Rape case ends with woman's throat slashed

March 22, 2007

Adapted from the New York Times

The killing of a 20-year-old woman, and the arrest of a man who was under court order to stay away from her, has raised troubling questions for law enforcement and the young woman’s family about apparent miscues that preceded the attack.

The suspect, 29, who was awaiting trial on a charge of raping the woman in 2005, was arraigned yesterday on murder and other charges in her stabbing death. As the woman left her home on her way to work, the police said, the man grabbed her and slashed her throat.

He faces a possible sentence of life in prison without parole if convicted of the most serious charges. His lawyer said his client was not in the area at the time of the attack.

Friends and neighbors of the woman, who like the suspect was an immigrant from Guyana, said they were disturbed to learn of complaints that the man had been a menacing presence in her life even after he had been charged with her rape.

“Some protection should have been given to her,” said a neighbor and a friend of the woman. “The restraining order did not work,” he said. “Why should this happen to such a beautiful girl? She did nothing to him.”

A spokesman for the district attorney whose office is prosecuting the suspect on the rape charge, said prosecutors learned late last year of a complaint that the man was trying to locate the woman, despite the restraining order. The spokesman said the attorney could have offered the woman a bodyguard, or moved her to a guarded location, but elected not to do so.

“We were in constant contact with the victim,” the spokesman said, adding that a member of the district attorney’s staff spoke with the woman three days before she was killed. “She did not express any concerns for her safety or report any threats.”

The woman was portrayed yesterday as an attractive and in some ways naïve young woman living in a close-knit community of fellow Guyanese immigrants. She had been separated from her own family since her parents and younger brother returned to Guyana years earlier.

According to her complaint to the police, she was raped by the man, who was then working for a real estate office, after he invited her into his apartment on the pretense that he would help her find her own place. The woman, then 18 and engaged, waited about eight months to report the rape to the police, a period in which she married another Guyanese immigrant.

A neighbor said her delay in reporting the rape might have been a result of nervousness about her immigration status.

“She didn’t have her paperwork,” said the neighbor, who added that the woman’s marriage, to a man with citizenship, had been intended in part to secure her own status as a resident immigrant. “She got her green card, and then she had the courage to speak out.”

A spokesman for Immigration and Customs Enforcement in New York said he could not discuss the woman’s immigration status.

The suspect was charged with rape in February 2006 and released on $5,000 bail. With prosecutors planning to put the woman on the stand at his trial, a judge issued an order of protection against him, which remained in effect at the time of her death.

In October, her in-laws told the police that the man had threatened to kill them if they did not divulge her location. “He said he was going to kill my daughter-in-law and my son and that he was going to kill all of us,” the victim’s father-in-law said yesterday.

The man was arrested on charges of aggravated harassment. But, the family did not press charges. “I thought if we didn’t press charges he would leave us alone and just go away,” the father-in-law said.

The district attorney’s spokesman said that after his office learned of the harassment complaint, a prosecutor was told to relay the information to the judge presiding over the rape case.

But the spokesman said it was unclear if the prosecutor, whom he did not identity, had followed through. The judge did not order any added protection. Nor did the district attorney, the spokesman said.

One reason, the spokesman said, was that the man seemed to be a model defendant, appearing in court as ordered more than 10 times for pretrial proceedings.

Another aspect of the woman’s life came to light yesterday: her husband had been under a more limited form of restraining order that prohibited him from harming her, although they continued to live together. That order resulted from the man’s guilty plea to assault and harassment, based on a November complaint by the woman that he had slapped and punched her.