We Need To Change Current Reporting Laws
I am all for positive change, but one read of the article in the Cleveland Plain-Dealer has changed my mind. If ever there were a case for maintaining juvie criminal records for a lifetime, this is a good example.
Cleveland Plain-Dealer
A jobless cook who came here in search of a restaurant job admitted today that he kidnapped a Brazilian nanny from a parking lot near Crocker Park, then raped and robbed her.
Curtis Soverns, 38, pleaded guilty to 11 felony counts just after noon.
Center, Curtis Soverns with lawyer, Juan Hernandez (left), and Mary Cay Tylee pleads guilty in Judge Eileen Gallagher's courtroom at the Cuyahoga County Justice Center.
Mike Levy/The Plain Dealer
Less than two hours before, Cuyahoga County prosecutors discovered as a juvenile he beat two women to death during a 1984 robbery in Kansas. That information, said Assistant County Prosecutor Richard Bell, gives the state even more impetus to seek a maximum prison term -- more than 100 years.
Common Pleas Judge Eileen T. Gallagher will sentence Soverns on Friday.
His 21-year-old victim, an immigrant au pair for a Westlake couple with young triplets, sat stoically between her boyfriend and his mother as Soverns recited "Guilty" over and over. She declined to speak after the plea hearing, and said she doubted she will come to the sentencing.
Prosecutors and Westlake police say the victim was on the parking lot on June 21, smoking a cigarette outside a car that her Westlake employers had let her use. She had just kissed her boyfriend goodnight after a date.
Soverns asked for a cigarette, then jabbed a pellet gun into the victim's ribs. Over the ensuing hours, Soverns drove her around Cleveland, Rocky River and Westlake, stopping occasionally to rape her and force her to withdraw her money from ATM machines.
It ended when Soverns hog-tied her at a construction site next door to Cleveland Browns lineman Ryan Tucker's Westlake home and threatened to kill her if she told anyone about the rapes. Soverns drove off in her car; the victim crawled to Tucker's house, where the right tackle and his wife called police.
Lt. Ray Arcuri and other police were stunned when the woman recounted the morning.
"We've got to get this guy," Arcuri recalled thinking.
Soverns had the victim's cell phone with him, and police got help from its service provider in tracking its signal to St. Louis, then west along Interstate 70. Missouri Highway Patrol trooper spotted the silver 1999 Honda Civic near Boonville, in the middle of the state, and pulled it over.
Investigators found the pellet gun and a receipt of its purchase from the night of the incident; the victim's cell phone; receipts documenting the ATM withdrawals and other evidence.
Soverns admitted stealing the car, but refused to talk about the other charges during the 11-hour drive with Arcuri back to Cleveland.
Authorities compelled Soverns to submit to a DNA test. When results were compared to biological evidence removed from the victim, they showed the odds of anyone but Soverns committing the rapes to be 160 quadrillion to one, Bell said.
Police also obtained photographs of Soverns from the ATMs' security cameras, and a security-camera image of him purchasing the pellet gun at a Kmart store in Westlake five hours before the kidnapping.
Westlake police searched for a criminal record on Soverns, who had lived in Kansas, Oregon and Utah before coming to Cleveland in May. They found nothing, although the defendant told Arcuri he'd served juvenile detention for a burglary in Kansas City, Kan.
Only on Monday did authorities here discover the truth: Soverns and his cousin beat two women to death with a baseball bat after breaking into their home in 1984.
