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About New York

In Botched Case of Park Jogger, an Altered Life

After the man was finished raping the 20-year-old college student and searching her apartment for money, he announced that he had to kill or blind her. He held an ice pick to her eyes, then found a blade. Already he had bound her with telephone wire ripped from the wall.

“Ankle to wrist,” the woman recalled on Thursday, 25 years later. “He put some paper towels on my eyes. I was kneeling and he was cutting at my eyes.”

She asked to be identified as Katherine.

The man, Matias Reyes, had followed her into an apartment on Madison Avenue in the East 90s on July 19, 1989. He had already raped two women in Central Park in April and two more in June, killing one, a pregnant mother whose children were in the next room. 

One of Mr. Reyes’s victims in April, a woman he had raped and beaten nearly to death, was the Central Park jogger.

On Thursday, the city comptroller approved a payment of $40.7 million to settle the claim of five men wrongly convicted as teenagers in the attack.

By the time Mr. Reyes found Katherine, three months after the attack on the jogger, he had started cutting at and around women’s eyes. He did not succeed in blinding them. “I just sort of collapsed,” Katherine said. “He got up and walked out of the room.”

Unsure if he had left the apartment, she waited a while, then managed to free one limb from the cord. She got to a window and screamed for help.

“People on Madison Avenue started to gravitate toward the window, like some sort of sci-fi film,” she said. “There was blood dripping down both eyes.”

Ten days later, Mr. Reyes followed another woman into the hallway of her building on 95th Street and Lexington, but a neighbor interrupted the attack. Finally, on Aug. 5, he followed a woman into an apartment on 91st Street between Lexington and Third Avenues, and raped her several times. She was able to escape. A building worker and neighbor confronted Mr. Reyes and held him at bay with a broomstick until the police arrived.

Katherine recalled that Detective Bruno Francisi and an assistant district attorney, Peter Casolaro, handled her case “with complete kindness and respect and thoroughness.” “I had to go in front of the grand jury and I saw one of the other girls, whose head was bandaged,” Katherine said. 

Ultimately, Mr. Reyes pleaded guilty to several of the rapes and the murder, but he was not questioned about two attacks in Central Park: the assault on the jogger on April 19 and on another woman April 17. The jogger had been beaten so severely that she had no memory of the attack, and by the time Mr. Reyes was arrested in August, the police had rounded up teenagers who had been making trouble in the park that night and gotten confessions from them. 

The police appeared to have lost track of Mr. Reyes after the jogger attack, even though he had been identified as a suspect in the rape two days before. The victim had noticed three stitches on his chin, and detectives got Mr. Reyes’s identity and address from hospital records but were unable to find him. The victim left the city. The sex crime detective on the case was transferred. The case folder was stamped “closed” around the end of June, even though no arrest had been made. 

The jogger case was handled by a separate unit of detectives who specialized in homicide investigations. 

Not until 13 years later, in 2002, did Mr. Reyes admit to the two rapes in the park, which physical and circumstantial evidence confirmed.

 Katherine recalled being contacted in 2002 by Mr. Casolaro, who apologetically asked her to describe how she had been bound. The jogger had been tied up in a similar way with her own clothes. 

Katherine finished college on time, never taking a break, putting the assault into a kind of deep freeze.

“I isolated myself,” she said. “That proved not to be good at all. I kind of lost the ability to reach in and tell the story, as it was — raw and from my heart.”

She was stunned by the news that the same man who attacked her had been implicated in the Central Park jogger case. “It turned me upside down.”

The lost opportunities to arrest Mr. Reyes were recounted in “The Central Park Five,” a book by Sarah Burns that became the basis of a documentary by Ms. Burns; her father, Ken Burns; and her husband, David McMahon. 

“It was yet another word of an earthquake,” Katherine said. “The same system that hurt those five also damaged me. I’m still sort of dismantled by this.”

Email: dwyer@nytimes.com Twitter: @jimdwyernyt

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section A, Page 23 of the New York edition with the headline: In Botched Case of Park Jogger, an Altered Life. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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