A man with a history of arrests for robbery and sexual assault in Baltimore County and the city has been charged with raping a 59-year-old woman during a home invasion robbery last week in Roland Park.
Chaz Ricks, 20, was arrested late Monday and is being held at the city Central Booking and Intake Center. City police were looking last night for a second man involved in the crime.
The woman was still in the hospital last night, police said, because her back was injured in the attack. The Sun does not name people who have reported sex crimes.
Charging documents against Ricks describe a brutal assault and rape Thursday night in a home in Tuxedo Park, a tiny neighborhood behind the Eddie's supermarket.
The attackers may have targeted the woman while she was out shopping that day and followed her home, police said.
Alone in her kitchen about 8 p.m., the woman was putting away groceries and making herself dinner when she heard footsteps behind her, according to charging documents. When she turned around, she saw two men pointing handguns at her; they had entered a front door that she had forgotten to lock.
The men took $7 from her purse on the dining room table and told her they were going upstairs to look for more money.
One man grabbed the woman, documents say, and she fell to the floor and started to lose consciousness. She told her attackers she could no longer stand or move, the documents say. One man carried her upstairs.
After the assault, the men left, slamming the front door. The woman called 911.
Police would not say yesterday whether Ricks is the man accused of raping the woman, or if he is suspected of being the man described in charging documents as being downstairs at the time.
Ricks, who has given police home addresses in the city and Baltimore County, has been charged in four other violent encounters -- including a home invasion robbery and rape in northeastern Baltimore County with similarities to the Roland Park attack.
None of those cases made it to trial.
In a Baltimore County case, a woman told police that two men wearing ski masks confronted her March 9 last year, as she was entering her basement apartment in Nottingham. One man had a black revolver, according to charging documents.
One of the men struck the woman on the head with the gun and, once in her apartment, continually pointed the gun at her, charging documents say.
