A Key West man who raped a tourist behind Key West’s most iconic landmark – after earlier stopping a man who was assaulting her – pleaded guilty as charged and was sentenced to 10 years in prison.
Kerry Calvin Gasag, 39, who never left jail after his arrest on Sept. 11, 2021, on Oct. 5 agreed to plead guilty to sexual battery, false imprisonment and evidence tampering, to avoid a trial on sexual assault charges.
Monroe County Judge Mark Wilson sentenced Gasag to a decade in prison plus five years of probation after his release.
The plea means the victim doesn’t have to appear in court and recount on the witness stand the horrors she survived in Key West, or answer lawyers’ questions about how she was raped twice within an hour.
“That was part of why the plea was handled this way,” said Monroe County State Attorney Dennis Ward. “She was very happy about that.”
Gasag’s prison sentence ends one of two cases at the Monroe County Courthouse connected to the woman’s nightmare.
Ward said she hasn’t had to appear in court yet.
Gasag told police he was with the woman but that she wanted to have sex with him behind the buoy. She wasn’t screaming or fighting like someone being raped, he repeatedly told police, “the way they do in movies,” he added.
But video from the webcam that’s pointed 24-7 at the famous tourist attraction shows Gasag dragging her from his SUV – his hand over her mouth – to behind the buoy while she is clearly trying to get away from him, police said.
A man in Boston, who works as a dispatcher, was watching the webcam at the time. He called Key West police and said he believed he was watching “a rape in progress.”
In the early hours of Sept. 10, Gasag told police he was driving his silver SUV when he heard a woman screaming in the 300 block of Fleming Street. He found her “having sex” with a man, he told police, and she asked for a ride to the Casa Marina resort.
Gasag said he pulled over at the Southernmost Point buoy, at Whitehead and South streets, and the two went behind the landmark.
Several minutes later, the woman appears from behind the buoy, only partially dressed, and starts running away. Gasag walks into the camera’s view and walks toward his Nissan Rogue. A few minutes later, he is seen at the buoy again. He picks up a pair of jean shorts, gets back into his vehicle and drives off.
The victim’s iPhone held the clues
Key West police pieced together the anguished account while speaking with the woman in her room at the Casa Marina resort.
She told police that she had walked from her hotel to Duval Street to have dinner and several glasses of wine. She then went to a sports bar.
At the bar, she was talking to a man and left with him in a small SUV. She soon realized she was in “a bad situation,” and wanted to get out, but the man sexually assaulted her.
But “a large portion” of her memory was missing, detectives reported.
Police had found the woman’s iPhone discarded at the intersection of Waddell and Alberta streets, near the Casa Marina.
As she looked through her phone, she discovered a seven-minute video she had somehow recorded earlier. The video revealed she hadn’t only been raped by Gasag.
The video begins with the sound of her “crying hysterically” as a man who identifies himself as Calvin telling another man to “stop,” according to an arrest affidavit.
Police confirmed the video was taken in the 300 block of Fleming Street, beside the Monroe County courthouse.
“Stop means stop,” the man, later identified as Gasag, says before telling the woman to get up.
A second man, who police said is Jorge Calderon Nunez, can be heard on the video saying, “This is my chica. Don’t look at her.”
Video from a Duval Street restaurant’s security camera shows the woman walking with Calderon Nunez 17 minutes before he attacked her on Fleming Street, police said.
The woman’s iPhone video continues with the woman appearing convinced Gasag had rescued her from Calderon Nunez.
But Gasag starts talking about the incident on Fleming Street and asks her, with a vulgar word, if she wants to have sex with him, too. She “adamantly” tells him no and tells him to pull over so she can get out. He tells her he could have had sex with her “back in the bushes,” and asks why she doesn’t want to.
The woman “panics,” police said, and the video ends as she gets out of the SUV.
After Gasag raped her at the buoy, the woman was found running in the street wearing only a top. Police took her to Lower Keys Medical Center and then back to her hotel room.
Calderon Nunez, 32, awaits trial on sexual assault. He remains remains locked up at the county jail on Stock Island on $225,000 bond and charged with sexual assault, false imprisonment and evidence tampering. He was arrested Sept. 17, 2021, on the charges.
