Jury ponders fate of man accused of rapes
He is suspected of raping five women from 2009 to 2011.
WESTPALM BEACH — Six years after law enforcement warned that a serial rapist was loose in the community, a Palm Beach County jury on Wednesday began deliberating the fate of a 30-year-old former Lake Worth man charged in the crimes.
Baltazar “Gabriel” Delgado-Ros was the last person the jury heard from before adjourning to decide whether he raped a suburban Lake Worth woman in July 2009 wh i l e h e r 2 3 - mon t h - o l d daughter slept in an adjacent room. The young mother is one of five women from Jupiter to Lake Worth whom Delgado-Ros is accused of raping between 2009 and 2011. It is the first case to be brought to trial.
In an video played for the jury, Delgado-Ros tells Palm Beach County sheriff ’s deputies he “sexually assaulted” the woman, who lived near Palm Springs but is not being identified by The Palm Beach Post because of the nature of the crime. She was the wife of a co-worker who, he claimed, owed him $150 for illicit drugs.
“I was drunk , ” he tel l s investigators in his native Spanish as jurors read a transcript of an English translation of the interview. “I now say I’m sorry to (her), to forgive me that time I took my anger out on the wrong person.”
Prosecutors said the statement was irrefutable proof that Delgado-Ros was guilty of both burglary and sexual battery, a charge that could send him to prison for life.
“She awoke with a man she did not know at the foot of her bed. He held a knife to her throat and raped her while her baby slept in the next room,” Assistant State Attorney Justin Hoover said in closing arguments. “We know it because he said so.”
But his attorney, Assistant Public Defender Maurissa Jones, urged jurors not to give too much weight to the confession. While acknowledging that it might be difficult to understand why a man would confess to a rape he didn’t commit, she offered a simple explanation.
“Gabriel had found God,” she said. He believed God would take care of him and that he needed to atone for b ad t hi ng s he had done. But she insisted that didn’t include rape.
The six jurors deliberated for an hour Wednesday before asking to hear the testimony from the rape victim again. They are to return to court this morning to hear a recording of the testimony and continue their deliberations.
Jones claimed that the sex was consensual. The victim’s now ex-husband, who like Delgado-Ros was born in Guatemala, had been picked up and was in the process of being depor ted. Perhaps worried her husband would find out about the tryst, she instead told deputies she had been raped, the defense attorney said.
Hoover and Assistant State Attorney Brianna Coakley scoffed at the explanation. Delgado-Ros held a blade to the woman’s throat. She had cuts on her neck and her throat. She didn’t recognize Delgado-Ros as her husband’s co-worker because it was dark, and she was frantic that he would make good on threats to kill her and then possibly kill her baby, Coakley said.
Delgado-Ros, who police said is also accused of raping a young girl in Guatemala when he briefly returned to his home country in 2011, was n’ t c h a r ge d wi t h t h e rapes here until 2014. For five years, the woman lived in fear that her rapist would return, Hoover said.
“He invaded her home. He invaded her privacy. He invaded her safety and securit y,” Hoover told jurors. “Find him guilty.”