ShareConvicted rapist released in December is charged in January assault
FORT WORTH -- Two months after being released from prison for sexually assaulting a woman, a 26-year-old man was charged Monday in the rape of a Fort Worth woman last month.
Joe Louis Woods is accused of forcing the woman, 22, into his Ford Explorer on Jan. 22 and driving her to a secluded dead-end road. During the attack, the woman saw some ID cards in the SUV's console and managed to hang on to them, said Sgt. Pedro Criado, a police spokesman.
Based on that evidence, investigators obtained a warrant for Woods, who was arrested Wednesday.
Woods was charged Monday with aggravated sexual assault by threat, according to Tarrant County court records. He remained in the Mansfield Jail on Monday afternoon with bail set at $250,000.
Woods was released from prison Dec. 8 after completing a three-year sentence for a September 2006 sexual assault of a 19-year-old woman in Forest Hill.
Woods had known the woman for four or five months, Forest Hill police Lt. Dan Dennis said. The assault took place in Woods' Forest Hill residence and stopped only after the woman's baby started crying, Dennis said.
Court records show that Woods pleaded guilty in that case in November 2007 in exchange for the three-year prison sentence. He was required to register as a sex offender and lives in southeast Fort Worth, Department of Public Safety sex offender records show.
In the recent case, Criado said, the woman was walking along East Davis Avenue when she noticed a Ford Explorer driving around. The woman told police that the Explorer pulled up next to her, and the driver offered her a ride. When she refused, the driver got out, grabbed her by her shirt and hair, and forced her into the SUV, she said.
She told police that the man drove to a dead-end street and sexually assaulted her in the back seat, threatening her with a brick that he picked up from the ground and claiming that he had a knife.
The woman told officers that the man told her afterward, "I'm trying to teach girls like you a lesson for walking around in your tight clothes and thinking nothing can happen to you."
He then offered to give her a ride to wherever she had been going, but the woman ran away and hid until she found someone to call 911 for her, Criado said.
According to a police report, the woman handed responding officers a plastic wallet insert that contained two Texas identification cards and other items that she said she had sneaked out of the vehicle.
DEANNA BOYD, 817-390-7655
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