A Bronx man was sentenced Friday to 292 months in prison for his kidnapping and stalking of an adult woman and the kidnapping of her seven-year-old son in or around October 2020. Aqulino Torres, 27, was convicted following a one-week jury trial in July.
“Aquilino Torres carried out a brutal kidnapping of a 7-year-old child and his mother, and threatened to kill the child,” said U.S. Attorney Damian Williams. ” He held his victims captive and physically abused both mother and child. Thanks to the FBI and NYPD, Torres was apprehended, prosecuted, and convicted of these horrific crimes, and has now been sentenced to a lengthy prison term.”
According to the investigation, on or about Oct. 5, 2020, Torres texted and called a woman hundreds of times, including a text threatening to “kick her daughter’s teeth out.” Later that night, Torres took them both to a motel in the Bronx, where he hit the child in the face and assaulted her mom, breaking both sides of her jaw. While Torres assaulted the mom, he told her that he would hang her and that her daughter would be found dead in the river.
Torres then had sex with the woman against her will. For the next five days, Torres held them against their will at an apartment in Washington Heights, without medical treatment for the woman’s broken jaw. On or about Oct. 10, 2020, the woman and her daughter escaped from the apartment and were admitted to a hospital shortly thereafter.
In response to their escape, Torres once again sent the mom hundreds of threatening text messages and called her hundreds of times.
For example, he texted her that he had put GPS on her phone and that, if he made the decision to go looking for her, “there won’t be turning back.” Torres then followed through on those threats and attempted to track down the woman and also posted nude photographs of her on the internet.
At the time of the events described above, Torres had absconded from parole supervision, having been placed on such supervision following a 2014 New York State conviction for second-degree assault against the mother of Torres’ children, who was then pregnant.
