Mankato convicted rapist tries to walk out of the courtroom during sentencing
The Brief
A man convicted in a 2015 rape of a 14-year-old girl was sentenced on Monday.
Lazarous Lazaro Thomas was sentenced to 30 years behind bars.
Thomas attempted to walk out of the courtroom after the sentence was handed down.
MANKATO, Minn. (FOX 9) - The man convicted of sexually assaulting a 14-year-old girl in Mankato was sentenced to prison on Monday, nearly 10 years after the attack.
The backstory
Lazarous Lazaro Thomas, 28, was convicted of first-degree criminal sexual assault for the attack that happened in September 2015.
Thomas wasn't arrested in the case until eight years after the attack, when there was a DNA match in 2023.
He was accused of breaking in through the girl's bedroom window, crawling on top of her, and threatening to kill her if she screamed.
What we know
In court on Monday, the judge handed down a 30-year sentence for Thomas, who will get credit for nearly two years of time served in jail.
The other side
Last week, the victim, Chloe Taber, spoke with FOX 9, talking about how the attack had scarred her.
"I struggled a lot with doing not so safe things. I ended up getting pregnant at 15. It's another one that I thought was a really weird symptom of it, or sign or whatever, is you would think after being raped that sex and those kind of things would be something that you would want nothing to do with. And I came to find out as I got older that that's not the case. Sometimes they become like victims and survivors become like hypersexual or do things not so safely, which I thought I was crazy for. But I came to find it's more common than we realize. But I did become pregnant at 15. I have a beautiful 8-year-old. She basically saved my life after the fact."
What they're saying
In court, Taber talked about how the assault changed her forever.
"Every night, I triple check that all the doors and windows are locked and shut," she said, "sometimes, getting up again to make sure. After all this time, it still affects me in many ways and will forever, something the defendant will never understand the feeling of. That being said, I believe he should be sentenced to the highest extent, as it's been shown to the state, there's no remorse."
When given the chance to speak, Lazaro denied he was responsible for the attack. "I believe that I've been wrongly convicted," Thomas told the judge. "I don't understand how this person can sit up here and say that I did something."
After the sentence was handed down, Thomas had to be stopped by deputies from walking out of the court.
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