanley at one point had to caution the same man that he was behaving improperly on the witness stand, giving free-flowing and unsolicited commentary instead of tailoring his responses to the questions asked.

The men’s testimony focused on events leading up to the incident on the couch, including that Phillips and a longtime girlfriend had recently broken up and that Phillips was unusually interested in “hooking up” with girls, especially because he was planning to soon live abroad in Germany and was seeking a kind of “last hurrah” before leaving the States. Some of the men described his insistence that they be “wingmen” for him in his pursuit of female company as “annoying” and “frustrating.”

The men said Phillips appeared to be interested in the alleged victim, whom he had just met that weekend and who was engaged to another man, but they differed on how that interest manifested, with one of the men saying Phillips was “really pressing” her during a walk from a bar and another saying that Phillips had insisted on sleeping on a downstairs couch, presumably to be near her. Testimony indicated that Phillips and the woman had slept on different couches in the living room one night before without incident.

“That whole weekend we were just hanging out and enjoying not having classes anymore,” one man said, but that vibe crashed to a halt when police officers showed up to the house Sunday morning to investigate the woman’s rape allegation. From that moment on the men’s close friendship with Phillips also apparently crashed to a halt, with one telling the jury they haven’t spoken since that day.

photo by: Kim Callahan/Journal-World

Lawrence Police Detective Mike Verbanic testifies at the trial of Reston Phillips on Tuesday, May 13, 2025, in Douglas County District Court.

The state on Tuesday also called two police detectives who investigated the case. Lawrence Police Detective Mike Verbanic testified that the police gave the woman Phillips’ phone number so that she could call Phillips and perhaps get a recorded statement from him, but Verbanic said no one answered the phone. Phillips’ attorney, Huerter, asked Verbanic if Phillips popped up as a contact on the woman’s phone when she entered his number. Verbanic said it did and that the woman couldn’t explain it.

In cross-examination, Huerter has attempted to suggest that the woman and Phillips were friendlier than the woman had said, alluding to their walking arm in arm at one point with the woman’s female friend and to their having sat beside each other on a sofa.

Huerter also elicited testimony about how much the woman had to drink that night, and Verbanic indicated that she had reported consuming four or five drinks across three bars. When the woman testified on Monday, she readily admitted that she had been intoxicated and had smoked marijuana but said she nevertheless remembered the incident with Phillips “as clear as day,” and she told jurors that she had no interest in him and never consented to sex with him.

Verbanic testified that he secured a DNA cheek swab from Phillips at a lawyer’s office in Topeka — for the purposes of comparing it to DNA in the rape kit that the woman had performed at the hospital.

The registered nurse who performed the exam is scheduled to discuss the report of the woman’s exam on Wednesday morning, when the jury reconvenes for Day 3 of the trial.

The defense is also expected to begin its case on Wednesday.

A warrant for Phillips’ arrest was issued in March 2018, nearly a year after the incident. He apparently spent considerable time in Europe and was finally arrested in September 2023 in Harris County, Texas. He has been free on a $30,000 bond since shortly after his arrest.

photo by: Kim Callahan/Journal-World

Reston Phillips, left, appears with his defense attorney, Joe Huerter, Tuesday, May 13, 2025, in Douglas County District Court.