A vile rapist was sentenced to 25 years to life today for following his teenaged victim home to Prince Street, holding a box-cutter to her throat and then violating her on the concrete floor of her courtyard.
“I am still now, 4 years later, picking up the pieces of myself and trying to put them back together,” the woman, now 24, wrote in a victim impact letter submitted to Manhattan Supreme Court Justice Gregory Carro.
“I will carry this with me for the rest of my life, and now, so will you,” she wrote to her attacker, Andres Suarez, 30, of The Bronx.
“Every night that you can’t sleep, every injury you suffer, every feeling of hopelessness and helplessness — know that it is earned, and does not even begin to compare to the horror you introduced to me,” she wrote.
The victim, a musician, has since moved to Europe, and was not in court to watch her monster ask for forgiveness through a Spanish interpreter.
Suarez — who sat in court in ankle shackles, handcuffs, and protective correctional mittens — had skated free for three years.
He was only matched to the attack when his DNA was swabbed after a 2012 assault arrest, and came up a hit with the anonymous DNA profile on record from the rape.
“Not only did you forever affect the life of the person you so violently raped, your conduct was clearly predatory,” the judge said in giving Suarez the maximum sentence allowed by law.
Suarez had alluded at trial to his DNA winding up at the crime scene from consensual sex, a claim the jury rejected in November after just two hours of deliberations.