Girl, 7, helped seal case against attacker

The 7-year-old girl survived.

In a case like hers, survival is remarkable.

She survived an intruder who carried her from a bed in a west Wichita apartment where she was spending the night in early June.

“Shh,” he kept telling her — so he could attack her without being caught.

But the girl would help seal the case against him, a police affidavit says.

Her injuries, detailed in the affidavit released Thursday, help explain something at the core of the case: why prosecutors charged Corbin Breitenbach with attempted capital murder along with aggravated criminal sodomy and aggravated burglary. The attempted capital murder charge alleges that the 23-year-old took the girl from a bedroom, strangled her to unconsciousness and brought her to an outdoor balcony and sexually assaulted her.

But the affidavit tells much more.

A medical official with years of experience examining sexual assault victims looked at photos of spots showing beneath the girl’s skin. The medical term for the spots is “petechial hemorrhage” and they come from broken or leaking blood vessels where force is used to block airways. The medical official told a Wichita police detective that “it was rare to have petechial hemorrhages like these on a living patient,” the affidavit said.

Medical staff put in a report that the girl “has petechiae all over head and neck, including over the entire scalp.”

The injuries, it said, were “consistent with severe strangulation.”

The girl’s account

The affidavit lays out details — some graphic and disturbing especially because of the age of the victim — that prosecutors use as legal basis for seeking the charges.

According to the affidavit, this is how the girl remembered it:

It was the weekend of Saturday June 10. The 7-year-old girl and her younger brother were spending the night at the apartment of a parent’s friend. It is a second-floor apartment in a series of condominium buildings in the 1400 block of North Smith Court, near West 13th and Zoo Boulevard.

The girl and her little brother slept in one bedroom. In an adjoining bedroom, the 26-year-old woman who lives at the apartment slept with her 6-year-old daughter.

The affidavit doesn’t explain how the intruder got into the second-floor apartment, which has a rear balcony in addition to a walkway leading to the front door. A separate, initial police report says there was no “forced entry.”

The nurses treating the 7-year-old girl said she told them “when I was sleeping, I heard walking on toys. He picked me up and kept saying shh,” the affidavit says. At the hospital, the girl gave the same account to authorities that she told the nurses.

The girl described the man as not having a beard or mustache. “He was a stranger. I think I saw him before but I don’t know where I saw him.”

The woman in the apartment woke up around 2:30 a.m. that Sunday and heard the 7-year-old crying.

The woman found the girl “naked, curled into a fetal position, lying on the edge of the bed, with blood covering the lower half of her body and bedsheets.” Her little brother was still asleep in the bed they shared.

The woman had the girl sit on the toilet and noticed that the 7-year-old’s face was “covered in dark red/brown spots.”

When she asked the girl what happened, the 7-year-old said a man carried her from the bed to a living room couch and asked her to take off her shirt.

After she refused, he began to strangle her.

After the girl regained consciousness, she apologized to the woman for peeing on the couch, which apparently happened as she was being choked.

The next thing the girl remembered was waking up back in the bed.

As the woman scanned the apartment, she found the girl’s shirt and underwear near or on the couch.

The woman also discovered that the sliding glass door to the second-floor balcony “was now open and a large puddle of blood was on the rear deck,” the affidavit says.

Several times, the woman tried to call 911 and the girl’s parents on a malfunctioning phone. She had to go to a neighbor’s unit for a phone to call emergency responders.

The call brought firefighters and an EMS crew, and the 7-year-old was taken to a Wichita hospital “with severe genital injury and severe petechial hemorrhages to her neck, face and head,” the affidavit says.

Because of the extent of the genital injury, it says, the girl would have to undergo reconstructive surgery.

A DNA match

As part of the sexual assault exam, staff took swabs that were sent early that Monday to the Sedgwick County Regional Forensic Science Center to try to identify any DNA.

Wichita police Detective Jason Waite asked the center to immediately test the swabs “due to the nature of the case,” the affidavit says.

The next day, a forensic scientist at the center said the swabs contained sperm cells.

The DNA profile from the sperm cells was put into the Combined DNA Index System, known as CODIS.

By midday that Thursday, the DNA matched to a registered sex offender — Corbin J. Breitenbach, 23.

He had listed a Derby address on the public registry, but he was at his girlfriend’s apartment that morning of the attack — on Smith Court in west Wichita. He was staying the night there — which he wasn’t supposed to do under his parole rules — just across a small courtyard from where the 7-year-old was staying. His girlfriend’s apartment and the one where the girl was attacked have the same configuration.

Breitenbach was a registered sex offender, with his DNA on file after he was convicted a 2012 sex assault where a 22-year-old woman was strangled to unconsciousness.

According to the affidavit, his girlfriend at the condos told police that she picked him up from a bar and brought him to her apartment by 1:30 a.m. He had been drinking and said he “needed to burn off alcohol” and left the apartment. She said he was gone for 10 to 15 minutes, returning by 2:10 a.m. Breitenbach and the girlfriend were in bed by 2:30 a.m., she said.

That’s around the same time that the woman just across the courtyard woke up to the sound of the girl crying.

‘That’s him’

Investigators not only had the DNA match.

They also could turn to the girl who survived the attack.

That Friday, five days after it happened, police showed the 7-year-old photos of different people, the affidavit says.

The girl “immediately identified Corbin J. Breitenbach by pointing to the picture.”

“That’s him.

“He did it to me.”

This story was originally published July 8, 2017 at 3:41 PM with the headline "Girl, 7, helped seal case against attacker ."