A New Orleans defendant has been sentenced to 30 years in prison after investigators connected him to sexual abuse cases involving three separate children, the Orleans Parish District Attorney's Office announced Tuesday. The case was handled by the office's Sexual Assault Kit Initiative, or SAKI, Unit, which specializes in prosecuting sexual violence cases from the point of arrest or DNA match through trial and sentencing.
According to the New Orleans District Attorney's Office, the New Orleans Police Department connected the defendant to sexual abuse cases involving three children, leading to the 30-year sentence. The announcement did not include additional detail about the defendant's identity, the ages of the children, or the circumstances of how NOPD made the connection between the cases.
A Specialized Unit Built for Complex Cases
The SAKI Unit is led by Chief Mary Glass and operates as an eight-person vertical prosecution team, meaning the same attorneys and victim advocates stay assigned to a case from its earliest stages through trial or sentencing, according to the Orleans Parish District Attorney's Office. That structure is designed to reduce the number of times survivors have to retell their accounts to new personnel as a case moves through the legal system.
The unit is funded in large part through federal grants from the U.S. Bureau of Justice Assistance, including an initial $1,009,485 award to establish the vertical prosecution model and a later $1,949,672 grant in fiscal year 2020 to sustain specialized staff and victim advocates, per the same office. Those federal dollars are tied to the national Sexual Assault Kit Initiative, which targets untested rape kits and unresolved sexual violence cases across the country.
Part of a Pattern of Multi-Victim Prosecutions
This sentencing follows a string of recent SAKI Unit cases in Orleans Parish involving multiple survivors or child victims. Earlier in August, the unit secured a conviction and 35-year sentence in a separate multi-survivor sexual assault case, the district attorney's office notes, reflecting an active prosecution pipeline for these complex cases.
In May, the SAKI Unit won a 40-year sentence at hard labor for Lorenzo J. Oliver after he was convicted of second-degree rape of a minor who had been abducted from a bus stop in December 2021, DNA evidence processed through the initiative having helped advance that indictment. And in April, OPDA joined NOPD and Crime Stoppers in a public appeal for additional survivors after arresting piano and martial arts instructor Joshua Wexler on child rape and molestation charges involving victims as young as four years old — a case investigators said fit a pattern in which offenders in positions of trust abuse multiple children over extended periods.
How Child Abuse Cases Move Through the System
Other recent Orleans Parish prosecutions illustrate how these cases typically come together. In November, convicted sex offender Jakiya Muller pleaded guilty to first-degree rape and received a 35-year sentence without benefit of parole or probation for assaulting two survivors in separate incidents days apart. And in a 2024 case, the SAKI Unit won a jury conviction against Dagoberto Arias for first-degree rape after a school teacher and social worker identified and reported a child victim's delayed disclosure of abuse — a pattern investigators say is common, since children often do not disclose abuse until well after it has occurred.
Child abuse prosecutions in Orleans Parish typically draw on forensic evaluations from specialized regional institutions, including the Audrey Hepburn CARE Center and the Children's Advocacy Center, according to the district attorney's office. Those centers provide the medical and psychological interviews that often form key evidence at trial. The office has not released further details about whether such evaluations played a role in Tuesday's case.
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