Rapist Is Called ‘Monster,’ Gets 60-Year Sentence

SANTA ANA —  Declaring that “a monster is as a monster does,” a judge Friday sentenced 31-year-old Kyle Borges to 60 years in prison for the rape of a 50-year-old woman and a young girl, who tearfully told the court how much she had been hurt by the crime.

Superior Court Judge Robert R. Fitzgerald said he calculated that the defendant would be 61 before he is even eligible for parole.

Borges was convicted in February of kidnaping the girl, then 12, from her home in a gated Huntington Beach community and raping her. In March, he pleaded guilty to charges that he broke into the home of a 50-year-old Huntington Beach woman and raped her.

The two attacks, as well as a third in Los Angeles County, occurred in 1989, a few months after Borges was acquitted in an unrelated rape case. Critical crime lab evidence in that case was not available in time for his trial.

Paul Stark, one of Borges’ attorneys, pointed out to the court during Friday’s sentencing that by pleading guilty in March, his client had spared the victim the ordeal of a preliminary hearing and a trial.

But the comment elicited no sympathy from Fitzgerald.

“It was also because he was dead in the water,” the judge said. “He didn’t have any defense in that case.”

Fitzgerald was also undeterred by letters requesting leniency from many of Borges’ relatives.

“They do not believe that he is a monster,” the judge said. “But a monster is as a monster does, and the facts of this case show that he is a monster.”

The maximum prison sentence Borges could have received was 64 2/3 years. The 60-year sentencewas generally agreed upon by the judge and the lawyers when Borges agreed to plead guilty to the second rape last month.

Deputy Dist. Atty. Jane Shade, who prosecuted Borges, focused much of her attention Friday on the Huntington Beach girl.

The girl had been so upset before her testimony in February that Fitzgerald cleared the courtroom of all spectators to make it easier for her.

Friday, she began to cry even before she read her brief, handwritten statement to the court.

With prosecutor Shade’s arm around her, the girl asked the judge to sentence Borges to the maximum.

“I don’t think he should be able to hurt other people like he hurt me,” she said. “I think this (case) took too long (to come to trial) and it wasn’t fair to me.”

Borges, dressed in a yellow Orange County Jail jumpsuit, did not look at the girl once as she read her statement.

Borges’ other attorney, Patrick McNeal, asked the judge to consider a middle-ground sentence, pointing out that 60 years was more than most defendants convicted of murder receive.

But Deputy Dist. Atty. Dennis Bauer, who was the prosecutor in the case involving the 50-year-old woman, countered that the maximum sentence was the only possible justice for Borges.

“He’s handed the victims a life sentence of the memories of the horrors of what he did to them,” Bauer said.

Borges, a former Anaheim resident, was acquitted in April, 1989, of the rape of a 46-year-old Anaheim Hills woman.

Prosecutors in that case had sent a blood sample taken from Borges to a private laboratory to compare it to a semen sample taken from the victim. Although DNA tests showed that Borges was the attacker, the results could not be prepared in time for the trial. Unaware of the lab results, the jurors cited the victim’s shaky identification in their acquittal vote.

On Sept. 6, 1989, Borges has admitted, he broke into the 50-year-old woman’s home in Huntington Beach while she was sleeping and raped her.

The next night, prosecutors said, Borges broke into a Dana Point home and tried to rape a 14-year-old girl asleep in her bed, but ran off after the girl’s mother awakened.

On Sept. 24, 1989, prosecutors said, Borges abducted the Huntington Beach girl from her home in the Sea Cliff on the Greens community. She had been sleeping on a living room sofa with a girlfriend when Borges broke into the house just before dawn. She was driven to a wooded area, raped and then dumped along a roadside.

Investigators found blood matching the victim’s in the front seat of Borges’ truck, and matched his shoe prints outside her home.

The jury convicted Borges of all but one burglary charge in the incidents involving the 14-year-old and the 12-year-old.