Tangled trail of collapsed cases and shattered lives

A rape case against Omar Cash died when the victim didn't show up for trial. An attempted-murder case against him failed when the victim hanged himself. A robbery case fell apart when the victim, wanted on a drug charge, became a fugitive. Each time Cash escaped conviction, prosecutors say, the experience emboldened him, and his violent behavior escalated.

Cash, 27, now stands accused of rape, kidnapping, and two murders.

"He's someone who has been through the criminal justice system every which way for every serious crime there is, and the result has not been state prison," said Mark Walz, an assistant district attorney in Bucks County, where Cash now faces a trial on a charge of capital murder. "He's the poster child for this type of thing."

In just three weeks last year, police say, Cash went on a rampage.

In April of last year, they say, he killed a man in a brazen daylight shooting outside a car wash in Frankford. Police say Cash shot Muliek Brown, 19, as he knelt to shine the hubcaps on his green Mercury Marquis. The car wash's security system videotaped the killing as the manager looked on in horror. "He shot him in the head and took off running," said the manager, Robert Green.

The scene haunts him still. "You want to see a guy get his head blown off?" asked Green as he stood outside the car wash a few months later. "I try to get it out of my head every day." Three weeks later, police say, Cash abducted a couple at gunpoint outside a lower Northeast Philadelphia nightclub.

According to police, the crime unfolded this way:

Cash forced Edgar Rosas-Gutierrez to drive while he repeatedly raped his girlfriend and ordered her to perform oral sex. Eventually, he told Rosas-Gutierrez to pull over on Route 1 North in Bensalem and get out of the car.

"I heard a gunshot," the woman later told detectives. "When he came back, he had blood on his hands. I thought he was going to kill me." Cash had shot Rosas-Gutierrez to death and dumped his body on the side of the road.

He drove off with the woman, raped her again in a parking lot, and then forced her to accompany him to the Comfort Inn in Lawrenceville, N.J. There, he attacked her again until she escaped, ran screaming into the lobby, and jumped over the front desk as a startled night clerk dialed 911.