Man who raped, burned woman, attacked prison staff gets life sentence
The dark, grainy video took an interminable five minutes to play: a building on a dark stretch of a Northwest Indiana highway; a flash of light; the headlights of a car tearing out from the parking lot.
Then, more than two minutes in, the fiery silhouette of a burning woman staggers onto the road, light flickers as she rolls on the ground to snuff out the flames.
Diane Pranske survived, and despite the pain from third-degree burns covering a third of her body, walked a half-mile up the road to a McDonald’s.
Friday, a federal judge in Chicago sentenced Pranske’s attacker, Carleous Clay, to life in prison. Clay also received an additional term of 10 years for an attack 18 months later when he tried to take a prison caseworker hostage inside the Metropolitan Correctional Center.
“The level of terror you inflicted on these two women is unimaginable,” U.S. District Judge Virginia M. Kendall said, staring at the bald, beefy defendant. “The physical pain you inflicted on Ms. Pranske alone is difficult to hear.”
The courtroom gallery was filled with Pranske’s supporters, seated alongside dozens of MCC staff. Pranske, who gave a statement in court, sat in a wheelchair out front. It was the first time she had seen Clay — who pleaded guilty on the eve of his trial — since the attack.
“It means that the world is safe from that evil monster,” Pranske said, her speech slurred by her injuries. “It makes me happy to know that I had something to do with putting him away. I’m sorry I had to pay the price, but, oh well, that’s what had to happen.”
Asked to address the court before he was sentenced, Clay apologized to both women.
“I don’t smile when I think about what happened. It bothered me because that’s not that person I am, especially when it comes to doing something to a woman,” he said. “I thank God every day that Diane got up that day.”
Pranske spent nine months in hospitals immediately after the September 2015 attack, including three months in an intensive care unit. She remains unable to walk and is legally blind.
Clay, who was on parole and had moved into a Lansing house near Pranske’s thanks to a church program for ex-offenders, broke into her house while she was at work, Assistant U.S. Attorney Angel Krull said.
Clay went back to the house a second time, and was interrupted by Pranske when she returned from work. He threatened her with a hammer, and forced her into the tiny trunk of her Chevy Aveo. He drove to an ATM and tried to withdraw funds from her account, then drove her to an abandoned building in Burns Harbor, Ind. There, he raped her, then choked her unconscious. He doused her in lighter fluid, set her on fire and drove off in her car.
While awaiting trial in April 2017, Clay told a caseworker at the MCC he was having problems with another inmate. Once inside her office, Clay pulled out a homemade knife and forced her to lock the door.
The caseworker, a 20-year veteran of the federal Bureau of Prisons, shouted for help on a radio when Clay was distracted, and prison staff unlocked the door and doused Clay with pepper spray.
The caseworker said she has since returned to work, but continues to struggle with post-traumatic stress.
“I thought I was going to lose my mind,” she said. “I could not shake that evil I felt in my bones and saw in [Clay’s] eyes.”