Suspected serial rapist Brent J. Brents confessed to raping five Denver-area women and two school-age children and repeatedly battering an apartment manager with a board, nearly killing her, a police commander testified Monday at a preliminary hearing.
Lt. Jon Priest said the first confession came early on Feb. 19 in Glenwood Springs shortly after Brents’ capture and the second later that day after Brents was returned to Denver.
Priest said Brents, who raped a 6-year-old boy and a 9-year-old girl in 1988, said sexual assaults didn’t thrill him anymore so he sought adult women who would put up a fight.
“He said, ‘It just doesn’t do it for me anymore,”‘ Priest testified. “Now it is the choking, fighting and struggling that does it for him.”
Priest said Brents added that the typical treatment for sex offenders doesn’t work for people like him and that he is a “good manipulator.”
After hearing testimony from six detectives, Denver County Judge Andrew Armatas ordered Brents to stand trial on 72 charges stemming from attacks on eight people between October and Feb. 18. He set an arraignment in Denver District Court for May 20.
Brents’ defense attorney, Carrie Thomp son, said she wouldn’t be ready for the arraignment, at which Brents is supposed to enter a plea. She said she wants to review Brents’ mental status before deciding on a plea.
In questioning Priest, Thompson focused on comments from Brents that “there is this thing in my brain that just goes (expletive) stupid.
“I know I’m (expletive) up,” Brents said. “I’m tired of the way my brain works. I don’t want to be that way any more.”
But prosecutors Stephanie Villafuerte and Carlos Samour and District Attorney Mitch Morrissey said Brents is a cold, calculating man who stalked women and returned to a home hours after he saw two children playing in the yard so he could sexually assault them.
Priest said Brents gave detailed accounts of sexual assaults of seven people: a woman raped on Oct. 20, 2004, two women raped Feb. 11, a 67- year-old woman and the two children raped Feb. 14 and the repeated rapes of a 27-year-old on Feb. 18. DNA has tied six of the victims to Brents, authorities say. Prosecutors are awaiting the results of DNA tests on the seventh victim.
Priest said Brents also provided graphic details of how he used a two-by-four to repeatedly hit apartment manager Tiffany Engle in the head after she stumbled upon him in an apartment in the 1000 block of Marion Street on Feb. 18.
Brents claimed that the only reason Engle didn’t die was because of the screaming of the 27-year-old rape victim, who was in the apartment and trying to flee, Priest said. Brents and the rape victim were naked when Engle walked in.
“She (the 27-year-old) yelled, ‘Please stop, don’t kill her, don’t kill her!”‘ Detective Martin Vigil quoted the young woman as saying.
The woman, who has since died of an accidental drug overdose, told police that Brents put a knife to her throat and “had sex with me more times than I could count,” Vigil testified.
After the preliminary hearing, Armatas advised Brents of new charges, alleging that he sexually assaulted a 23-year-old woman on Jan. 11 and a 22-year-old woman on Jan. 21. A preliminary hearing date on those charges is scheduled for May 26.
Staff writer Howard Pankratz can be reached at 303-820-1939 or hpankratz@denverpost.com.
