Parents: Man living next door assaulted daughter, fled

HOUSTON The girl's parents want this guy caught, they say, before he attacks another child. We're not revealing their identities so as not to identify the victim, their 10-year-old daughter.

"She was sitting in one of my chairs," the girl's mother said.

The girl's mother says on Monday afternoon, her 10-year-old daughter was sitting on the front porch alone outside their apartment when a man in the adjacent unit opened the door and forced her inside.

"It's sad because he's up in his 40's," her mother said. "I call him a rapist, a child molester."

The girl told investigators she was inside the apartment a short but unknown period of time. According to the police report, the suspect kissed her. Her father says the man tried to do more.

"She said that a guy next door tried to kiss her, put his hands up her blouse and pull her pants down," he said.

The girl somehow got out and ran back to her parents next door. They called 911 but by the time they arrived, the man was gone.

"He's a sick individual. His mind has to be sick," the father said.

Paramedics arrived but the mother and father say, inexplicably, their daughter was not taken to the hospital right then.

"I'm mad," her mother said. "They wasn't doing their job."

The mother, who's a rape victim herself, says it's inexcusable.

Houston police say it wasn't necessary medically, and a spokesperson says they'd identified the suspect fairly quickly so they had "...no reason to do further forensic examination knowing who the suspect is..."

The mother took the 10-year-old to the ER at Southwest Memorial the next day and doctors performed a sexual assault kit to gather evidence.

The person answering the door at the suspect's apartment says he knows the suspect but doesn't know where he is. That's what concerns the victim and her family -- the fact that he is still out there, somewhere.

"He needs to be locked up," the girl's mother said. "He needs to be put away before it happens to anybody else's child."

Houston police refuse to identify the suspect even though they say know who he is. They describe him as a Hispanic male, 20-30 years old who is about 5 feet 6 inches and weighs between 130 and 150 pounds.