PROVIDENCE, R.I. (WPRI) — Providence Police have charged a man with video voyeurism, simple assault, and disorderly conduct after he’s believed to have used his cell phone to take a photo up a woman’s skirt earlier this week. The man was already a designated Level III sex offender after he was convicted of sexually assaulting two females in Lincoln — a 50-year-old woman and a 14-year-old girl, neither of which he knew — according to state records.
Gary Rasey, 37, was recently released from the ACI in Cranston and has been staying at the Harrington House men’s shelter on the ACI grounds.
“Level III is the absolutely worst category for sex offenders,” Maj. David Lapatin of the Providence Police Department said.
On the morning of Tuesday, August 30, Providence Police had been called to the Providence Place Mall for a report of a man attempting to take a photo up a woman’s skirt as she was riding up the escalator. The woman felt the cell phone brush her leg, turned to discover the suspect and confront him, and he ran down the escalator and out of the building towards the State House. Police distributed a surveillance photo of the man and asked for the public to look for him, describing him as a white male in his 30s or 40s with a long brown ponytail and glasses.
A police detective from Lincoln recognized the suspect from prior incidents, and Providence police said the victim picked Rasey out of a photo lineup. They arrested him at the corner of Butler and Waterman Avenues on Providence’s East Side.
“This is a pretty bad guy,” Lapatin told Eyewitness News on Friday morning. “Thankfully, we got him off the street as quick as we could.”
According to police, there could be other victims.
“I believe that day there were several women he had done that to,” Lapatin said. “No one else has come forward.”
Rasey was ordered held on bail; he’s due back in court November 16, according to the Rhode Island Judiciary’s website.
