photo by: Kim Callahan/Journal-World

Daniel James Garcia-Hernandez is pictured Monday, March 3, 2025, in Douglas County District Court

A Douglas County courtroom on Monday was nearly full as dozens of people turned out to support a young woman as she confronted the man who “eternally changed” her life with a brutal crime.

“I want you to look at me and know what you did to me,” she told Daniel James Garcia-Hernandez, sitting in a blue suit just a few feet from her. “You raped me.”

The woman, her mother and her aunt all told Judge Stacey Donovan about the horror of what Garcia-Hernandez — someone the victim had presumed she could trust like a brother — had done that January night in 2022, when the woman was a senior in high school and a star athlete.

Though he had originally been charged with rape of a person who was unconscious or powerless, Garcia-Hernandez, 24, of Topeka, was sentenced on Monday for two counts of sexually motivated aggravated battery instead, in accordance with a plea deal arrived at a month ago between the parties.

Assistant Douglas County District Attorney Samantha Foster told the court that the plea deal had been made after “careful conversations with the victim and her family.”

Donovan, following the plea agreement, sentenced Garcia-Hernandez to 41 months, or 3.4 years, in prison for each count of aggravated battery, to run concurrently, followed by three years of post-release supervision and 15 years as a registered sex offender.

Though Garcia-Hernandez was not convicted of the more serious felony, Donovan observed that the plea deal “had not been reached lightly,” and she told the young woman that she appreciated “knowing the journey you’ve been through.”

That journey has included “spending the last three years remembering every detail of that night,” the woman said, adding that she had been “eternally changed” by the crime against her and how it had “affected every relationship in my life since.”

“I used to move through life without fear,” she said, but now she is burdened every day with a mental replay of the crime, and every time she enters a room she reflexively checks where the exits are.

The woman’s mother described the woman as her “hero,” telling how she had to finish high school with a brave face while the nightmare hung over her and then to go off to college, frequently calling home sobbing over the “violation that has left a lasting scar on my daughter’s mind, body and soul.”

But “she never gave up the battle of doing what is right” and coming forward so that “hopefully others will be spared,” the mother said.

Garcia-Hernandez’s attorney, Cooper Overstreet, in urging Donovan to follow the plea deal, stated that his client had no criminal history and that he had taken responsibility for his actions by pleading guilty rather than no contest to aggravated battery and by agreeing in the deal to a prison term. He also said that Garcia-Hernandez had lost a promising career in the National Guard as a result of his actions.

Garcia-Hernandez, who had been free until Monday on a $75,000 bond, spoke only briefly, telling Donovan that he took “full accountability” and saw incarceration as an opportunity “to become a better man.”

“I apologize to the court, all my family behind me and, most importantly, to (the victim),” he said, before being taken out of the courtroom in handcuffs.

photo by: Kim Callahan/Journal-World

Daniel James Garcia-Hernandez is pictured Monday, March 3, 2025, in Douglas County District Court