Illegal Immigrant from Guatemala Who Jumped, Choked, Bit, Beat and Raped Five Women Was Living in Lake Worth 2009-2011

By Margaret Menge                        Contact:  margaretmenge@yahoo.com

He's the worst serial rapist Palm Beach County has ever seen. And he had no right to be here.

Baltazar Gabriel Delgado-Ros, a citizen of Guatemala, was living here illegally from 2009-2001 when he attacked, beat, choked, bit and raped five different women in Jupiter and Lake Worth. He lived....

Baltazar Gabriel Delgado-Ros, a citizen of Guatemala

1. at 48 Holiday Drive, on the first street west of I-95, just south of Lake Worth Road, in the Lake Osborne neighborhood (on and off from August 2009 to February 2011) and;

2. at 731 North F Street, just six blocks north of the Lake Worth substation of the Palm Beach County Sheriff's Office (from Oct. 3-Oct. 11 of 2011).

He also lived for a while in 2011 at 3299 State Street, Apt. 4, just south of 10th Avenue North, across from Wal-Mart.

His first known address in Palm Beach County was 130 1st Street in Jupiter, where he was living with family members in 2009 when he assaulted the first woman.

It happened the night of April 9, 2009. A 21-year-old woman was walking by herself near the 200 block of Old Dixie Highway in Jupiter, talking on her cell phone with her boyfriend. He attacked from behind with his shirt over his head, grabbing her by the shoulders and throwing her to the ground. She screamed. He took her cell phone and broke it, and yelled at her to "Shut the f*** up." She continued to scream. So he kicked her and punched her with his fists, and then covered her nose and mouth, until she almost passed out. Then he raped her.

On July 24, 2009, a 26-year-old woman living in an apartment in Palm Springs woke up at 3 a.m. to see a man next to her bed. He told her, "Shut the f*** up bitch I kill you," pressed a knife to her neck with one hand and choked her with the other hand while he raped her. After struggling at first, the woman complied to protect her two-year-old daughter and her mother who were sleeping in the home. The DNA found inside the woman matched the DNA taken from the young woman who'd been attacked in Jupiter three months earlier.

On August 8, 2009, a few minutes after midnight, a 53-year-old woman living near Forest Hill Boulevard and Military Trail went out on her front porch to have a cigarette. She was attacked from behind, with a paint scraper pressed to her neck. The man dragged her to the side of the house where he screamed at her to take her clothes off. When she didn't, he severely beat her, and then, lifting her shirt, bit her nipple so hard that it ripped. He pulled off her pants, bit her crotch, bit her face, ripping her lip and jaw and "beat her to the point that she was unrecognizable" to quote directly from the probable cause affidavit. Then he raped her and sodomized her while she drifted in and out of consciousness. During the attack, he stole two rings off her fingers, cutting one of her fingers to get the ring off. The woman was taken to Delray Medical Center after the attack where she was rushed into surgery. She died two weeks later. Her family says she died as a result of the attack, but PBSO says the medical examiner's report did not find that the attack caused her death. The DNA found inside the woman was the same as in the two previous attacks in Palm Springs and Jupiter.

On Saturday, January 16, 2010, a 58-year-old Asian woman walking to work at McDonald’s in the early morning on Lake Worth Road near the intersection with Congress Avenue was approached from behind. The man told her to take her pants off or he would kill her. When she said no, he beat her face and head until she lost consciousness. The police found her that morning at 8:30 a.m. A number of bones in her face had been broken and she'd suffered head trauma and bleeding on the brain. And she'd been raped. The DNA found inside her was the same DNA that had been found in the three other victims.

