New York man rapes teen girl days after release from jail where he had landed for stabbing mall employee
SYRACUSE, NEW YORK: A 21-year-old man in upstate New York raped a 14-year-old girl nearly nine days after he was released from prison, according to police. The man, identified as Luis Torres, was arrested while he was on parole late last month after the teenage survivor alerted the police, accusing him of sexually assaulting her at a Syracuse home in February. Torres was previously in prison for stabbing a mall employee in 2017.
According to court documents cited by Syracuse.com, Torres had sexual intercourse with the girl on two other occasions between late February and early April. The 21-year-old was eventually taken into custody last month on June 26 and he continues to remain jailed without bail at the Onondaga County Justice Center. Torres has been charged with second-degree rape, endangering the welfare of a child and violating his parole, according to online records.
Torres had been released on parole earlier this year after being convicted of second-degree assault in a December 2017 attack at Destiny USA mall. According to police, he had stabbed an employee at Syracuse’s Original Caramel Corn Shoppe after stealing a bag of chips. He was sentenced to at least two years in prison. The 21-year-old was initially released from prison with conditions in August 2019, he later returned in January before being released again on February 20. The convict is set to appear in court on July 30. It is not yet clear whether he hired an attorney in the case.
The news comes days after a 72-year-old notorious sexual predator, who was sentenced to 1,000 years for sexual exploitation of children, was released on parole. Peter Mallory, a former Troup County commissioner, who was renowned as a prolific collector of child pornography from Georgia, was released on parole on May 27 by the State Board of Pardons and Paroles. Mallory's parole came nearly three weeks after an appeals court found that the sentence for Mallory’s 2012 conviction "was appropriate".
Shortly after his parole, District Attorney Herb Cranford released a statement saying that he opposed the decision “but was powerless to stop it." Cranford released a statement on Tuesday, June 30, stating that he had to explain his stance after several members of the Troup County community expressed concerns over Mallory's release. “Mallory’s crimes did not allow for the state to seek or the trial court to impose a sentence without parole eligibility, and parole is a power exercised exclusively by the State Board of Pardons and Paroles," Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported.
The sexual predator and former owner of LaGrange television station WCAG-TV, was sentenced in December 2012 after a three-week trial. He was convicted of 60 counts of sexual exploitation of children, three counts of invasion of privacy and one count of tampering with evidence.
He was apprehended and charged after a LaGrange Police Department initiated an investigation into him in February 2011. Police were reportedly alerted to over 600 suspected child porn files linked to a computer in LaGrange, and the officers' probe led them to the television station operated by Mallory. Authorities seized over 26,000 files of child pornography from him, according to the prosecutors in the case.