A 55-year-old woman who was raped more than three decades ago told jurors on Tuesday how she pleaded with her attacker not to harm her baby.

“I’m pregnant. Please don’t hurt my baby,” the woman, who was then 23 years old and five months pregnant, recalled telling the man.

Roger Dale Honeycutt is on trial this week in the rapes of two Charlotte women in 1981. Police say they have DNA linking the 62-year-old Kannapolis man to the assaults.

The rape victim who testified Tuesday wasn’t asked to identify Honeycutt as the man who sexually assaulted her on Feb. 21, 1981. She told the prosecutor she did not know him.

The woman told jurors that the sexual attack occurred in her apartment after she had fallen asleep on the sofa downstairs. Her husband and daughter were asleep upstairs.

She recalled how the man put his hand across her mouth. Then she told jurors the man threatened her. “If I don’t scream I wouldn’t get hurt,” she recalled.

She testified that the man forced her to perform oral sex and then raped her.

She recalled her assailant’s words as he left the apartment. “Don’t forget to lock the door behind me.”

The woman told jurors she then became concerned about the lives of her husband and daughter.

“I started screaming and ran upstairs,” she recalled. “I screamed and screamed and screamed.”

The woman had gone to the hospital after the attack, where a rape kit was collected. But police had no suspect to compare the DNA evidence against.

In 2005, Honeycutt was sentenced to federal prison for sexual exploitation of a minor. He was released in 2008.

In 2006, Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Department’s newly created sexual assault cold case squad and crime lab submitted the DNA to a national database that has millions of offender profiles.

On Oct. 18, 2010 – nearly 30 years after the sexual attack – detectives with the sexual assault cold case squad arrested Honeycutt at his home in Kannapolis and charged him with the Feb. 21, 1981, rape.

In January 2012, Honeycutt was arrested again. This time he was charged with the rape of a 26-year-old woman that occurred on Jan. 24, 1981.

Police say they have DNA matches linking Honeycutt to both of the sexual assaults. He is charged in each case with second-degree rape, second-degree sex offense and first-degree burglary.

During opening statements Tuesday, Mecklenburg Assistant District Attorney Barry Cook told jurors about similarities of the two sexual assaults. He described both as home invasions. Both victims were sleeping on a sofa in their apartments when the attacks took place, he said. The rapist got into the apartments through sliding patio doors.

Defense attorney Bill Soukup told the jurors there is no question the two women were raped.

But Soukup said the only evidence police and the prosecutor have are partial DNA profiles. “There’s no other evidence they went and got the old-fashioned way,” he said.

“Roger Honeycutt is entitled to justice too,” the defense attorney told the jurors. “He did not commit these crimes.”