Less than 24 hours after detectives released shocking surveillance video showing a creep sexually assault a woman on a quiet Upper East Side street in a disturbing display of depravity, the NYPD confirms to Upper East Site that they’ve captured the suspect– also wanted in a string of sex crimes— early Saturday morning.
Investigators say officers arrested 20-year-old Damian Baeza Rendon on East 104th Street near Fifth Avenue in East Harlem around 3:45 am Saturday morning, bringing an alleged summer-long groping spree to an end.
Early Friday morning, police released surveillance video of the first attack, which occurred on the Upper East Side back on June 28th. A young woman walking late at night on East 89th Street near First Avenue when she was sexually assaulted by a stranger, now believed to Baeza Rendon.
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The suspect is seen on surveillance video running up on 22-year-old victim from behind, grabbing at her blouse and pulling it down off her shoulders, then putting his mouth on one of her breasts, police say.
Detectives say that attack was only the first in a series of three sexual assaults believed to have been carried out by Baeza Rendon. Since then, detectives with the NYPD’s Special Victims Unit have been working to track him down.
The next sexual assault would come early in the morning of Sunday, July 31st, when police say a 30-year-old woman walking on Greene Street in SoHo just before 2:30 am was stopped by a man who approached her from the opposite direction, groped her and then ran away.
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Then, three weeks later around 2:00 am on Saturday, August 20th, police say the same suspect attacked a 33-year-old woman who was walking home on East 98th Street in East Harlem— sneaking up on the victim from behind and pulling up her dress, police say, ripping her underwear in the process and groping the woman before running away.
The 20-year-old East Harlem resident, wearing a black surgical mask over his face, had nothing to say to our news partners at FreedomNews.tv as SVU detectives led him to a waiting squad car Saturday morning.
Baeza Rendon is charged with four counts of sex abuse and two counts of forcible touching, police say.
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