NEW ORLEANS — A jogger was snatched along the Algiers levee and dragged to the water's edge. There, her attacker broke her bones, dislocated her hip, punched her into permanent vision loss and raped her.
“I couldn't crawl so I started dragging myself on my back through the dirt with one hand,” the woman, who asked to remain anonymous, told Eyewitness News.
Police took DNA and submitted it to a data base while Navarri Henderson uploaded this picture on the very same day.
And, minus the hint of a smile, he matched the victim’s description to a tee - the white tee she said her rapist wore that day, the well-groomed, athletically-built man in his late teens whose "shoulder length small twists or braids violently whipped from side to side" as he beat her.
Months later he would upload more creepy, cryptic posts.
“Gotta keep cool and watch em slowly,” he wrote in April . "Been teaching myself how to be a man"…"once I get me a soul, won't have to worry about Navarri.”
Were these the musings of a rapist on the lurk?
Police say his second alleged victim was attacked in August 2018. A pregnant woman in her last trimester was dropped off at her Algiers apartment when she too was dragged, beaten and choked unconscious. Sources say she came to as she was raped.
Once again DNA was submitted to a database, while the rapist walked the streets.
During that time, Navarri henderson would upload more pictures, more videos seemingly unfazed by what police said he did. He got a girlfriend, got her pregnant and then allegedly went into a rage last October that would be his demise.
Navarri allegedly beat his pregnant girlfriend so badly that she was hospitalized for days. Police took his DNA to prove it, having no idea it would link him to the Algiers rapes.
Among his first calls from prison? His mother, Tyisha Henderson.
“Ma, you know I have made some bad choices in life, but this here is not me,” he told her.
We first spoke to her by phone at her home in Arkansas. Navarri never told his mother that police had allegedly linked him by DNA.
“I was praying, I was praying, I was praying they had the wrong guy but like I said DNA don't lie! DNA don't lie!” she said.
DNA. It is likely the crux of the prosecution's case, but it also links Navarri to a dark family secret.
The man police say is a serial rapist is the son of convicted serial rapist.
Stephret Harvey is currently serving a 40-year sentence for rapes in the early 2000s. His M.O? Chillingly familiar. Kidnapping strangers, dragging, choking and raping them.
“And learning about his father, I didn't even know that!” Tyisha’s aunt, Delzorah Barnett said. She helped raise Navarri, but had no idea about his father's violent past. “I knew he was in jail. I don't know what I thought. I thought drugs.”
Navarri's mom never told her. She had her own problems. You see, while Tyisha has been sober for 17 years, she wasn't when Navarri was a child.
She called them her demons - drugs. And when her habit got bad, she'd send Navarri to live with Aunt Delzorah.
“He was really sad,” Delzorah remembered.
Navarri was about two years old the first time he came to live with her. She said he was withdrawn and fearful, tended to wet the bed.
“One thing in particular he shared with me, that they did to him, about taking underwear and pushing it in his mouth,” she remembered.
Navarri grew more withdrawn and at the age of 12 threatened to hang himself with an extension cord. His mom took him to the hospital where he was admitted for weeks and diagnosed with something she kept to herself.
“Bi-polar and paranoid schizophrenic,” his mother said.
It's something else she never told his aunt even when he went back to live with her as a teen. That's because his mother had long before stopped his meds. She said they made him act like a zombie.
“Me being a mom, I thought no,” Tyisha said.
Delzorah had no idea he might need any. Plus, she was dealing with her own catastrophe - her son, a college grad and Iraq war veteran was killed in New Orleans in 2013. But as hard as she took it, she said Navarri took it perhaps even harder.
“He was just broken - broken by my son getting killed,” she said.
He became more withdrawn and Facebook posts would suggest, harder.
By 2018 he was threatening to kill -- “My own family don't know the real me,” one post read.
And then a nod to his father: "Free my pops. That's the only man I look up to. when I look in the mirror, I see a reflection of you."
Seven months later he would allegedly rape the 7-months pregnant woman on her way to her Algiers home. Neither his mother nor his aunt is saying or assuming Navarri is guilty, but both have confronted him in jail.
“I always tell him if you didn't do this, pray,” Tyisha said. “God can only help you out of this situation and if it's something that you did do, you need to pray to ask God to forgive you.”
“I don't know whether you're innocent or you're guilty, but you know God knows and the victim knows,” his aunt Delzorah said.
Then she revealed a devastating secret of her own. “I said, ‘I don't have empathy for the rapist because I am a rape victim.”
She was 15 when a rapist attacked her.
And Tyisha was raped by the man she loved, Stephret, she says. The two women who raised an alleged serial rapist turned out to be rape victims themselves.
“I don't think you just decide you want to be a murderer or a rapist or a child molester,” Delzorah said. “It comes from some deep dark pain.”
But if Navarri's pain came from his childhood, where did his father's come from?
The cycle of violence goes back three generations. Navarri's grandfather was shot to death in front of his kids while he was allegedly beating his wife. Stephret was 10.
“They witnessed his dad's girlfriend murder his father,” Tyisha said.
“The first thing I said is, ‘Oh my God, if my nephew, if he is guilty, the sins, the sins that fall down.” Delzorah said.
Navarri, grandson of a murdered alleged wife beater and son of a convicted rapist sits in jail accused of rapes and beatings himself. His mom and aunt pray for him, but also his alleged victims. For them, they have empathy.
“Because I know right where they were and right where they may be,” Delzorah said.
“I pray that one day they can find peace where they can put this behind them,” Navarri’s mother said.
Navarri Henderson is set to stand trial in June.
If convicted, he'll get life in prison where his father will be until 2054.
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