UES Rapist Pleads Guilty

Last summer, the Upper East Side was terrorized by several different perpetrators of sexual assaults, and early last week, a man arrested for two of those crimes pleaded guilty to rape and sexual abuse. Jason Quinones, who is 22 and was 21 at the time of the attacks, admitted to raping a woman in her East 90th Street home last August. He climbed through the window of her ground floor apartment at 4:30 a.m. while she slept, grabbed her cell phone to keep her from calling the police and raped her. Quinones was arrested several days later, based on DNA evidence left at the scene, and later also charged with another sexual assault that had taken place in July on East 83rd Street. He told prosecutors that he approached his first victim from behind in her building and forced her into her apartment, where he pushed her onto a couch and sexually abused her. District Attorney Cyrus Vance admonished Quinones for committing "atrocious sex crimes." "In both cases, he saw a chance to sexually assault a woman while she was vulnerable, and both times, he took it," Vance said. Quinones is scheduled to be sentenced on June 20, and could face up to 25 years for the class B felony rape conviction, as well as up to 7 years for the sexual abuse conviction.