On September 23, 2011, a young woman was speed walking on 10th Avenue North while listening to her I-Pod at about 6 a.m. She was on the 2500 block, heading east, passing by an apartment complex now called Costa del Lago when a man grabbed her from behind, pulled her onto the grass next to the sidewalk, covered her nose and mouth, bit her finger, bit the side of her face and commanded her to take her pants off, speaking with a heavy Spanish accent. The woman pleaded with him in Spanish, saying: "Listen to me, please." He replied: "Shut up and take off your pants." He held his elbow on her neck and she lost consciousness as he began to rape her. After the attack, he made off with her purse. The DNA found inside her was the same as in the other four victims. Horrifyingly, a 16-year-old girl waiting at the bus stop across the street saw the man pull his shirt over his head, grab the woman, and push her out of sight. And she heard the woman scream. But she didn't call 911 until she saw the man reappear carrying the woman's purse 10-15 minutes later and then saw the woman walk out of the bushes a few minutes after that, walking as though she were hurt. The 16-year-old said she initially thought the man and woman were "playing."

Posters with these police sketches were posted all over the Lake Worth area in 2011. But the sketch didn't much resemble Delgado-Ros.

The second victim, who was attacked in the middle of the night in her home in July of 2009, had been able to get a few glimpses of her attacker’s face, thanks to a street lamp outside her window. After the Palm Beach County Sheriff’s Office took over the case from the Palm Springs Police Department, the woman met and spoke with PBSO detectives at length.

Detective Lori Gunn of the Palm Beach County Sheriff’s Department said last week that by talking with this victim, they were able to hone in on a particular construction company that the woman’s husband had worked for, a construction company that Gunn says was already on their radar. The woman’s husband was not at home at the time of the attack because he himself had been deported back to Guatemala in early July, something a co-worker would have known.

Gunn says the fact that the rapist was here illegally made it hard to find him as people here illegally work under other names, don't have social security numbers, and don't submit any documentation to their employer.

Incredibly, the rapist was able to fly out of Miami International Airport on Oct. 8, 2011, returning to Guatemala.

His last known address in Palm Beach County was at 731 North F Street in Lake Worth, walking distance from the sheriff's substation, from City Hall and Publix, and four blocks from the Guatemalan-Maya Center, which helps Guatemalans find jobs in our community, provides legal services, including help with immigration issues (fighting deportation) and helps them apply for food stamps and other government benefits.

 

He was at this address for only about a week, in early October of 2011, sleeping on the couch of friends who came from his same village in Guatemala, according to Det. Gunn. She didn’t find out he was there until it was too late. By the time she got there, he’d left for Guatemala. The people living there told PBSO that Delgado-Ros, whom they knew as "Gabriel Delgado" and by the nickname "Hormiga," had a girlfriend living at 46 Holiday Drive, next door to where he'd lived behind the Tri-Rail station in Lake Worth, and another girlfriend in Miami-Dade County, where he'd lived before moving to the State Street address.

PBSO collected a pair of sneakers that Delgado-Ros had left behind and submitted them for DNA testing. The DNA matched the DNA found inside the five women.

731 North F Street in Lake Worth (door on right), where the rapist lived in early October of 2011. The property is owned by Palm Beach real estate investor Benjamin Wohl.

The people living at 731 North F Steet called PBSO again in November with some news. They saw on a social networking site that Delgado-Ros had been arrested in Guatemala for sexually assaulting a child under the age of 12. He’d been released on bond pending court proceedings.

PBSO completed a probable cause affidavit on November 14, 2011, and began talking with Guatemala. Delgado-Ros was held by Guatemalan authorities during extradition talks until March of 2014 when U.S. Marshals traveled on a private plane to Guatemala and brought him back to Palm Beach County to be tried here. He's now being held at the Palm Beach County's west detention center in Belle Glade.

When they led him off the plane in Florida, Delgado-Ros was caught by a news photographer smirking. He was wearing a Beverly Hills Polo Club t-shirt, with his hair gelled. The other men in the photos, the U.S. Marshals, are shown giving each other the thumbs up. The Palm Beach County Sheriff's Office tweeted, "We got him," though it was more in the sense of retrieving, rather than capture, as Guatemalan authorities had nabbed him and were holding him.

