Yesterday, a mother confronted the man who admitted to grabbing her 23-year-old daughter off a Queens street and beating and raping her with a metal pipe, then leaving her for dead in an alley. Guihua Yu, who traveled from China, shouted and sobbed, "You beast! Give me back my daughter! .... Yao was our sun, our hope, our dreams, our future and our strength... You have destroyed our lives. I wish a life of hell for you."
Carlos Salazar Cruz admitted to the horrific May 2010 attack on Yu Yao in Flushing. Yu Yao had only been in NYC for a few months, working in a nail salon and living at a relative's while dreaming of attending law school; her screams attracted the attention of a resident who called the police. Police found a drunken Cruz walking down the street, with blood on his shirt and holding the bloody pipe. The grieving mother's statement lasted 45 minutes, "I just wanted to be able to hold her and see her. What I saw was a corpse, a dead body.... I wanted to die. There was no reason for me to live anymore. The pillar of my life had disappeared. The sky had fallen - all because of this beast. This beast sentenced her to death... Come back my daughter! My only child. I have lost my child. My child, my child."
According to the Daily News, Cruz "blamed his troubles on the alcohol and crack cocaine that buoyed him during his forced separation from his wife and child in Mexico" and asked for forgiveness. But Queens Supreme Court Justice Richard Buchter said, "Her life was so cruelly and wantonly snuffed out by the senseless act of this barbaric defendant,... He wasn't too drunk to strike the victim over the head with sufficient force to kill her. This is the crime of a sociopath, a psychopath, and not merely an alcoholic... You violated her in the most horrific and disgusting way." And noting how Cruz was an illegal immigrant, Buchter said, "We needed this defendant in this country like we need the plague."
Cruz was sentenced to 22 years (he took a plea deal), but even Buchter thought that Cruz deserved the death penalty, “We had torture, we had sex crime." Cruz will be deported after his sentence.
