BANGOR – A very relieved Edward Dalton Jr. left the Penobscot County Superior courthouse Wednesday surrounded by family members, only minutes after a jury acquitted him of raping a teen-ager last summer behind an Orono nightclub.

On the other side of the courthouse, a very disappointed prosecutor, Deputy District Attorney Michael Roberts, walked slowly back to his office, with a pile of evidence tucked beneath his arm.

“I feel tremendously for this victim,” Roberts said, noting that “these cases are extremely difficult to prosecute.”

But Dalton’s attorney, Christopher Largay of Bangor, said the young woman’s story had been inconsistent from the start and said jurors recognized those inconsistencies.

“They [the woman and Dalton] had casual, consensual sex,” he said.

The jury, the majority of them over the age of 50, took just over four hours to reach the not-guilty verdict.

The woman who claimed she was raped, now 19, sat between her mother and father during closing arguments but the family was not in the courtroom to hear the verdict.

“This has been tremendously difficult for her and her family,” Roberts said. “She didn’t want to come forward in the first place and if you talk to any rape crisis workers you’ll find that that is very common.”

Largay said his client was relieved and ready to get on with his life.

“He just graduated from Husson College and he’s got a job with Federal Express that he wants to get back on track,” he said.

Roberts was clearly frustrated by the verdict, though he added that he felt that the jury gave the case a lot of thought.

He said the case was a classic example, however, of a rape victim being placed on trial “and she was put on trial here,” he said.

“It’s also what happens when you have a trial docket that causes an 11-month delay between the incident and the arrest,” he said.

The teen claimed that Dalton, 23, of Bangor, grabbed hold of her wrists as she was locking her car after 1 a.m. in the parking lot of the Ushuaia nightclub on Aug. 19, 2000.

She said she was pulled or pushed to the back of the building where she was pushed face down and raped.

One unusual slant the jury had to grapple with was that the young woman had seen Dalton in line to get into the bar earlier in the evening and admitted that she was familiar with him because they had worked together at the lounge and restaurant in the Holiday Inn on the Odlin Road in Bangor.

Testimony came Wednesday from the lounge manager who said it would have been impossible for the woman and Dalton not to have contact with each other during work. At the time of the alleged assault neither worked at the Holiday Inn any longer.

Yet after the attack the woman told friends and police that she didn’t know her assailant. She then said she thought she knew him from somewhere but didn’t know where.

She testified that a few days later she called a worker at Pete and Larry’s Lounge and found out his name.

Conflicting testimony also arose Wednesday when 27-year-old Shad Lee of Carmel testified that he danced with the woman that evening at the club and spent about an hour and a half standing with her and holding her hand.

Lee then testified that as he was leaving the building at 1:45 a.m., just after the time of the alleged attack, he saw the young woman and Dalton walking along the side of the building toward the front entrance.

“I assumed they had gotten together, so I left,” Lee said.

The woman testified that she had seen Lee that evening but that she did not dance with him. She was recalled to the stand Wednesday after Lee’s testimony and adamantly denied holding Lee’s hand. She said under questioning that he had asked her out before but that she had turned him down.

She further testified that after the alleged assault, Dalton left and she laid on the ground for about 10 minutes before returning to the club to find her friends so they could leave.

Another witness, Pika Bonic, who accompanied the woman to the club that evening, offered conflicting testimony about whether she saw the woman dance with Lee, but in the end told jurors that she was sure she did see them dancing together.

While dancing with another man at the bar may not have played a role in the verdict, it suggested inconsistencies with the woman’s testimony.

On Wednesday, Largay accused Orono police Sgt. Bob Bryant of botching the investigation and said the woman wound up in a trap when she told her friend that she had been raped. Largay said she did not want to admit that she had had sex in the parking lot and made up the story about being raped, thinking it would not go any further.

Soon, however, her friends and family were involved and then the police were contacted.

“And then it was too late,” Largay said.