The Level 3 sex offender charged with assaulting an MIT student in the laundry room of her sorority house has been ordered held without bail.
Nahom Getaneh, 33, was formally charged in municipal court in Roxbury this morning with assault to rape and indecent assault and battery on a person 14 or over. A not guilty plea was entered on his behalf in the 2 minute hearing and the judge ordered him held without bail pending a dangerousness hearing scheduled for Monday.
While Getaneh waived a formal reading of the charges against him, police reports filed in the case offer some detail about what allegedly occurred Saturday night in the 500-block of Beacon Street.
Two Boston Police patrol officers responded to a sorority house there at around 11:47 p.m., but the residents who answered the door had no idea about an assault in progress. After first searching the basement, officers eventually found the victim hiding in a closet on the second floor.
The victim told police that she was bringing her bicycle into the back of the building when she saw her alleged assailant leaning against a wall in the public alley. She said she had assumed the man, who she described as “a Middle Eastern male in his 20s-30s,” according to the police report, was just an attendee of the party next door.
“Can you help me, brother?” the man allegedly asked her in “heavily accented English.”
The victim punched the access code and went into the door, but she said her assailant followed her in, pushed her into the laundry room and began assaulting her. During the attack, during which he at the very least grabbed her breasts, she told police, he attempted to strangle her and asked “Do you want to die?”
She said she didn’t know where he had fled and an immediate sweep of the area turned up no results, according to the police report. So Boston Police issued a public bulletin seeking help in solving the case, which bore fruit Tuesday afternoon.
Police saw a person matching the physical description the victim had provided, and who matched surveillance footage from the alley ahead of the alleged assault, in the area of the 100-block of Southampton Street in the midst of the city’s Methadone Mile. According to the arrest report, he was still wearing the same clothes he was wearing on Saturday night: a navy blue shirt with a tie-dye design and baggy sweatpants with two white stripes.
Also of note from the wanted poster was a “distinct walk” that was on full display as Getaneh was in the courtroom dock on Wednesday. It’s a gait suggestive of a pronounced limp or heavy leg shackles.
This is a developing story.