Demond Demas, the Texas A&M receiver arrested last week on a charge of assault, is now the subject of an open investigation from an incident with another girlfriend.
The father of the current woman allegedly assaulted by Demond Demas attacked the wide receiver before a campus conduct hearing just days ago. The woman’s father and mother were charged with misdemeanor assault and taken to Brazos County Jail.
Brianna Turk, who is a current student at Prairie View and a girlfriend of Demas’ since they attended high school, is now accusing him of slapping and choking her several times during a six-month period starting in the summer of 2020.
“Turk, her voice shaking, spoke publicly for the first time about what happened to her in 2020.
“He started to choke me,” Turk said. “At that point I had to take my hands off my face, because I was trying to grab his hands to make him let me go. I told him, ‘I can’t breathe!’ He let go for a split second and I thought that was the end of it. But then he started choking me again, and I was screaming for him to get off me.
“He eventually let me go, and when he did I crawled into the bathroom and started bawling.”
The Brazos County district attorney’s office declined to pursue charges at that time, citing a lack of overall evidence and a “she said/he said” circumstance, a law enforcement official said.
Turk reported Demas’s alleged multiple assaults to A&M police in November 2020. The case remains open with the university police department and a school investigation is ongoing.
Turk’s mother, Iesha Turk, even tried reaching out to the A&M football program to discuss Demas’ alleged abuse of her daughter.
“No one ever reached out (from A&M football), and I had sent them a picture of her (bruised) face,” Iesha said. “I have never heard back from anyone from the football staff.”
Demas had already been suspended from A&M a couple of weeks ago because he was not attending class. The suspension was unrelated to the assault cases.
For Brianna, she stated she mostly ignored the early signs and she paid for it dearly.
“I just didn’t see it the way everybody else saw it,” she said. “I thought, ‘Oh, he’s just mad right now … he’ll get over it. He just acts this way sometimes.’ A lot of people around me were telling me it would turn into a bad situation, but I didn’t see the signs.”
After a year of dating, that’s when violence started in their relationship. It began with pops to her mouth.
“The very first time I remember him slapping me in the mouth was upstairs in the movie room of his aunt’s house,” Brianna said. “I said something ‘smart’ to him, and he doesn’t like it when I talk smart to him, and he just popped me in the mouth for it. I thought, ‘Where did that even come from?’ I was in shock.
“I told him, ‘You can’t do stuff like that because my parents have always told me little stuff turns into full-on abuse.’ He said, ‘You know I’d never really put my hands on you, right?’”
Brianna recalled an incident where she was trying to style his hair when things got violent.
“I said to him, ‘Can you just turn your head so I can finish doing your hair?’” Brianna said. “I said it in a tone that he didn’t like, and he just stared dead at me, and I already knew he was going to pop me in the mouth — I just knew it was coming.
“But this time he full-on slapped me across my face, and so hard it turned my face to the other side. I just sat there and cried and he apologized and said he was sorry and that he would never do it again.”
In November 2020, Brianna finally told her parents about the abuse and how she had been trying to put makeup on over the resulting black eye.
“I cried to Demond about wanting to tell my mom, because I tell her everything and this was the (worst) thing that had ever happened to me, and I couldn’t even tell her,” Brianna said, her voice trembling. “He said I couldn’t tell anybody because he didn’t want to ‘lose everything.’ His aunt is a trauma therapist, and I told him she wouldn’t say anything to anybody about her nephew, and I could get the help I needed.
“But he said, ‘No, she’ll be mad at me! You can’t say anything.’”
The Brazos County district attorney’s office declined to pursue charges at that time, citing a lack of overall evidence and a “she said/he said” circumstance, a law enforcement official said.
