RALEIGH - The father of murder victim Stephanie Bennett opted to dismiss a civil suit Monday morning in the midst of a jury trial against her apartment complex.

The dismissal came after a week's worth of testimony about her brutal May 2002 rape and strangulation death in her ground-floor apartment at North Raleigh's Bridgeport Apartments.

Terry "Carmon" Bennett, father of the 23-year-old IBM contractor, filed a lawsuit in May 2004 against the apartment complex's parent company, Equity Residential Inc., accusing the company of not providing a safe environment and not properly fixing a window in her apartment.

Charles A. Bentley, Bennett's attorney, said the lawsuit will be reinstated.

"The case will come back again and be retried," Bentley said, adding that the decision to dismiss the lawsuit was made because of an issue that emerged during trial. He did not specify what the issue was.

North Carolina law allows plaintiffs' attorneys to dismiss a case at any time before they finish calling witnesses to the stand. The case can be refiled within a year, said G. Gray Wilson, a Winston-Salem attorney with 30 years of experience.

In the four days of the trial, jurors heard from a former Raleigh homicide lieutenant in charge of the initial investigation, a security expert and Stephanie Bennett's aunt.

Attorneys for Equity have maintained that the landlords couldn't be responsible for preventing Bennett's killer, who appeared to have stalked her.

"It's been our position all along that they didn't have evidence," attorney Gloria Becker said outside the courtroom.

Bennett's suspected killer, Drew Planten, committed suicide after his October 2005 arrest but before being tried for Bennett's murder.

The lawsuit, seeking at least $10,000 in damages, was filed more than a year before Raleigh police named Planten as a suspect.

A chemist for the N.C. Department of Agriculture, Planten was arrested after police detectives matched a sample of his DNA to genetic material left at the crime scene.

Ballistics evidence found in his apartment after his arrest linked Planten to the 1999 shooting death of a Michigan woman. He is also considered a suspect in a 1993 strangulation death of another woman in Michigan, his home state.

The "first-dismissal" rule is usually used when plaintiff's attorneys want to do more research or get a new judge or jury, said Wilson, the Winston-Salem attorney.

"A dismissal is a way to salvage a case," he said.

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