Karate creep ‘molest’ bust
A karate instructor has been charged with molesting four young female students in his upper Manhattan studio — nearly 20 years after he was convicted of preying on another child, officials said.
Hector Bencosme, 57, was arrested Saturday for allegedly abusing the children — all between 10 and 14 years old — inside his dingy basement dojo on Post Avenue near Academy Street in Inwood, cops said.
The Upper West Side resident told his victims he needed to evaluate their bodies — then inappropriately touched them and photographed them topless over a two-month period, according to authorities.
“The defendant lured young females into his martial-arts school under the guise of teaching them,” prosecutor Kristin Caruso said at Bencosme’s Sunday arraignment in Manhattan Criminal Court. “Instead, he sexually abused at least four students, touching their butts and breasts.”
Bencosme — facing a slew of charges, including sexual abuse, forcible touching and use of a child in a sexual performance — was remanded.
His arrest comes nearly two
decades after he was charged in January 2000 with molesting a child inside the youth’s Washington Heights home.
Bencosme was found guilty of the abuse, but skipped his sentencing while out on bail, according to Caruso.
“Ultimately, he has never been sentenced,” she said at Sunday’s arraignment.
Relatives of Bencosme — who, according to his lawyer, has two adult daughters living in the city — told The Post in 2003 that he had fled to his native Dominican Republic.
At the time, he operated a taekwondo school on West 159th Street — eerily similar to the karate studio he’d kept in recent months at the end of a trash-strewn Inwood alley.
It was at the Inwood studio that Bencosme allegedly massaged the four girls and saved topless photos of them on his cellphone.
In one case, he allegedly massaged one of his young charge’s bare breasts, a police source said. In another, he rubbed his genitals against a student’s buttocks, the source added.
His obsession with underage girls came to light when a student using Bencosme’s phone found some of the explicit pictures and came forward, according to a source.