Cockeysville Man Sentenced to 8 Years for Raping Intoxicated Woman Outside Towson Bar

TOWSON — A man seen on surveillance video having sex with a semi-conscious woman in a parking lot outside a Towson bar last year was sentenced Monday to eight years in prison for second-degree rape.

Mark Hammon, 54, of Cockeysville, pleaded guilty in August to sexually assaulting the 22-year-old woman in a parking lot near a bar on West Pennsylvania Avenue around 1 a.m. on April 25, 2025.

The woman told police she had four or five shots of alcohol before going to the bar that night. The last thing she remembers, she said, was talking with an older man inside.

Surveillance footage from a nearby bank captured much of what happened afterward.

After Hammon and the woman kissed, hugged and had sex in the front seat of his truck, the woman fell to the pavement, struck her head and became motionless, appearing to be “concussed or unconscious,” Assistant State’s Attorney Kayla York said.

Police said the video shows Hammon continuing sexual activity with the woman after she became motionless.

“There is an opportunity to stop,” York said. “There’s an opportunity to recognize that this young woman was profoundly vulnerable. There was an opportunity to summon help. And the defendant chose something else.”

Baltimore County Circuit Judge Robert Cahill said he watched more than an hour of the surveillance footage and described what he saw as “nothing short of horrifying.”

Cahill said Hammon showed, “at best,” an indifference to the woman’s condition and treated her “much like a burlap sack of potatoes.”

“She was hurt, she was clearly debilitated,” Cahill said, adding that Hammon showed no compassion or effort to care for a woman who was “clearly not in a position to have consented to anything under the circumstances presented.”

The woman told Cahill on Monday that because she has no memory of the sexual assault, the experience has caused her to question her own perceptions.

“There’s a particular kind of damage that happens when something causes you to question your own understanding of yourself,” she said.

The ordeal also has made it more difficult for her to trust others, she said.

“Trust used to feel much more instinctive to me,” she said. “I do not want to live in a world where I have to assume the worst about people or look at every new person and wonder what they are capable of.”

She said she followed through with charges in part because the area is frequented by younger friends and college students. If something similar happened to one of them, she said, she couldn’t live with herself knowing she had an opportunity to speak up and didn’t.

After the assault, Hammon repeatedly tried to pull the woman to her feet and re-dress her. Bystanders who became concerned about her condition gathered around and prevented Hammon from having further contact with her.

Hammon walked away, but when he returned, a fight broke out and at least two people punched him in the head, according to charging documents.

The bystanders flagged down Baltimore County police, and medics were called. EMTs reported that the woman “presented with decreased levels of consciousness and signs of alcohol or substance exposure.”

Hammon was arrested June 4, 2025, following a monthlong investigation and has been held without bail at the Baltimore County Detention Center.

Defense attorney Bradley Shepherd told Cahill that Hammon also was extremely intoxicated that night. He said the behavior was out of character for Hammon, whose criminal history consisted of two decades-old charges in other states for nonsexual offenses.

Shepherd said Hammon was an operations supervisor at a pharmaceutical production company where he had been employed for 14 years. He said Hammon was grieving the loss of a family member and on that night had been drinking more than was normal for him. Hammon told police he remembered little of the night.

York asked Cahill to impose a sentence of 10 years in prison. Shepherd argued that such a sentence would be excessive compared with sentences imposed on other sexual assault defendants in Baltimore County. He cited more than a dozen cases in which he said defendants accused of more egregious sexual misconduct received substantially less than 10 years in prison.

Cahill sentenced Hammon to 20 years in prison, suspending all but eight years, followed by five years of supervised probation. Maryland law requires lifetime sex offender registration for a conviction of second-degree rape.

Hammon did not address the judge directly. Instead, Shepherd read a statement on his client's behalf.

“My self-medication led to a horrible mistake and a complete lack of good judgment for which I am sincerely, truly apologetic,” Hammon wrote. “To the people involved and their families, I’m sorry.”