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By happenstance and gumption, two narcotics detectives are now media darlings after capturing an escaped fugitive accused of being the Shenandoah rapist.
By CARA BUCKLEY
The heroes’ first calls were to their mothers. Because it was near midnight, both women had been fast asleep when their phones rang, and after they picked up, their crime-fighting sons hurriedly, and proudly, shared the news.
The manhunt was over, the detectives told their moms: After six days on the run, Reynaldo E. Rapalo, the escaped fugitive accused of raping school girls, mothers and grandmothers, had been caught. And they, detectives Wayne Cox, 34, and Alcides Velez, 28, had done the catching.
''I’ve arrested many people in my career. This one was closer to home,’' Cox said Tuesday, the day after he and Velez captured Rapalo, the man police believe is the ''Shenandoah rapist,’' at a Bird Road-area strip mall. ``When you have family and friends, you’re going to be concerned. You’re going to want to see this individual off the street.’'
Cox and Velez were a third of the way through their 12-hour, dusk-to-dawn shift Monday night when they got the tip that changed their lives: A short, stocky man resembling Rapalo was lingering outside a nondescript stretch of stores off the Palmetto Expressway on Bird Road.
Cox and Velez belong to the county police’s Tactical Narcotics Team, and, in the days since Rapalo’s audacious Dec. 20 jailbreak -- he dropped six stories using knotted bedsheets -- they had become wholly consumed by the manhunt. Rapalo is accused of terrorizing the Shenandoah area by raping seven girls and women, ages 11 to 79, between 2002 and 2003, and is slated to stand trial in February. Like many involved in the search, Cox and Velez felt an urgency to recapture him. Both men, while unmarried, have young daughters: Cox has a 4-year-old, and Velez’s daughter is 8.
''A guy like him, especially with the crimes he’s committed, touches everybody,’' Velez said Tuesday. ``Whether they’re married, whether they have a mother or daughters, we all felt personal.’'