Man faces at least 24 years in prison after pleading guilty in 3 Durham rape cases
A North Carolina man pleaded guilty Wednesday in three rape cases dating back to 2010, and faces a sentence of at least 24 years, the Durham County District Attorney’s office said Thursday.
Michael Brooks Jr., 48, pleaded guilty in Durham County Superior Court to one count of first-degree rape, two counts of second-degree rape and one count of assault on a handicapped person, the district attorney’s office said in a release.
The charges stem from three separate incidents that occurred in 2010, 2016 and 2017.
Brooks was originally arrested in November 2017 for choking and raping a 68-year-old Durham woman whose house he was staying at. The woman let Brooks sleep on her couch after he said he had nowhere else to go, before he choked her until she lost consciousness and raped her on Sept. 11, 2017, the release said.
In 2019, Brooks, who remained in custody since his arrest in November 2017, was charged with raping a 36-year-old woman on June 26, 2016. Brooks was at the woman’s home watching television when, after asking her for a ride home, he pulled a knife on her and raped her, according to the release.
And in 2020, Brooks was charged with raping a then-25-year-old woman on Sept. 29, 2010. Brooks was identified as a suspect in the decade-old case during a spate of sexual assault arrests announced by the Durham Police Department in January 2020, after police matched DNA samples from a backlog of sexual assault test kits to a national DNA database.
At the time, Brooks had been linked with eight Durham Police Department cases and one Durham County Sheriff’s Office case. Since August 2010, Brooks has also been on North Carolina’s registry of sex offenders, due to a sexual battery offense from September 2007 that he was convicted of in January 2009.
On Wednesday, Brooks was sentenced to between 292 and 363 months in prison, the district attorney’s office said. He was also ordered to complete a sex offender treatment program and comply with permanent no contact orders granted for each of the victims.
The victims in all three cases identified Brooks, and sexual assault test kits were completed in each case, the district attorney’s office said.
Since early 2019, more than a dozen suspects, including Brooks, have been charged through an initiative of the Durham Police Department and District Attorney’s office to identify suspects in sexual assault cold cases through sexual assault kit testing, the release said.
