Admitted Child Rapist
… is about a court hearing that bothered me as much as the tail-end of my daily AC crime beat days. Sat in court yesterday and watched Jose Carrasquillo plead guilty to the brutal, savage rape of an 11-year-old whose name I kept out of the story both here and in the paper. It’s a story about a not-entirely-mentally-put-together guy getting caught up in drugs that’d make 1980s Miami blush and snap when the woman he had a crush on decided to go off one night with a black guy.
Here’s a link. Here’s an extended draft, much of which couldn’t fit in today’s paper.
His hair shaved, eyes vacant and cuffed left hand gripping his chin, Jose Carrasquillo admitted he “was a little nervous” yesterday before assistant district attorney Catharine Thurston read the details of, and police statements made after, his brutal rape of an 11-year-old girl.
By noon, the 27-year-old pleaded guilty to 10 charges that could bring a sentence anywhere from a decade till the day he dies. He admitted to committing both that June 1, 2009 attack in Kensington and an assault on a 16-year-old girl an hour earlier. The hearing became a lesson in how drug-addled mental instability and race-fueled hatred can destroy lives.
According to records, Carrasquillo and a woman who he “had a crush on” used some PCP on May 31. He then snorted cocaine, but she left him with a black friend. “I went berserk,” he later told police. Black people “treated me bad and they think they are the supreme race.” From there, he was looking for black people to attack.
By 8 a.m. the next day, he approached the 11-year-old, who had walked her 4-year-old sister to school through a park near 6th and Indiana. Carrasquillo told her he was a friend of her mother’s and dragged her into an alley.
“He assaulted her in every way imaginable,” said Thurston.
When he saw she was covered with blood from the waist down, he told her, “That’s what happens. It’s OK.” He then told her to walk to school. When Carrasquillo left, the girl told a passerby what had happened.
The victim required surgery and multiple days of hospitalization. People who’d seen his wanted poster found the suspect days later. Before police arrived, Carrasquillo was beaten and stabbed into the intensive-care unit. He told police they had the wrong guy but, relenting when presented with evidence, he said he uses wet, crack and snorts cocaine. “That’s why I don’t remember things,” the report stated. “It was the drugs.”
A sentencing hearing is scheduled for Nov. 15.