Felix Rojas, 44, arraigned after video showed him performing sexual acts on unresponsive passenger
Authorities in New York have charged a man with attempted rape after surveillance video taken showed him performing sexual acts on an unresponsive passenger who was later determined to have died.
Police have been looking for suspects in the case for weeks, after footage captured two different people robbing the corpse of a man on a train traveling from Brooklyn to Manhattan, one of whom allegedly sexually violated him.
Felix Rojas, 44, was arraigned on Tuesday, three weeks after authorities said he abused the male victim inside a subway car. Rojas, who was arrested on Sunday, has also been charged with attempted grand larceny.
Thank you.
Yeah, I’ve struggled a bit to process a really good friend of mine being raped years and years ago, and the “weird levels of guilt and self-doubt” is something I experienced in my own way, because I thought I got traumatized “more” than my friend did (though I know now that’s not how trauma really works) and thought that was selfish of me (which I know now was a silly thing to think), and sorting all of that stuff out was a big part of my own journey. And I guess watching my friend wrestle with that stupid “what is the right way to feel about what happened to me and how should I perform those feelings” aspect of trauma, and watching her have to deal with other people’s feelings about her feelings, and hearing her “joke” multiple times about how being murdered would have been less of an inconvenience for her is all a big part of what makes me feel like I do about what rape is and isn’t.
Thank you a million times over for understanding.
That’s hard to deal with. You are clearly an empathetic person with deep concern and care for this friend.
When dealing with grief, the best practice is to not seek solace/comfort from someone on a more inner circle of the grief (with the circles being like immediate family > close friends > extended family, and so on). Like it would be generally seen as inappropriate if a man’s wife died and her coworker went to him to process their grief.
Your friend’s ‘joke’ about murder summarizes simply how a lot of victims feel like rape is a loss of self, of personhood, in a way that parallels the loss of that in death—except the victim has to live through it and process it. So getting back to the grief circles, with rape those same circles may exist except with the survivor at the center. And it seems like you needed your own space to process the grief but you were trying to respect the circles and so you didn’t have support in that.
I’m just rambling thoughts that all mirror what you’ve said—I think I’m just trying to acknowledge what you experienced in my own words.
I hope you and your friend are more at peace now or at least on your way to it <3