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A Virginia man was sentenced Friday to 27 years in prison for the 2005 rape of a 12-year-old D.C. girl who was abducted at gunpoint and forced into a van on her way to school.
D.C. police detectives and federal prosecutors got a break in the unsolved case last year when a DNA profile obtained from the victim, now 30, linked Marquette Johnson, 42, of Fort Belvoir, Va., to the brutal attack.
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Prosecutor Amy Zubrensky, who specializes in sexual assault cases in the D.C. U.S. attorney’s office in, told D.C. Superior Court Judge Maribeth Raffinan that Johnson had a history of attacking women going back to 1999. She said he attacked two women in 2015, but they were able to fight him off. “His violent, criminal history is not ancient history,” Zubrensky said.
Zubrensky said Johnson forced the girl, who was wearing her school uniform, into his van around 8:30 on the morning of Nov. 28, 2005, and drove to a nearby alley in the 1300 block of Morris Road SE, where he sexually assaulted her.
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Afterward, authorities said, Johnson drove the girl to school, telling her as he let her out of his van, “See, I told you, you wouldn’t miss school.”
The victim in the case did not appear in court. But her mother, reading from a statement from the victim, thanked the detectives and prosecutors for “believing” her account of what happened. Addressing Johnson, the victim said in the statement: “You are a sick individual. You knew I was only a child. I was in my school uniform. There is not a day that goes by when I don’t think about what you did to me.”
Johnson apologized to the victim and her mother. He also apologized to his fiancée, daughter and siblings.
“I am not the same man today as I was then,” he said. “I am a changed man. I ask God to forgive me of my sins. I ask you all to forgive me of my sins. I am a different person today, a better person.”
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