William Abreu, Student-Raping Brooklyn Asst. Principal, Still Free 7 Years After Rape

EAST WILLIAMSBURG, BROOKLYN — Of the slew of sickening complaints lodged against 44-year-old Queens resident William Abreu in his years as assistant principal at Progress High School for Professional Careers, only one charge has stuck in the court of law: third-degree rape.

A Brooklyn Supreme Court jury found in September of this year that Abreu (pronounced uh-bray-oh) had repeatedly groped and raped his 17-year-old female office assistant, an undocumented immigrant and recent high-school graduate, while she worked in the Progress High administrative offices at the Grand Street Educational Campus over the summer of 2009. Abreu then threatened to report the girl to immigration authorities, prosecutors said, if she told anyone what he had done to her.

Abreu has remained a free man in the seven years since.

The former city employee at the center of one of Brooklyn's most high-profile school rape cases was finally handed his sentence Tuesday: six months behind bars, followed by 10 years of probation.

And yet still, for the foreseeable future, Abreu will not be sleeping in a jail cell. That's because the Honorable Vincent Del Giudice — the same judge who decided to sentence Abreu to six months in prison, rather than the four years recommended by prosecutors — allowed Abreu to walk out of court Tuesday on $25,000 bail. The convicted rapist will remain free until a decision has been made on his appeal.

There's no saying how long that could take.

Abreu has maintained his innocence ever since his victim broke her silence in 2012. The rape, Abreu's lawyer said Wednesday, "didn't happen."

"We're going to appeal," his lawyer said.

Abreu's accuser — now in her 20s and living in Honduras — has stuck by her story, too.

In 2012, with her nightmare summer job three years behind her but inspired by another Progress High student who spoke up with similar allegations, the young woman told the Special Commissioner of Investigation for the NYC School District that Abreu had approached her one day in the office in 2009 and said: “If you don’t allow me to touch you, I will have to call Immigration.”

He told her to move to a couch in the room, she said, where he touched her leg and her vagina over her jeans. Abreu then reached into her underwear and touched her vagina again, she said. From there, she told investigators that her boss completely undressed her, groped her, forced his penis inside her, raped her, then ejaculated onto her abdomen.

Once the assault was over, according to the student, Abreu threatened her with deportation once again. “If you don’t come back, I am going to have to go to Immigration,” she remembered him saying.

The girl continued to work for Abreu for the rest of the summer. During that time, she said Abreu "often" groped her breasts, vagina and buttocks over her clothes, ignoring her protests; demanded she give him oral sex; and forced her hand onto his penis.

During the recent trial, Abreu's accuser made the trip from Honduras to the U.S. to repeat this same story in front of a Brooklyn jury.

And she's not the first young woman to accuse him of sex crimes.

Another teen student at Progress High told NYC School District investigators that in March 2011 — also during a summer job in Abreu's office — the assistant principal had approached her and said, “If you want to continue to work here, you have to have sexual relations with me.” He said he would pay her $4,000, she remembered, if she had sex with him and other men. In particular, she said Abreu urged her to have sex with his colleague Juan Martinez, the middle-aged director of an after-school program at Progress High. Abreu then groped her buttocks and sent her over to Martinez' office, where the second man forced her to give him oral sex, she said.

In summer 2012, another trio of 15-year-olds reportedly came forward. When applying for the same summer office job with Abreu, they said, the assistant principal told them they'd have to “perform sexual favors” and “dress provocatively” in the office.

It took until September 2013 for NYC School District investigators to compile all the accusations into substantiated reports. Based on these reports, Abreu was fired by the district in November 2013. And finally, in January 2014, he was arrested and indicted — along with Martinez — for an alleged string of predatory sex crimes against teen students.

However, the Brooklyn jury tasked with determining Abreu's guilt or lack thereof — reportedly composed of seven men and five women — acquitted him this September, nearly two years after he first appeared in court, of all charges but one.

The only charge that stuck: rape in the third degree.

In calculating an appropriate punishment for the crime, Judge Del Giudice had the option of putting Abreu behind bars for up to four years.

On Tuesday, Del Giudice instead gave the convicted school rapist six months — one-eighth of the maximum sentence.

Not two weeks before he died suddenly from cancer this past fall, Ken Thompson, the Brooklyn District Attorney under whom Abreu was convicted in September, called the defendant "an assistant principal who violated the trust of a vulnerable teenager... using her immigration status as leverage."

"This young woman had the courage to speak out against this abuse," Thompson said. "He’s now been held accountable for his deplorable actions.”

At Tuesday's sentencing, prosecutors "requested the maximum sentence of four years in prison" for Abreu, a spokeswoman for the DA's Office said.

However, she said, "the judge imposed a lower sentence over our objection."

Del Giudice did not respond to a request for comment from Patch. In his stead, a spokesman for the New York State Office of Court Administration said that since Abreu's case is pending appeal, "it wouldn't be appropriate for [the judge] to comment whatsoever."

How did a convicted student-raping Brooklyn assistant principal end up with a six-month jail sentence? We'll be investigating this case further over the next few days. Subscribe to the Williamsburg-Greenpoint Patch email newsletter to read the latest.