Homeless teen raped
Repeat sex attacker jailed for nine years
A Hamilton man who raped a homeless teenaged girl has narrowly avoided being sentenced to preventative detention.
In what Justice Paul Davison QC described as a finely balanced case, he opted not to impose what would have been an indefinite jail term for defendant Abdi Omar.
He did, however, jail the 34-year-old for nine years, with a minimum non-parole period of four-and-a-half years.
Omar appeared for sentence in the High Court in Hamilton on Tuesday, after having been found guilty by a Hamilton District Court jury of one charge of rape, following a trial in October last year.
It was a charge laid following an incident that happened in the early hours of December 31, 2015, in a Hamilton park.
Omar met his 18-year-old victim in Garden Place the previous evening. She was, at that time, homeless and had been sleeping rough in a band rotunda in the central city.
He approached the young woman, who was with a group of friends, and told her she was pretty.
He then took the group to a liquor store where alcohol was purchased, and they travelled to a house in a rural area to drink.
Later, he drove his victim and a friend back to the city. He dropped the friend off at the house where she lived, but as his victim went to hop out of the car as well, he put his hand on her arm and told her to stay with him.
He then took her to another house, where they spent some time with one of Omar’s associates before leaving.
The young woman asked Omar to drop her off at the rotunda. Instead, he drove to a park in Hamilton where, shortly before dawn, he dragged her on to the back seat of the car and raped her.
He then dropped her off at a toilet block in Steele Park.
However it wasn’t the first time Omar had committed such a crime.
In January 2009 he was sentenced in the Hamilton District Court to five years and nine months’ prison after pleading guilty to two counts of sexual violation by unlawful sexual connection.
Those charges related to incidents on the night of August 14 the previous year, when Omar and his female victim had attended a party in Hamilton. At the party Omar had unsuccessfully tried to proposition several female partygoers. In the early hours of August 15, the victim left the party with a friend but later found herself alone with Omar.
Omar led that victim to a toilet block next to Fairfield Primary School and told her that she could not leave until she had sex with him. He forced her to have anal intercourse and also forced her to perform oral sex on him. Later, outside the toilet block, Omar became involved in an argument with another woman and the victim escaped by hiding in nearby bushes.
At his sentencing on Tuesday,
Crown prosecutor Rebecca Guthrie called on the judge to impose preventative detention.
This was because Omar had been deemed as posing an ongoing threat to the public and the similarities to his 2008 and 2015 offences – non-consensual sex acts in public places with women he had not previously known – indicated there was a repetitive pattern to his offending.
Omar continued to deny his offending and had either not adequately engaged or had declined to take part in rehabilitative programmes following his earlier conviction.
He had also been assessed by two psychologists. One had found him to be at high risk of further violent and sexual offending within 10 years of his release from prison.
The other had balked at making such a conclusion and said it was very difficult to predict future offending based on past offending.
Justice Davison took note of Omar’s troubled background. Born in Somalia, he had witnessed many traumatic events as part of the civil war in that country, including summary executions in the street.
He and his family came to New Zealand as refugees when he was seven years old, and he had experienced difficulty in adapting to schooling and this led to behavioural problems.
In the end, the judge decided that preventative detention wasn’t warranted. On his release the Department of Corrections could make Omar the subject of an extended supervision order, as a means of monitoring his ongoing behaviour.
‘‘I’m ultimately influenced that there is no pattern of serious sexual offending in your case,’’ he said. ‘‘Rehabilitation cannot be ruled out entirely.’’