Houston man gets 55 years for role in Port Arthur woman's brutal gang rape
HOUSTON, Texas (KTRK) -- Eighteen years after a woman was gang raped by three men, one of her attackers was finally brought to justice. The cold case was thawed by a DNA discovery.
Tiffani, who asked she not be fully identified, is not a sexual assault victim, but a survivor. She said she always believed that one day, there would be payback in the justice system for what was done to her, but she learned not to let that consume her life.
She came to that conclusion after undergoing a lot of pain and therapy that would change her life.
Tiffani and some friends were in Houston in February 2000 to go to the rodeo. They were in the Galleria area the night before the concert. On their way back to their hotel, they stopped to take a bathroom break at a restaurant on Westheimer. When Tiffani and a girlfriend walked to their car, a man approached her.
"He asked me for my car," she said. "I laughed, thinking he was joking. I looked down and saw he had a gun in my side."
He forced Tiffani into her car, pushing her to the passenger side. Two more men got in as well. "We drove and got on the North Freeway," she recalls. "Then they blindfolded me."
The abductor exited near Bush Airport. "I knew we were near the airport because I could hear the planes," Tiffani said. "While we were driving, one of the men shoved a gun at me and told me to get in the back seat. That was the first time I was sexually assaulted."
"I WAS STATISTICALLY DEAD," rape victim says
The car eventually parked on a soccer field, she learned after they left.
"The driver just wanted the rims from my car. The others had something else in mind," she said. A fourth man had followed them, apparently in communication with the others.
She believes the assaults lasted for several hours, while the driver was removing the tires from her car.
"When they finished, he started asking me, 'Where are you from?' and whether I had car insurance. He told me I could file a claim for the tires and rims," Tiffani said.
They left in a car brought by the fourth man.
Tiffani was told to leave the blindfold on until they drove away, fearing they would kill her before they left. She listened for the sound of the car leaving, then looked for help. She found it at a machinist's shop, where she was able to use a phone.
"I called my friends to tell them I was alive," she said. "They had already called police, and a detective was with them. He gave me a phone number and told me to call it. I did, and they said 'HPD Homicide.' I said, "Homicide?' Well, I was statistically dead."
She was given a rape exam, and later learned the nurse considered this one of the most brutal cases she had seen, based on the injuries.
"I told myself that I survived, and life goes on," Tiffani said. "I didn't learn until later what I had become. I was angry, and suppressing everything that happened."
It finally took a therapist to get her to face what had happened, walking her through the attack, and identifying all the trauma that occurred in one night. Finally, Tiffani was healing. Then came the call.
In 2014, the Harris County district attorney's office contacted her to tell her DNA from one of her attackers had shown up in a DPS database. The man was in prison on an aggravated assault conviction from a road rage incident.
"I was at Disneyland on that day," she recalled. "The happiest place on Earth, and then this comes up."
Wilber Ulises Molina was charged with sexually assaulting her.
"He was a match for that one part of the DNA that was sitting by itself," she said. This week, Molina was found guilty after a four-day trial, and then sentenced to 55 years in prison. Because she was blindfolded during the assaults, the first time Tiffani saw Molina was in court.
"My social worker, who was with me throughout the trial, asked me if I wanted to see him before the trial. She looked at him through a glass door in the courtroom.
"That was my first look at him and I just lost it. I'm pretty sure everything I'd kept in for 18 years came out in 30 seconds."
She did not give a victim impact statement. He didn't deserve hearing her words, she said.
"Nothing I would have said would have made any difference. I don't need to tell him what a bad person he is. He's already a bad person," Tiffani said.
Molina was offered a plea deal, but he turned it down. He has yet to identify any of the other men involved in the assault.
Tiffani says she's at peace with that.
"Some people might base their lives on whether they get justice. Other women who go through this might be, 'I need him caught. I need this to be over.' No, you don't. You can be fine without that closure. Make your own closure so you can move on. The most important thing is your healing, and the rest will happen as it should."
