Daughter Identifies Her Mother’s Nonverbal Rapist Nearly 40 Years Later

A woman born in 1986 to a nonverbal mother who was raped at a facility for the severely disabled said she has finally found her biological father. In doing so, Magdalena Cruz also believes that she has unraveled an unfathomable and ugly mystery.

Cruz claims that the man who impregnated her mother, who was 30 at the time but had the mind of a toddler and wore diapers, was an employee of the Monroe Developmental Center in Rochester, New York. claim for unspecified damagesCruz accuses the extinct center of covering up the crime.

The plaintiff came to her conclusion after a DNA test and genealogy kit helped her reach her father’s family in Virginia. Cruz found a photo of a female relative whose eyes resembled hers, and she learned that the woman’s father had lived in Rochester, near the care facility where the rape occurred.

At the time of the pregnancy, the center’s administrators told the victim’s family that they suspected another patient of being the rapist and said they would file a police report, which never happened. According to Cruz, the Monroe Developmental Center said it would also conduct an internal investigation, but never interviewed any employees.

Hospital workers also discussed putting Cruz’s mother on birth control, even though she did not have the capacity to consent to sexual intercourse, the lawsuit claims. Her lawyer argues that if the victim had not become pregnant, no one would have known that she had been sexually assaulted. Notes from the Monroe Developmental Center obtained by Cruz indicate that her mother suffered various injuries before and during her pregnancy, including a bite mark on her breast.

“The events surrounding (Cruz’s) birth were far more shocking and grotesque than his family had realized,” Cruz’s lawyers charged in this week’s filing.

Cruz’s mother and the rapist are still alive, but are not named in the lawsuit. Monroe Developmental Center closed in 2013 but was operated by the state-run Office for People with Developmental Disabilities, which the lawsuit opposes. The office had no comment on the case, citing the “safety and well-being” of its patients as paramount.

( The woman whose father was convicted of killing her mother 20 years ago is haunted by the Innocence Project’s decision to revisit the murder. )

In the notes obtained from the center, Cruz also verified that one of her mother’s caregivers wrote that she “likes men of color, she gets naked, sometimes she screams, jumps, eats very quickly.”

Cruz believes that this caretaker is the man who raped his mother.

At least 10 employees of the Monroe Development Center were identified as sexual deviants in the decade before Cruz’s mother was raped, according to the Associated Press.

Police told Cruz that the statute of limitations for criminal charges had passed, but the Adult Survivors Act, signed into law by Gov. Hochul last year, gives sexual assault survivors until Thanksgiving to file civil lawsuits, regardless of when the assault occurred.

with cable news services