Man Gets 50-Year Term in Daughter's Rape

A Fairfax County man who raped and impregnated his 12-year-old daughter in 2001 and then fled the country for four years was sentenced yesterday to 50 years in prison.

Attorneys for the man, 39, had argued aggressively that he was innocent at court hearings in early 2002. They filed a motion seeking to preserve fetal tissue in the event that his daughter had an abortion. A Fairfax juvenile court judge rejected that motion, saying that he did not have the authority to order investigators "to obtain evidence which does not exist at this time."

The daughter did not have an abortion and delivered a girl at full term. The girl has genetic disorders, said Fairfax Deputy Commonwealth's Attorney Raymond F. Morrogh.

The father's name is being withheld to protect the identities of his daughter and her child.

Fairfax Circuit Court Judge Stanley P. Klein granted the man $75,000 bail in February 2002, and he was released from jail. He disappeared the next month, and police think he went to his native El Salvador. His daughter's child was born that month, and DNA tests showed that the girl's father is the father.

Fairfax police did not drop the matter. Morrogh said that sex crimes Detective Paul O'Neill "never walked away from this case. This guy was gone for almost four years, and Paul never forgot about him."

In October last year, O'Neill got a tip that the man had returned to the United States. He was arrested at a construction site in the Falls Church area of Fairfax.

The man pleaded guilty in May to rape and sodomy. He faced a possible life sentence on the rape charge.

Fairfax Circuit Court Judge Robert W. Wooldridge Jr. imposed two terms to run concurrently, 50 years for the rape charge and 10 for the sodomy charge.

"He took the greatest gift a man could get, a daughter, and he threw her away," Morrogh said.