North Liberty man guilty in Waterloo, Cedar Falls rapes

WATERLOO — A judge has found a North Liberty man guilty of raping Waterloo and Cedar Falls women after breaking into their apartments in spring 2023.

He is also set for trial, tentatively in January, on rape charges in a 2022 Iowa City attack.

Asante Ajee Walker-Garcia Adams, 27, had waived his right to a jury trial in the Waterloo and Cedar Falls attacks, allowing Black Hawk County District Court Judge David Odekirk to decide the case based on investigative records. The case was submitted Sept. 11.

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This week, Odekirk issued his verdict, finding Walker-Garcia Adams guilty of second-degree sexual assault and first-degree burglary in the attacks. Sentencing will be at a later date.

The verdict notes that DNA evidence recovered in the Cedar Falls rape was consistent with his profile, and the chances of another person having that DNA profile would be less than 1 out of 7.4 octillion. In the Waterloo case, the DNA was a 1 out of 280 quadrillion match.

Authorities said Walker-Garcia Adams attacked a woman in an apartment complex near Hawkeye Community College in Waterloo on March 10, 2023. Then on April 10, 2023, he attacked a woman in her College Street apartment near the University of Northern Iowa in Cedar Falls.

In both cases, the attacker had a knife or claimed he had a knife.

“It was determined that the modus operandi of the suspect in these incidents was to find unlocked residences, enter and use a knife to threaten the female resident,” Odekirk wrote in his verdict. “The suspect would then sexually assault the female, take her electronics before fleeing and discard them in close proximity of the residence.”

In the Waterloo attack, the woman had been in bed with her young son when a man entered the apartment through an unlocked door and took her to another room where he sexually assaulted her.

He took her cellphone, and she was later able to call for help using her son’s tablet.

In the Cedar Falls case, the assailant entered by cutting a window screen and opening an unlocked living room window. Following the assault, he asked the victim if she had any money and took her telephone and her iPad.

Walker-Garcia Adams also is charged in an attack in Iowa City in September 2022. In that case, his wife confronted him as police searched for a suspect, saying she knew he was in the area of the attack and video surveillance captured images that looked like him.

A trial in that case is tentatively set for January in Johnson County District Court. He was also suspected in a May 2023 assault in Center Point, according to court records.