A Washington man was sentenced to 43 years in prison for the 2003 kidnapping and sexual assault of a law student near Union Station.
Shepardson Ray Blair, 48, was tied to the crime seven years after the rape through DNA evidence collected after the woman was taken to a hospital.
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Blair was found guilty by a D.C. Superior Court jury in May on charges of first-degree sexual abuse with aggravating circumstances, kidnapping and assault with significant injury.
According to court documents, the victim was a law student interning at a nonprofit organization that provided legal services for survivors of domestic violence.
On July 14, 2003, at about 10 p.m., the young woman was walking home after attending a Portuguese language class.
Around the 800 block of Second Street NE, Blair approached the woman, saying, “Shut up. Shut up. Shut up.”
The victim testified at trial that she could not understand why the defendant was telling her to shut up when she had not said anything.
Blair then grabbed the woman by the throat, squeezing hard so that the woman had trouble breathing or speaking.
At trial, the woman tearfully testified that she remembers the feeling of her feet coming off the ground from the choke hold and her flip-flops falling off.
She was dragged by her neck into the bushes. Blair pushed the woman face down into the ground and repeatedly slammed her head into the ground, prosecutors said.
He then raped her and ordered her to perform a sex act. When she refused, the man ran off.
The woman reported the assault to police and was taken by ambulance to George Washington University Hospital, where she was treated for injuries and swabbed for DNA.
She had bruises and cuts all over her body, and her eye was shut for more than a week. She was ashamed of being a victim of an assault and never finished her internship or told anyone why she left.
The case went cold until 2011, when a DNA hit identified Blair as a suspect.
According to court records, Blair was convicted of assault with intent to commit rape in 1987, in which police said he struck his victim in the back of the head and dragged her into the woods.
