OAKLAND PARK, Fla. – A technician at a psychiatric hospital in Oakland Park is facing a half-dozen sexual battery charges after Broward Sheriff’s Office deputies accused him of raping a patient multiple times while she was drugged and unable to resist.
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Deputies arrested Jeff Doresca, 37, on Monday, according to an arrest report obtained by Local 10 News on Wednesday. The report states that the victim’s roommate witnessed at least one of the rapes.
According to the report, deputies went to Fort Lauderdale Behavioral Health Center at 5757 N. Dixie Highway to investigate the case on Monday.
BSO Detective Dimos Charoudis wrote in the report that the victim, a 32-year-old woman, admitted herself to the facility on Thursday to be treated for schizophrenia and depression.
Deputies said the woman told investigators that just before 4:25 p.m. Sunday, she had been given her regular medications, which made her drowsy, and lost consciousness. She said she woke up to a female nurse placing a wet towel over her forehead.
When the nurse left, Doresca came into the room and asked the victim if she had showered, the report states. When she said she hadn’t, Doresca told her to take a shower and then watched her as she bathed, Charoudis wrote.
While watching, Charoudis wrote that Doresca asked her, “Can I have a taste?” and then proceeded to touch the victim’s privates.
The detective wrote that the woman “was not understanding what was happening because she was still drowsy.”
Deputies said she went back to bed and was given medication just after 9:30 p.m. that made her drowsy again. Later that evening, Doresca came back into her room and sexually assaulted her, the report states.
Charoudis wrote that Doresca went back into the woman’s room “five additional times” to rape the woman while “she was too drowsy and weak to resist.”
He wrote that surveillance video shows Doresca going into the victim’s room multiple times and wrote that he “would always look down the hallway to see if anyone was looking at him.”
The woman’s roommate would tell detectives that she “saw the male tech having sex with (the victim)” but since she was “not resisting” she “assumed it was consensual.”
In an interview, translated by a Haitian Creole-speaking deputy, Doresca admitted to having sex with the patient but blamed her, claiming that she “came onto him” and “threatened him that if he did not have sex with (her) that she would report him and he would lose his job,” deputies said.
“Doresca admitted that he was instructed when he was hired that he was not allowed to have sex with any of the patients (and) that it was wrong to have sex with a mental patient who was drowsy from being under the influence of her medication,” Charoudis wrote, saying Doresca admitted “he was not thinking straight when he had sex with a helpless victim.”
Doresca, arrested on six first-degree sexual battery charges, was being held without bond in the BSO Main Jail as of Wednesday evening. If given bond, he was ordered to not have contact with the victim or work as a caregiver.
Jail records show that an immigration hold was dismissed. Doresca has lived in the United States for two years on Temporary Protected Status, according to his arrest report.