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Sunday, July 23, 2023

Delvin Barnes' War on Women

     Delvin Barnes, despite the fact his father was a minister and was raised by loving parents, turned into a predatory sex offender and an abusive husband. In 2005 the 26-year-old's wife kicked him out of their house in Philadelphia and acquired a protective order against him. As is often the case the protective order did not protect.

     Barnes' estranged wife, at ten-fifteen on the night of November 28, 2005, was getting ready for bed when he shocked her by jumping out of her bedroom closet. She threatened to call the police if he didn't leave. He said he had no intention of leaving. When she tried to dial 911 Barnes grabbed the phone, punched her in the face, kicked her and threatened to choke her to death.

     The husband-intruder ordered his wife to undress. He then spent the night sexually abusing her. The next morning, she talked him into letting her call her mother, someone she spoke to every day. In speaking to her mother in earshot of her captor, the battered wife managed to hint that not all was well at her house.

     Barnes' wife hoped that her mother would get the hint and call the police. Instead, her mother, accompanied by her father who was armed with a baseball bat, showed up at the house to check on her. Barnes expressed his rage over what he considered a betrayal by again assaulting his wife. When her father came to her aid Delvin Barnes wrestled the bat from him and headed for the kitchen to grab a knife. The victim and her parents used this opportunity to run to a neighbor's house where they called 911. By the time the Philadelphia police arrived at the scene, Mr. Barnes was long gone.

     The next day police officers found Delvin Barnes in Philadelphia and took him into custody.

     A year after the home invasion, assault and rape, a jury found Barnes guilty of aggravated assault, criminal trespass, false imprisonment, simple assault and reckless endangerment. The jurors, however, acquitted him of two felonies: rape and burglary.

     The judge sentenced Barnes to three years behind bars. That meant he was back on the street in a matter of months.

     In Virginia, a young woman in July 2014 accused the 37-year-old Barnes of threatening to blow her up with a bomb. A prosecutor charged him with the lesser crime of trespassing, a misdemeanor. Eventually the prosecutor dropped that charge.

     On October 1, 2014, in Charles City County, Virginia, Delvin Barnes abducted off the street a 16-year-old girl who didn't know him. Two days later the victim showed up at a Charles City County business with third-degree burns. She told detectives that her abductor had doused her with bleach and gasoline and set her on fire. The victim had walked two miles from the home where she had been held against her will and raped.

     Investigators in Virginia identified Delvin Barnes as the Virginia girl's rapist by finding a DNA match in a national databank. The victim also identified Barnes from a past mug shot. A local prosecutor charged the suspect with attempted capital murder, abduction, forcible rape and malicious wounding with a chemical. At the time these charges were leveled Barnes' whereabouts were unknown.

     After graduating from high school in California, Maryland, Carlesha Freeland-Gaither worked at a store called Factory Barn. In 2012, she moved to Philadelphia where she took up residence with her grandfather. Two years later, the 22-year-old, a certified nursing assistant at Presbyterian Hospital in Philadelphia, moved in with her boyfriend.

     At 9:30 at night on Saturday November 2, 2014, while Freeland-Gaither walked home from a family party in the Germantown section of the city, Delvin Barnes came up behind her and pulled the screaming and kicking woman into his four-door Ford Taurus. A witness to the abduction called 911.

     At the scene of the kidnapping, detectives found the victim's eyeglasses and cellphone on the street next to shards of auto glass. Surveillance camera footage showed a man in a knit cap and dark coat abduct the victim off the street.

     Shortly after the kidnapping, the FBI and the Philadelphia Citizen's Crime Commission raised a $42,000 reward for information leading to the identify of the abductor.

     On Tuesday November 4, 2014 the authorities published a photograph of a man using Freeland-Gaither's ATM card at six o'clock in the morning in Aberdeen, Maryland. The next day, around noon, U.S. Marshals, ATF and FBI agents pulled Delvin Barnes out of his car that was parked on the side of the road in Jessup, Maryland. Inside the vehicle they found the kidnapped woman who was shaken but alive.

     Following treatment at a local hospital for minor injuries, the agents transported Freeland-Gaither home to Philadelphia where she was greeted by family and friends.

     The suspect's uncle, Lamar Barnes, in speaking to reporters about his nephew said: "Some men grow up having problems with women. So they take it out on women. Apparently Delvin is one of them."

     In September 2015, Barnes pleaded guilty in a Philadelphia courtroom to abducting Carlesha Freeland-Gaither the previous fall. Barnes informed the judge that he had kidnapped the victim to raise money to travel back to Virginia. "It was an act of robbery in the beginning, and it turned into other things," he said. 
     In January 2016 the judge sentenced the 37-year-old to 35 years in prison. 

1 comment:

  1. I love this blog very interesting! I wrote you a letter years ago and I was so happy that you responded. At the time I believed that Haupman was innocent,but years later I believe he's guilty......

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