Ten years ago, Adam Wright unalterably changed a 12-year-old girl’s life when he raped her twice in a dingy shack on a Brooklyn rooftop.


On Wednesday, before a Brooklyn judge sentenced him to 47 years in prison, Wright, 44, looked at his victim and had the gall to offer her words of advice.

“Learn to let go, don’t hold on to any pain,” he told the woman, now a 21-year-old mother and nursing student. “Give it to the Lord and He will take care of it for you.”

The two rapes — within minutes of each other — occurred Nov. 13, 2002. The victim described the attacks in court Wednesday as “the day my childhood was taken by a man I never saw (before) or even knew.”

“I had nightmares day in and day out, year after year,” she added.
Wright, who lived in the victim’s Canarsie neighborhood, skirted justice until 2008, when he was arrested for an open alcohol container and a DNA test matched him to the crime.

During his trial, Wright acted as his own lawyer, cross-examining his victim and making a bizarre claim that DNA samples were somehow “co-mingled” in an intra-agency conspiracy to frame him.
But “his defense had certainly no basis in the evidence and no support in the facts whatsoever,” Brooklyn Supreme Court Justice Dineen Riviezzo found.

She imposed the stiff sentence on Wednesday, citing “the particular heartlessness of his act.”
“This defendant raped a 12-year-old stranger, then completely dressed her, leading her to believe — however fleetingly — that her nightmare is over. He then undressed her and raped her a second time,” Riviezzo said.

The victim twice ran off the stand in tears during her trial testimony, struggling to describe each sex assault.
In an impact statement before Wright’s sentencing, she described how the assault — in a filthy elevator room on the rooftop of her tenement — made her afraid of men and changed her from a sweet young girl into an aggressive and reclusive teen.

“Basically, I was put into a shell. No one could bring me out of this shell,” she said.
But the brave woman showed no emotion when Wright addressed her on Wednesday.

Minutes later, the judge granted her wish, effectively locking him up for the rest of his life.

“Today, it brings me great comfort,” the victim told Wright, “that you are going away and will never do this to anyone ever again.”

Read more: http://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/adam-wright-44-raped-12-year-old-brooklyn-rooftop-sentenced-47-years-prison-article-1.1030518#ixzz1o0TbESmJ