Houston Chronicle

Police name a suspect in rapes

Man used victim’s debit card, has ties to area of assault

- By Nicole Hensley STAFF WRITER

He tied them up, covered their eyes and raped them. According to detectives, he then forced his victims to shower away any trace of DNA that would link him to the crimes.

During one of the attacks, a woman begged him to stop because she was pregnant.

Houston investigat­ors on Tuesday named 28-year-old Brandon Jay Carter as the suspect behind a string of harrowing assaults that began last June in west Houston and Greenspoin­t after tying him to the use of a victim’s stolen debit card. The attacks started three months after his release from the Harris County Jail on a criminal trespass charge.

Police believe he stalked his victims and waited for them to be alone.

“Brandon Carter is not a very nice man,” said Reagan Daniel, a Houston police detective. “He’s very, very methodical about not leaving evidence at the scenes.”

So far, Carter has been charged with debit card abuse and one count aggravated sexual assault, with the likelihood that he will face more charges, police said. As of Tuesday afternoon, he had not been apprehende­d. He has ties to the Greenspoin­t area.

Carter, who is 5 feet 8 inches and weighs about 150 pounds, has shown a pattern of predatory behavior in his decadelong rap sheet. Most of the arrests were for misdemeano­rs, and whichever felonies he was charged with were either dismissed or downgraded. Two warrants for Carter’s arrest were issued last month, one for debit card abuse linked to the latest, Jan. 5 attack, and another for aggravated sexual assault for a June 18 allegation.

In the latest incident, the woman revealed it was the first time her boyfriend had not spent the night with her, Daniel said. The attacker ambushed her outside her apartment as she left for work. He forced her back inside at gun

point, court records show. The charging papers for debit card abuse do not say that she was sexually assaulted but detectives linked the events at a news conference.

During the attack, the man covered her face with a hood and bound her with zip ties. He found her debit card and demanded that she give him her PIN, documents state.

While receiving an examinatio­n at a hospital, the woman called police and checked her bank account. More than $400 in cash had been withdrawn at a convenienc­e store in the 600 block of Greens Road, authoritie­s said. Surveillan­ce footage was used to link Carter to the withdrawal, and that another man was him with.

“He made a mistake and we caught it,” Daniel said.

Suspicious contents

A hint of how methodical the attacks were carried out was found in a bag seized by police last April when a woman’s brother spied Carter loitering near her apartment.

The bag contained a BB gun, latex gloves, two sets of blacked-out goggles, nine zip-ties, a pair of pruning shears, rope and a trash bag. The contents, while suspect, were not illegal to have, police said. Though Carter was under suspicion of trespassin­g — and did not live at the apartment building — patrol officers apprehende­d him on outstandin­g traffic tickets, Daniel said.

Afterward, Carter never came to collect his possession­s. The stash was logged as usual and kept in an HPD property room until Carter was identified in the January assault.

“People get arrested with the strangest stuff,” Daniel said. “But there’s no crime in carrying goggles and there’s no crime in carrying a pistol.”

Daniel now believes he was likely stalking a prospectiv­e victim when he was encountere­d in April.

‘Scrub evidence away’

Two months later, Carter broke into a woman’s Greenspoin­t apartment and used goggles to cover his victim’s eyes, according to court documents.

The 42-year-old woman woke to find a man pointing a gun at her. A strip of cloth covered the bridge of his nose and he was wearing her shoes, court documents show. He bound her hands behind her back. And when the goggles refused to stay on, he fashioned a shirt into a blindfold and sexually assaulted her.

The woman said Carter then forced her to brush her teeth and shower as he watched with a gun pointed at her. He began assaulting her again and she pleaded with him to stop “because she was pregnant,” according to court documents. He instead had her take a second shower “so she would scrub the evidence away.”

Details from a third assault in December were not readily available, but Detective Ramon Garcia told reporters the woman was also stalked, alone and forced to shower.

In each sexual assault kit, the Harris County Institute of Forensic Sciences found no sign of the suspect’s DNA, according to police.

Exposure charge

Amid a scattering of arrests, court records reveal that Carter was often busted on accusation­s of sexual offenses and breaking into homes.

In 2011, the Harris County Sheriff’s Office arrested Carter on the felony charge of attempted sexual assault. He made bond and landed in a Fort Bend County jail the next year for burglary with the intent to commit a sex offense, records show. The Harris County case was dismissed in 2012 out of preference for the Fort Bend County investigat­ion. In 2016, that case was dismissed for the following reason: “Identifica­tion suppressed. No additional evidence at this time.”

Carter was arrested again in 2017 for burglary after he entered a woman’s home with the plan to rob her. He entered a guilty plea and the charge was downgraded to criminal trespass, a misdemeano­r. His lawyer at the time noted in court documents that Carter “was looking at many years in prison.”

Long before Carter’s suspected sexual assault spree, Houston police encountere­d Carter on their own turf.

He exposed his genitals to a woman at 1200 Travis St., the Houston Police Department headquarte­rs. Carter was found guilty of that 2009 charge, also a misdemeano­r.

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