Gulfport police arrest man accused of raping woman he met at a bar

A Gulfport man was arrested Tuesday after evidence showed he raped a woman he met at a bar, police said.

Timothy Allen Coppola, 54, faces a charge of sexual battery.

Police said Coppola met a woman while out drinking on March 10 and the two began chatting, according to a Gulfport Police Department arrest affidavit. The two eventually went to another bar, but the woman told police she doesn’t remember anything that happened that evening after they left the first bar.

At some point, the affidavit states, Coppola took the woman to his home. She woke up the next morning, naked from the waist down, with bruising around her left eye and soreness in her genital area. However, when she asked Coppola if they had had sex, he said they did not and told her to go shower, police said. He also told her that she had hit her face at some point the previous night.

In an initial interview with police, Coppola denied having sex with the woman and said she fell off a barstool at one point and hit her face. In a second interview with police, he told them he had penetrated her a few times in the back seat of a car on the ride home that night, the affidavit states.

A rape kit found DNA in the woman’s body that matched Coppola’s. Sgt. Thomas Woodman, a police spokesperson, said there was a delay between when police believed Coppola raped the woman and when they took him into custody because detectives were waiting on DNA test results to establish probable cause for an arrest.

Coppola was booked into the Pinellas County jail and released later the same day after posting $10,000 bail, records show.

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