Ricardo Cepates

In April 2004, a grand jury formally indicted Cepates on several counts of aggravated sexual assault, kidnapping, making terroristic threats, weapons possession, aggravated assault, burglary and child endangerment. Later in the year, Cepates was convicted on all counts. In February 2005, he was sentenced to 139 years in prison. In sentencing, judge Frederick DeVesa said that Cepates, "terrorized an entire community for two years and the Rutgers University campus". By the time of his sentencing, Cepates had confessed to all of the crimes and apologized to the victims in court. In 2014, the New Jersey Supreme Court denied Cepates a new hearing.

In early June 2003, New Brunswick investigators started to investigate the rapes as possibility being connected to a serial rapist. By late June, they confirmed this suspicion by finding the same male DNA at multiple crime scenes. At the same time, the rapist was ruled out in several unsolved rapes in occurred in the surrounding area.

Cepates' crimes attracted controversy among New Brunswick residents when it was found out that before he committed the rapes, he had been arrested for attempting to assault another woman. In 1998, he was arrested for grabbing a woman and holding a knife to her throat as she walked down Livingston Avenue. He was charged with criminal restraint and possession of a weapon for unlawful purposes. He pleaded guilty to the charges and received probation. He was not a registered U.S. citizen at the time, and New Jersey authorities made no effort to have him deported to his native country, something that became controversial after his 2003 arrest.

Ricardo Cepates (born April 26, 1971) is a Honduran former construction worker and convicted serial rapist and kidnapper. From September 2001 through December 2003, Cepates attacked seven women and girls in New Brunswick, New Jersey. His modus operandi was to attack his victims during the late afternoon or early morning in the area surrounding Rutgers University, where some of his victims were attending as students. Cepates was captured the day of his last attack after being chased by an angry group of residents.