CLINTON HILL — A man who kidnapped his ex-girlfriend and brutally tortured her over three straight days was sentenced to life in prison, according to the Brooklyn District Attorney’s office.
Alex Anselmo, 31, of Grand Avenue, trapped his former girlfriend and their 2-year-old daughter in her apartment where he raped and sexually assaulted her for several days, inflicting 50 wounds on her body, according to the DA.
After a jury trial, Anselmo was found guilty on 17 counts including kidnapping, rape and assault on Sept. 16, and was sentenced Thursday to 75 years in prison.
The victim had broken up with Anselmo, the father of two of her children, in the spring of 2012, after which he became “increasingly obsessive,” prosecutors said. Though she obtained an order of protection against him, he ignored it.
On April 1, 2013, Anselmo broke into the victim’s Bedford-Stuyvesant apartment, attacked her and handcuffed her to a bed, where she was restrained for most of the following three days. He raped her, cut her feet with a knife, and beat her with a dumbbell and extension cord, according to the DA’s office. He also threatened her with a gun and used clippers to cut off all her hair.
The 2-year-old remained in the living room during the attacks. On April 3, a neighbor listened through the apartment door, heard a gun being cocked and called police, the DA’s office said. Police broke down the door and found the woman in a formal dress she was made to wear, the DA said.
Prior to the incident, Anselmo searched the web for how to sterilize a woman and how many Xanax pills were needed to cause death, prosecutors said.
“The brutal violence the defendant unleashed on this innocent woman was truly shocking and shows that he is totally unfit to remain in society,” District Attorney Ken Thompson said in a statement. “I hope that his long prison sentence will bring some solace to the victim and her daughter for all the trauma they have suffered."
Thompson's office organized a conference Thursday at Brooklyn Law School about approaches to domestic violence, including ways to involve survivors in the prosecution of perpetrators.
The Kings County district attorney's office received 10,492 cases of domestic violence last year, and have received almost 7,500 thus far in 2015.
The NYPD responds to approximately 670 domestic violence calls a day, the DA's office said, 212 of which are in Brooklyn, on average.
