Man gets 18 years for Villa Park rape attempt
A man who claimed he was high on PCP when he climbed into a Villa Park woman’s apartment, undressed, and tried to rape her was sentenced Tuesday to 18 years in prison.
DuPage County Judge Kathryn Creswell imposed the term on 37-year-old Juan Rivera-Rodriguez, who pleaded guilty in October to home invasion and attempted aggravated criminal sexual assault.
Rivera-Rodriguez claimed he unwittingly smoked marijuana laced with PCP and had no memory of the August 2006 attack.
Prosecutor Romas Mockaitis said the victim, then 24, had fallen asleep on a couch with several windows open when she awoke in the middle of the night to find Rivera-Rodriguez lying naked on top of her.
He said the defendant groped the victim, then dragged her to a bedroom where she feigned an asthma attack.
“It was her quick thinking that scared him enough to run out of the apartment,” Mockaitis said.
The case went uncharged for nearly four years, until Rivera-Rodriguez was imprisoned on a felony traffic case and ordered to submit his DNA to a state database.
Last year, investigators matched that DNA to the collar of a shirt left behind at the victim’s apartment, less than a mile away from where Rivera-Rodriguez lived at the time. Authorities also matched the defendant to a fingerprint on a window frame. He was charged a month before he was due to be paroled.
In a letter read by his attorney in court Tuesday, Rivera-Rodriguez claimed he smoked marijuana with several people before the attack and only later learned it was laced with PCP. He apologized to the victim and her husband, saying he hoped they could “find it in their hearts to forgive me.”
“I don’t remember anything else from the rest of that day,” he wrote, according to his attorney, Assistant Public Defender Brian Jacobs. “I was not of sound mind and body.”
Jacobs noted his client had no prior record of violence and said the rape attempt appeared to be the result of a “horrific reaction” to drugs. Prosecutors countered that the attack showed “escalating behavior” for the four-time felon, who was deported to Mexico in 2001 only to return illegally four months later.
Prosecutors said the victim remains deeply troubled and is unable to sleep in the dark.
“The court can only imagine the terror the victim felt,” Creswell said.