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District Attorney: Harrisburg man gets 17 to 34 years in prison for raping 3 women in 2013

HARRISBURG (WPMT)-A Harrisburg man will spend the next 17 to 34 years behind bars after he was convicted of sexually assaulting three different women on three s...

HARRISBURG (WPMT)-A Harrisburg man will spend the next 17 to 34 years behind bars after he was convicted of sexually assaulting three different women on three separate occasions in 2013, according to the Dauphin County District Attorney’s office.

Judge Deborah E. Curcillo  sentenced 24-year-old Jyrell Selvey on Thursday.  She also ordered him to serve a consecutive 12 term of probation on top of his prison sentence. Selvey pleaded guilty in October to rape by forcible compulsion, involuntary deviate sexual intercourse by forcible compulsion, indecent assault by forcible compulsion and unlawful restraint, according to court records.

In June, July and September of 2013, three unrelated women reported to police that were sexually assaulted after being approached by a man who was brandishing a weapon.  One woman described a gun; another a knife; and a third said she was threatened with a pipe-like item.  After being coerced into a secluded area, each woman was raped and sodomized.  The police believed that the three assaults were potentially the same suspect because in each case, the perpetrator eerily apologized repeatedly to the victims as he was assaulting them.  Each woman went to the hospital immediately and DNA evidence was collected and entered into a national database.  The police had been unable to identify a suspect because the perpetrators’ DNA was not yet in the database.

In September of 2013, when the third victim was sexually assaulted she had the courage to lie to the perpetrator and say that she enjoyed being with him and requested his cell phone number.  The assailant gave it to her and that allowed police to identify a suspect which them led to the acquisition of a search warrant for his DNA.  Once his DNA was uploaded into the database—he was identified as the assailant in all three cases.

According to the District Attorney’s office, Selvey has a history of mental illness and reported that he sees people who are not really there and that they talk to him.

Before Selvey was sentenced Thursday–he expressed remorse for his actions, prosecutor said.

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