A Bolingbrook man convicted of sexually assaulting and robbing an 85-year-old widow in Westmont has been sentenced to 100 years in prison.
The sentence for Tevin Rainey, 23, was handed down last week by DuPage County Judge Brian Telander.
A follow-up hearing on the case will be held Thursday. Rainey’s defense attorneys expect to file a motion to reconsider sentence, which preserves Rainey’s appeal rights and will likely produce one more future hearing for Rainey at the trial level.
Rainey could choose to appeal or seek relief via the post-conviction process.
He already has been turned over to the Illinois Department of Corrections and is not expected at next week’s proceeding.
Rainey was found guilty this year of breaking into the woman’s apartment in early on Jan. 1, 2015, and then sexually assaulting her at gunpoint before forcing her to drive to an ATM and withdraw money.
In finding Rainey guilty, Telander commented that prosecutors had constructed a case against Rainey that fit together like a jigsaw puzzle. The judge’s sentence likely will keep him behind bars for the rest of his life.
Telander sentenced Rainey to 60 years on a count of aggravated criminal sexual assault, and then gave him a consecutive 40-year sentence for armed robbery with a firearm. Rainey must serve 85 percent of the 100-year sentence before he is eligible for parole.
His victim, now 89, declined to testify at the sentencing hearing, but her clear and credible trial testimony was a critical component of the prosecution case, said Assistant State’s Attorney Mike Pawl, who garnered the conviction with fellow prosecutor Cathy DeLaMar.
“To be able to testify about something so unimaginably horrible with such grace and dignity was a tribute and a testament to her,” Pawl said Thursday.
The woman said at trial that she could not positively identify Rainey as her attacker, but other key details of her testimony were corroborated by evidence gathered by investigators. She was able to lead police to the Woodridge apartment complex where she dropped off her attacker. Rainey sometimes stayed there with a relative, according to trial testimony.
Rainey argued at trial that an acquaintance was the actual attacker, but authorities said they found both Rainey’s and victim’s DNA on the gun used that night. Several relatives of Rainey wrote the court and asked the judge to take into account his difficult upbringing at sentencing. His mother, Nicole Rainey, was one of 21 people crushed to death in Chicago’s E2 nightclub stampede in 2003.
“I’m not sure everyone could understand the big losses Tevin and his siblings took,” Rainey’s aunt, Wynonia Rainey, wrote in a letter in the court file.
Clifford Ward is a freelance reporter.
