LEE COUNTY, Fla. — A Fort Myers man has been found guilty of raping a co-worker in the parking lot of their workplace in August 2020.
Kyndall Hutchins was arrested and charged with the crime and bonded out of jail after two days.
He was fitted with an ankle monitor.
In February 2021 he failed to show for a hearing and it was soon learned Hutchins had cut off the ankle monitor, prompting a manhunt.
He was later captured in Rhode Island.
Hutchins is a registered sex offender with a history of violent offenses and eluding police.
He is scheduled to be sentenced on July 5.
In an exclusive interview, the victim's mother spoke with Fox 4 about her daughter's painful journey over the last two years.
“I have a lot of anger, I have a lot of relief, I have a lot of thankfulness," she says.
“We were scared to death. Those couple of seconds when they were reading the verdict, it seemed like a million years.”
But then a guilty verdict came.
“I’m just glad it worked out - that the jury saw that he was guilty.”
The mother of the young rape survivor asked us to not show her face or give her name, but she says she felt compelled to share her teenager's story.
“My daughter worked at Miceli's Italian Restaurant in Matlacha, that’s where her coworker raped her in the parking lot," she says, recalling the incident.
"[Hutchins] was behind that big red chair they have there, it’s like a tourist chair, you know, makes you look smaller, huge chair. He popped out from behind it and said ‘I’ll walk with you to the car.'"
Earlier that afternoon, she was recovering from surgery, saying that she talked to her daughter. But she wasn't prepared for the call that she received later that day.
“It was a male’s voice - and it was the owner of Miceli's, Joe Miceli, he had called off my daughter’s phone to me - and told me that a fellow employee just pulled down her pants.”
Soon she would learn the details that led to more than two years of pain for her and her family. Now, as she waits for Hutchins sentencing, she says hope is mixed with many emotions.
She offered this message for other parents, whose children are also sexual assault survivors: “I’d like to say that I know it’s not easy to come forward. I think my daughter was so, so brave because a lot of people don’t come forward because they’re scared or they think they won’t be believed or they just don’t want to deal with the process - and my daughter was strong enough to get through that, so she’s hoping she does that for someone else.”
