PRINCETON: Victim confronts convicted rapist at sentencing and asks ‘Why?’

By Philip Sean Curran, Staff Writer
She stood there, weeping inside a Trenton courtroom Friday morning, asking a question of the rapist who had attacked her in her sleep last June in Princeton and now was a few feet away.
“Why?” she asked Pedro Arias-Santiago, who sat at the defense table listening to his Spanish interpreter relay her words to him in the language he had learned in his native Guatemala.
He offered no answer for a crime that he had committed by illegally entering the woman’s home on Birch Avenue and then raping her. Earlier, he had told Mercer County Superior Court Judge Peter E. Warshaw that he wanted “forgiveness.”
But the judge, a former Monmouth County Prosecutor used to seeing the worst of society, said he was struck by Arias-Santiago’s “audacity” to seek forgiveness without apologizing for what he had done.
The judge sentenced Arias-Santiago to seven years in state prison for sexually assaulting the then-28-year-old woman and to five years for committing a burglary, also on Birch Avenue, two weeks prior to the rape. The two prison terms, due to run concurrently, were in line with the plea bargain that Arias-Santiago, a 26-year-old bachelor, had accepted in February from the Mercer County Prosecutor’s Office.
The federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement has a detainer on Arias-Santiago, who is in the country illegally and faces deportation. He had been in New Jersey for the past five years, living in the Witherspoon-Jackson neighborhood of Princeton among the other illegal immigrants from Central America who have come to the college town in large numbers.
From the bench, Judge Warshaw said Arias-Santiago, who had worked for an asphalt company, has said he has a drinking problem and that he was drunk the night of the crime. Arias-Santiago, the judge said, has indicated that he had entered the woman’s residence and got into bed with her. But the judge noted he has been unwilling to take responsibility for his actions.
At his guilty plea in February and again in court Friday, Arias-Santiago showed no remorse, a man, who when Princeton Police arrested him last year, was found with some of the victim’s clothing for what the judge said was Arias-Santiago’s “own personal gratification.”
As for the victim, she waited in Judge Warshaw’s courtroom for the case to be called, with her attacker entering shortly before 11 a.m.
Given the chance to speak, she walked to the lectern in front of the judge, uttered a few words and then broke down. Tears rolled down her face.
She said Arias-Santiago had “invaded my space,” told him that she was “so much stronger that you” and that she hoped “you get what you deserve.”
She had grown up in Jersey City, where bad things happen to people all the time, she said. “You wouldn’t think something like this happened in Princeton,” she said.
Later, the judge spoke of the “courage” she had shown in getting up to speak.
The judge noted that although Arias-Santiago has no priors, he believed it likely Arias-Santiago would commit another crime. He issued a sex offender’s restraining order against him, so that he cannot have any contact with the victim. According to court records, he also goes by the alias Pedro Olegario.