The Palm Beach County Sheriff's Office in fact bears significant blame for creating a safe haven for illegal aliens and the criminals among them. In 2012, a spokesperson for the sheriff's office told me that they do not check the immigration status of those who are arrested in Palm Beach County, saying they don't consider it their responsibility to enforce federal law, and leave it to ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) to comb through their arrest records and figure out who is here illegally.

The mobile home at 48 Holiday Drive, just west of the Tri-Rail station, where Delgado-Ros lived on and off from 2009-2011.

Then in 2014 -- amazingly, just four months after Delgado-Ros was extradited from Guatemala -- Sheriff Ric Bradshaw announced that Palm Beach County would join Broward and Miami-Dade counties in refusing to comply with the federal government's detainer requests, and would not hold illegal immigrants for an extra 48 hours, if requested by the federal government, so that it could be determined whether the person arrested needed to be deported.

Add this to the social services situation on the ground in Palm Beach County. The rapist lived in the two cities in Palm Beach County -- Jupiter and Lake Worth -- that have help centers specifically for Mayans from Guatemala. And specifically for this reason, as noted in studies of the Maya in Palm Beach County, thousands of Guatemalans have poured into these two cities, which, until about 30 years ago, were small, quaint, peaceful, seaside towns. Lake Worth now has a violent crime rate that is more than three times higher than the rest of the country (as measured per 1,000 residents).

Add to this the willful negligence of our local media -- newspapers and television stations -- which withheld the information about the rapist's provenance...that he was a citizen of Guatemala, and had illegally crossed our border and was living here illegally, with those who employed him and who helped him also breaking the law. This guy was not supposed to be here. He shouldn't have been able to get in to the country, and he shouldn't have been able to stay. He shouldn't have been able to find work, or feed himself, or make a home here. If he were not here, the women would not have been attacked and beaten and raped. One of them wouldn't be dead, according to that woman's family.

News reports relied almost exclusively on information provided by the Palm Beach County Sheriff's Office and underplayed the attacks, often referring to them by the legal charge of "sexual battery" instead of "rape" and leaving out the details that would have rightfully alarmed and horrified readers and viewers. 

The Palm Beach Post and the Sun-Sentinel have gone on to publish heart-warming stories about the help centers for people from Guatemala, with the Sun-Sentinel referring to the Maya of Lake Worth in a 2012 news story as "a quiet subculture of hardworking and often undocumented immigrants."

It's not clear whether Delgado-Ros is Mayan. But it's apparent from his facial features that he is descended from one of the indigenous peoples of Guatemala. And almost all of the indigenous people of Guatemala are Maya.

The Maya from Guatemala, according to studies, do not acknowledge themselves as Guatemalans or Hispanics, but think of themselves as Indians. They also do not recognize the concept of nations, and only know of the United States as "El Norte" -- not recognizing it as a sovereign nation with laws and borders.

Despite the fact that his DNA was found inside the five women, Delgado-Ros has pleaded "not guilty" and has requested a jury trial. He faces charges of sexual battery and life in prison. He has not been charged with the murder of the woman he attacked on her front porch on Aug. 8, 2009 near Forest Hill Boulevard, even though her family has insisted that the attack led directly to her death two weeks later.

Was the extradition from Guatemala contingent upon Delgado-Ros not being charged with a homicide? Is he escaping a possible death penalty at the insistence of Guatemala?

We don't know.

Certainly, between November of 2011, when PBSO found the last residence of Delgado-Ros in Lake Worth and learned that he'd flown back to Guatemala and had been arrested for sexually assaulting a child there, and March of 2014 when he was extradited, several conversations took place between our two countries.

The pre-trial conference in this case is set for Nov. 20, 2015 before Circuit Court Judge Samantha Schosberg Feuer, a Democrat. The trial is set to begin on Nov. 30, 2015 at the Palm Beach County Courthouse. Delgado-Ros will be defended in court by Maurissa Jones of the Public Defender's Office.