A Saudi Arabian air force sergeant who was assigned to Keesler Air Force Base in Biloxi, Miss., and Joint Base San Antonio-Lackland in Texas for training was sentenced to life in prison with a minimum of 35 years served in 2015 by Judge Stefany Miley. He received the sentence for kidnapping and raping a 13-year-old boy in a bathroom at the Circus Circus hotel on the Las Vegas Strip where he traveled to celebrate New Year’s Eve 2012.
The man, Mazen Alotaibi, 25, would be 57 before being eligible for parole. The boy’s mother, sobbed while giving a victim impact statement before Miley imposed sentence. The mother cried while saying that her son’s life had been ruined by Alotaibi.
Miley imposed the mandatory sentence for sexual assault with a minor under the age of 14.
Earlier in the case, Alotaibi’s defense attorneys tried to get a retrial based on a witness who said he lied about the level of Alotaibi’s intoxication before the encounter with the boy. In what the Associated Press called a “strongly worded” decision not to grant a retrial, Miley said that, “Testimony regarding the defendant’s presumed level of intoxication is … at best another handful of sand on an already expansive beach of evidence.”
An AP report by Ken Ritter quoted Miley as saying that, “ ‘Recantations should be viewed with suspicion.’ She said she wasn’t convinced that the witness, Rashed Alsheri, lied at trial — or that his testimony about Alotaibi drinking affected the verdict.’ ”
The defense argued that Alotaibi was too intoxicated to know he was committing a crime. In a separate AP report, the 13-year-old victim’s mother was quoted as saying she wanted Alotaibi to “rot in hell.”
According to the boy’s testimony at trial, he was waiting to go to breakfast with a friend when he smelled marijuana on the clothes of some men inside the hotel and approached them asking about the pot. Upon learning the boy was only 13, they dismissed him, but Alotaibi followed him outside the hotel and smoked marijuana with him; he then asked the boy for sex.
The two went inside the hotel, and Alotaibi was seen on elevator surveillance video leaning down and apparently kissing the boy’s neck on their way to the hotel room. The boy testified that in the hotel room bathroom, Alotaibi blocked the door, offered him $150, then $300. He said the boy refused; then Alotaibi forced him into oral and anal sex. Alotaibi told police he had been drinking Hennessy all night.
The boy is seen running back to the elevator about 30 minutes after going into the room.
Alotaibi was convicted of two counts of lewdness with a child under 14 and one count of kidnapping, which each carry a possible sentence of 10 years to life in prison.
He was also found guilty of felony burglary for entering a building with intent to commit a crime and of misdemeanor coercion.