By The Diary
27 Sep 2024, 01:16 AM EDT
Timothy Harnett was sentenced to a minimum of 98 years in prison for kidnapping a woman, beating her and raping her for four days in Kingsbridge, The Bronx (NYC).
Harnett, 45, had been found guilty by a jury in July and has now received his sentence. The crime took place over four days between April and May 2022. It all started when he offered a 28-year-old woman money in exchange for sex. He then took her to an abandoned building on Briggs Av, where he hit her with an iron bar, fracturing her wrist and dislocating her knee. He then raped her and held her for four days, according to authorities.
The unidentified victim managed to escape by breaking a window and told a person to call 911, he recalled. News 12. At the time of the crime, Harnett was a homeless man and a “level 3” registered sex offender, the highest in New York state, he noted. DailyNews.
Investigators detailed that Harnett stripped the woman naked, tied her feet and handcuffed her wrists. He also threatened to kill her if she tried to escape, but she did exactly that on May 2. When Harnett left for a laundromat, the victim used the tire iron to break a window. With the fragments he cut the ties on his feet. He then flagged down a passerby who called 911 and flagged down an NYPD patrol car.
NYPD later detained Harnett at another abandoned building in Harlem. Upon reviewing his background, it was determined that 23 years earlier, in May 1999, he threatened a fifteen-year-old girl with a knife, forced her to go to a hotel, and then held her captive for hours while he sexually assaulted her.
That time a jury found him guilty of sodomy, which is a criminal sexual act under state law, and he was sentenced to 18 years in state prison. He was released in December 2020 and finished his parole in September 2021, state records show.
In a similar case, in October 2021 Aquilino Torres was sentenced to 24 years in prison for kidnapping and torturing his girlfriend and her 7-year-old son for several days in NYC, because the woman allegedly cheated on him, according to the FBI.
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