Darryl Phelps, a registered sex offender on parole, was sentenced to 37 years to life in prison yesterday for the brutal assault and rape of a Korean visitor on a sidewalk in Midtown Manhattan inside a construction shed.
Phelps, 62, was found guilty of predatory sexual assault and molestation by a jury following his trial for a case in December 2021, when the victim walked home from her job as a waitress in Koreatown.
The unidentified 23-year-old victim was in New York on a student visa and left the US after the brutal incident. She has not returned since, not even to testify at trial.
“I desperately want the perpetrator to be punished,” the victim wrote in a statement in Manhattan Supreme Court on Wednesday by Assistant District Attorney Austin Minogue. “I want him to receive draconian punishment if possible,” the New York Post quoted her as saying.
“Notably, while this survivor did not return to the United States to testify, our prosecutors were able to secure this conviction using body camera footage, eyewitness testimony, and other evidence,” Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg stressed.
Phelps had been found guilty after less than an hour of deliberations. According to the evidence, on Dec. 22, 2021, he threw the young woman to the ground after hitting her head with a hard object. He then hit her several more times and threatened to kill her if she made any noise. He then proceeded to remove her pants, sexually assault and rape her, holding her down with one arm and wrapping the other around her neck.
“I can’t forget what he said to me as he removed my clothes and took off his own: ‘I’m going to kill you, mutilate your corpse, and throw it away,'” the victim recalled in her statement. “The man seemed to know what he was doing was wrong.”
Phelps had been convicted of attempted rape in 1997 and was on lifetime parole at the time of the assault.
In her sentencing yesterday, Judge Felicia Mennin told Phelps, “You restrained this young woman against her will and raped her. Not once, not twice, but three separate times during this incident…You have frightened her for life and effectively imposed a sentence of horrific memories and psychological damage.“
In a similar case in September, a man who offered to help a female tourist through New York’s complex subway system took her to the end of the platform at Port Authority station in Manhattan and raped her, NYPD reported.