A Queens mother who was savagely gang-raped in Flushing Meadows Park said the five homeless immigrants who beat and brutalized her carried out their attack like “a pack of wild wolves in search of their prey.”
“They punched me so hard that I was knocked to the floor,” the woman said in a scathing letter read to Supreme Court Justice Randall Eng yesterday before he sentenced Victor Cruz, one of her attackers, to 21 years in prison.
“They savagely dragged me like an animal, like a piece of furniture, and took me to a secluded area of the park, a hut, a foul place that smelled so bad that not even animals should be made to be there, where I was brutally and repeatedly raped by five or more men.”
Cruz, Luis Carmona, Carlos Rodriguez, Armando Juvenal and José Hernandez pleaded guilty in December to rape and kidnapping charges in exchange for sentences of 20 to 23 years.
“This is a crime that can only be described as one of blood-chilling inhumanity,” Eng told Cruz, 22, who apologized to the woman.
All of the attackers, except Carmona, were in the United States illegally. The case has been widely cited by critics of the Immigration and Naturalization Service who say the agency consistently fails to deport dangerous illegals.
The victim, a 43-year-old mother of two, said the Dec. 19, 2002, attack has taken a devastating toll.
“I am afraid to go out. I have nightmares. I am not able to sleep,” she wrote. “I feel depressed and sad most of the time, and cannot even perform simple activities a lot of times.”
The attack began at 9:30 p.m. on a walkway connecting the National Tennis Center to Shea Stadium.
The woman said she and her boyfriend were “having a quiet, wonderful and relaxing evening,” when the five accosted them, beat her boyfriend and robbed them.
She was dragged to a shantytown along the Long Island Rail Road tracks where at least three of the men lived.
“I screamed for help and tried to get away, but to no avail. That only made them beat and punch me ever more and harder,” she said.
The woman was sexually tortured for three hours before cops rescued her. The men were arrested and gave confessions.
Juvenal, Carmona and Rodriguez are to be sentenced next Thursday. Hernandez will undergo a psychiatric exam and be sentenced next month.
The victim – who is suing the city and the MTA for $50 million – said she and loved ones are still trying to cope.
“I have become dependant on people,” she said. “I cannot be intimate again, and it is scary to be hugged.”