Between where a 16-year-old Lauderhill girl got off the school bus and her home, police say she was forced to survive a box cutter put to her throat before being raped in a driveway last week.
Police say the “calm demeanor and the manner in which he preyed upon the victim” suggest the suspect has done this before.
That suspect, 39-year-old Jermaine Henderson, a 5-foot-6, 220-pound Miramar resident, has been in Broward County Jail since Tuesday. He’s charged with two counts of sexual assault with a weapon, sexual battery on a victim over 12 years old.
No bond has been granted. Henderson bonded out after a 2019 misdemeanor arrest then forfeited that bond by not showing up for his arraignment. Henderson also had two civil writs of arrest for being in arrears on child support, according to his online jail records.
The arrest warrant says the 16-year-old girl looked at a photo array and “pointed at the photo depicting Henderson while repeating ’That’s him,’ ” multiple times.
Crocs, a box cutter and a pickup truck
The arrest warrant says the 16-year-old got off the school bus near the corner of Northwest 38th Avenue and Sixth Street and headed home around 4 p.m. on April 11. Surveillance video from a nearby home released by Lauderhill police shows the girl walking down the street as a white pickup truck pulls into a driveway in front of her. A man stops the girl and talks to her.
The warrant says the victim described the man as heavy-set with hazel eyes, a beard, brush cut hair, around 5-foot-6 to 5-foot-7, wearing an orange construction shirt, work boots and khaki pants. She said he told her she got “from point A to point B pretty fast” and asked her if she was on the track team. He then asked if he could check out the multi-colored Crocs she was wearing. She put one up on the truck’s tailgate.
He grabbed her ankle, she said, and put a box cutter to it. He told her to follow his orders and she wouldn’t get hurt. He then put the box cutter to her throat and walked her to the open front passenger side door. After opening the rear passenger side door to conceal them from casual passers-by, she said, the man raped her.
Preservation and investigation
The bleeding girl subsequently went to HCA Westside Hospital for treatment, met with Plantation and Lauderhill police officers, described the truck, then to the Sexual Assault Treatment Center for examination and a rape kit.
Two days later, the warrant says, detectives went door-to-door in the neighborhood after walking through it with the 16-year-old, who remembered details such as where she crossed the street after getting off the bus and why she crossed where she did. On April 14, a resident emailed police that her surveillance video picked up something.
After police viewed the surveillance video, a license plate reader search found a 2008 white Ford F-250 pickup truck with paper license tag DDI2994 later changed to a regular tag 28BMDQ. It was owned by a Plantation man who also appeared on a Plantation police department report from April 12.
The truck’s owner had gone with a friend to USA Tires International to complain about work done on the truck and the disagreement got heated enough for Plantation police to be called. The friend actually had been the one to bring the truck in for work.
The friend, the warrant said, was Jermaine Henderson.
* story by The Miami Herald
