Justice finally, “prevailed”, call it, belated justice if you will, from the Front Page Sections, translated…
A seventy-year-old man, Shen, was accused of breaking and entering, and raping a pregnant woman, molesting her elementary and kindergarten aged daughters. After years of being at large, last year, the police was able to connect him to the cases using the latest DNA technologies.
The Taipei District Court mandated the case dropped due to the ten-year statutory period. But the High Courts found that his actions were within the statutory period of ten years for rape, that it was, still valid, found him guilty and gave him EIGHT years.
The High Courts stated, on the rape of the pregnant woman that if basing off the former legislations of “over GIVE years of jail sentence”, with the statutory period being twenty years; on the first trial, the judge believed the statutory period of a decade was still valid. On the molestations of the two young girls, but because there’s a shorter statutory period for that, the case was still dropped.
The woman who was raped was only thirty, she was eight-months pregnant and she’d blamed her fiancée for not being there to protect her, they terminated the engagement. She’d cried and told, after she was raped, she’d started having recurring nightmares. These past years, she’d raised her child all on her own, didn’t have much luck with work at all, she’s still living in the shadows of the rape she’d endured.
In the earlier years, Shen worked as a fisher in Keelung, when he’d committed the rape, he was working as a welder in Songshan District. In the early morning hours of four on July 27th, 1996, Shen broke the steel windows at a local Eastside residence to commit burglary, saw there was a woman sleeping, he’d turned on her. The pregnant woman woke out of shock, and begged, “I’ll do what you want me to, just don’t hurt my child!”, after he’d raped her, he’d burglarized her home.
On December 19th of the same year, Shen broke and entered into a residential home again, where he’d sexually molested a five-year-old young girl, as the five-year-old girl’s older sister woke from her cries next to her, she too, fell victim to his assault.
The police found similarities in the two cases, took the DNA, the prints of the suspect, but didn’t set up the files back then, and not made a match; in 2014, Shen was caught for grand larceny, after the printed him, the records showed he was the man who’d raped the pregnant woman from back when. In 2014, Shen was arrested for burglary, after the police printed his fingers, it’d shown that he was the “Apartment Wolf” from back then.
So, this sexual predator was, finally caught! But, imagine how long the victims felt unsafe inside their own homes, and how much traumas these victims must’ve endured, and, they’re still not, healed completely yet…