Illegal Alien Rapes 73-year-old wheel chair bound woman
73-year-old rape victim: Security, independence, privacy, pet all gone
By: Heather Nann Collins, Journal Inquirer
08/23/2007
For a 73-year-old disabled East Hartford woman, the life she had before Alejandro Cuy Xum raped and beat her early one morning is gone forever.
Gone, she told a Hartford Superior Court judge on Wednesday, are her sense of safety and security.
Gone are the friendships she had with her neighbors at the Willow Arms apartment complex on Main Street.
Gone is her independence: Since the attack, she has moved to an assisted living facility, where instead of privacy and a home filled with a lifetime of memories she shares a room with another person and must confine her personal items to one dresser.
And gone too is the canine companion that Cuy Xum also beat when he sneaked into the woman's apartment just after 4 a.m. on July 18, 2005.
"When someone invades your home and there is nothing you can do to protect yourself, you feel terribly vulnerable," she wrote in a statement to Judge Thomas P. Miano.
The woman - who is confined to an electric wheelchair and tethered to an oxygen tank - was accompanied by her daughter, who read her mother's three-page statement at Cuy Xuy's sentencing Wednesday.
"I am afraid of people in a way I never have been before," the woman wrote. "My confidence in most things is gone. That part of my life ended."
In a plea deal Cuy Xum, 27, was convicted in July of first-degree sexual assault, first-degree burglary, and assault on an elderly person.
Cuy Xum also was convicted of second-degree burglary for a break-in at a home near the woman's apartment the night before the rape.
In that case, Cuy Xum crept into the sleeping homeowner's bedroom, rifled through the man's trousers that were hanging over a chair, and stole from his wallet. He also took a ring, prosecutor Edward R. Narus told Miano.
Narus had sought a 25-year prison sentence for Cuy Xum, a Guatemalan native who had illegally been in the United States for less than a month when he was arrested by East Hartford police.
It wasn't an unreasonable request, Narus said, given the "savage attack" by Cuy Xum.
The woman's electric wheelchair was parked next to her bed, Narus said, making it obvious to anyone that she was vulnerable and essentially defenseless. Rather than simply taking whatever valuables he could and leaving the apartment, Cuy Xum responded to the woman's vulnerability by raping and beating her.
"The violence he then inflicted upon her was totally gratuitous in every sense of the word," Narus said.
And Narus made reference to the June 23 break-in at a Chesire home that ended with a mother and her two daughters murdered and the father's savage beating. Two of the dead were sexually assaulted. Police there have charged a pair of career burglars who now face the death penalty.
"We can all understand the fear," Narus said. "While we might be in our home, people can enter and do what they will."
But Miano said he considered a host of factors in reducing Cuy Xum's sentence to 20 years to serve, including his low IQ and other mental health issues, and potential problems with police searches done after the fact.
Nevertheless, the judge noted, the "devastating act that just affronts humanity" committed by Cuy Xum won't likely be erased for the woman, even with a lengthy prison sentence for her attacker.
"No one can appreciate what that lady has gone through," Miano said. "It's much more painful than the bruises. No one should be subjected to that - no one."
With the assistance of a Spanish interpreter, Cuy Xum repeatedly asked for forgiveness and apologized for what he did.
And his lawyer, Public Defender William C. O'Connor, said the 20-year sentence handed down by the court very likely will be exactly that - not the 85 percent some defendants serve before they're paroled.
Given the Chesire case and the current lawmakers' response - some are calling for 25-year mandatory minimum sentences for home invasions and an examination of parole policies is under way - Cuy Xum "is never going to get parole in a case like this."
After Cuy Xum serves his prison sentence, Narus said, it is very likely he will be deported to Guatemala.
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