The man accused of sexually assaulting a dead body on the New York City subway made his first court appearance after turning himself in.
Felix Rojas, 44, was charged with rape nearly three weeks after the incident on the R train near the Whitehall Street station.
In a concerning detail, his eyes appeared red and bloodshot as he was arraigned in Manhattan Criminal Court on Tuesday.
Rojas, who is from Brooklyn, turned himself in to police with his son on Sunday, sources told the New York Post.
The victim was identified as 37-year-old Jorge Gonzalez, who mysteriously died on the train before he was assaulted.
Gonzalez, who boarded the train around 8pm on April 8, reportedly passed out after smoking a cigarette he had been handed by a woman.
The sexual assault unfolded when Rojas allegedly got on the R train about three hours later.
He first made contact with the deceased around 11:20pm and robbed him before allegedly assaulting him 25 minutes later.
Felix Rojas (left), 44, was charged with rape nearly three weeks after the incident on the R train
The victim was identified as 37-year-old Jorge Gonzalez (pictured), who mysteriously died on the train before he was assaulted
Surveillance footage seen by police reportedly shows the 44-year-old man having sex with the corpse then leaving the train
Surveillance footage seen by police reportedly shows the 44-year-old man having sex with the corpse then leaving the train.
Police said another passenger rifled through Gonzalez’s pockets and stole from him before his body was finally found by a conductor.
Gonzalez’s cause of death has not been confirmed, but his estranged wife Teresa, 38, told the New York Daily News she believes he died of cirrhosis of the liver after years of alcoholism.
‘We were happy. Yes, we were. But the thing is all the pressures of life, new marriage, new child, I was working a lot, he was working a lot and slowly he just became an alcoholic,’ she said. ‘He was putting the alcohol over everything else.
‘That’s the biggest reason why he ended up in the situation where he was. There was just no way for him to stop.’
Teresa and Gonzalez share a 13-year-old son, but he abandoned the family about five years ago.
The couple met when Teresa was 15 years old while celebrating her quinceañera in the same small town in Mexico where he lived and she had family, according to the news outlet.
They finally married when she was 24, after Gonzalez emigrated to the United States.
‘Even though he was from the countryside he adapted to any situation,’ she said. ‘We could go eat a steak or a sushi at a nice place — or, at the same time, we could go to the corner and get tacos and stuff. I really couldn’t do that with other friends.’
