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NYPD detains person of interest in ‘horrific assault’ in Kew Gardens Hills

Police have taken a 21-year-old man into custody after naming him a person of interest in a case being investigated as a random sexual assault, NYPD officials said on Tuesday.

Ronald Williams was named last week as a person of interest in the attack of a 52-year-old woman in Kew Gardens Hills. On Tuesday, Chief of Detectives Dermot Shea said in a news conference at police headquarters that Williams was taken into custody on Tuesday morning at a motel in Columbia, South Carolina, after violating the terms of his probation.

The circumstances of his probation were not immediately clear.

The arrest is “very good news for the residents of Queens,” said Shea, who described the daylight attack as a “horrific assault.”

Williams is considered a person of interest in the possible sexual assault of the woman, who had just dropped her child off at school on April 30 when she was attacked. She was found at about 8:30 a.m. at the bottom of an outdoor stairwell in Queens.

By last week, she regained consciousness, but had not yet been able to talk to investigators, Deputy Chief Michael Baldassano, executive officer of the Detective Bureau, has said from police headquarters. It was not immediately clear if that had changed.

“We find this to be an extremely violent and random attack at a time of day that we wouldn’t normally see something like this,” Captain Elisa Anders from the NYPD’s Special Victims Division said last week.

Baldassano has said police believe this was a random attack and the woman did not know her attacker.