Portland man accused of raping 13-year-old douses woman with gasoline and threatens to kill her, prosecutors say

A man wanted by police on sex abuse and rape charges poured gasoline on a woman and tried to kill her last week, Multnomah County prosecutors allege.

Aubrey Ulysses Lewis, Jr., 35, has been charged with attempted murder, assault on an officer and other charges, in addition to five counts of sexual abuse and one count of rape to which he has pleaded not guilty in a 2023 case that has stretched until his second year.

Court records show that Lewis, who is from Portland, was convicted in South Carolina of “criminal sexual conduct,” which landed him on that state’s sex offender registry, and in Nevada for a sexually motivated coercive conviction.

He was on probation from the Nevada case when he moved to Portland with his then-girlfriend and her children in 2021. Conditions of release prohibited him from living in a home with minors, according to court records. Nevertheless, he lived in a house with a woman and her children, records show. She was a longtime partner, Lewis’ aunt, Ida Alexander, told The Oregonian/OregonLive.

In Portland, Lewis struggled to meet his probation requirements, which included court-ordered treatment. When his probation officer discovered he was living with children in 2022, he was told he had to move, court records show.

Lewis also sometimes stayed in a house with a 20-year-old woman, the woman’s 13-year-old sister and their mother. According to court records, Lewis sexually assaulted the 13-year-old around mid-January 2023, offered her marijuana and raped her.

The girl’s older sister gave birth to a baby with Lewis on February 1, 2023. Five days later, Lewis’ probation officer came by the house and told the woman’s mother that Lewis was a sex offender, according to court records.

The mother did not know this and called her family together for a meeting the same day to share what she had learned. Afterward, the woman’s 13-year-old daughter told her mother that Lewis had sexually assaulted her three times, according to court documents. The woman called the police and after a three-month investigation, the police requested a warrant for Lewis’s arrest.

But by the time the judge issued the warrant, Lewis had been returned to Nevada because he had violated his probation requirements and had already been released from prison there. According to court records, the Portland Police Bureau arranged to be on scene when Lewis’ parole officer in Las Vegas was scheduled to meet with him on May 30, 2023.

When confronted by a Portland detective, he denied the girl’s accusations and when told he would be arrested, he said they would have to kill him and began “throwing himself into the window.” He had to be held down by several officers.

Records show he was held in the Multnomah County Jail until March 18, 2024, when prosecutors’ request to keep him in custody was denied and he posted 10% of the $20,000 bail, records show. The home address he listed on court documents, at the Greenbriar Village apartments in southwest Portland, was the same place he shared with the girlfriend with four children who moved to Portland with him in 2021.

Nearly seven months later, in October, one of the four children told an Oregon Department of Human Services worker that Lewis was living in their home. After an investigation was launched, two of the children’s schools told the agency that Lewis was listed as their emergency contact.

“DHS is very concerned about the safety of the children,” a Multnomah County Sheriff’s Office deputy wrote in a court document asking a judge to reorder Lewis’ arrest.

The judge agreed and a warrant was issued for Lewis’s arrest the same day, October 17.

On Nov. 9, police responded to a 911 call that a woman was arguing with a man and yelling at a home near Southeast Powell Boulevard and 119th Avenue. The officers who arrived on the scene spoke with Lewis’ grandmother, who lives in Portland, and said she let him and the woman stay overnight because they were homeless.

Lewis was gone by the time police arrived, but court records show his girlfriend was upstairs. She told police that Lewis poured gasoline on her and threatened to kill her, but she managed to run into the house to get away from him.

Officers drove through the area until they found a man matching Lewis’ description in a Safeway parking lot. When they told Lewis he was under arrest, he started walking away and pouring gasoline on himself.

“Kill me,” he said repeatedly, then set himself on fire.

Lewis finally threw his burning coat on the ground and ran away. Police found him on top of a building with a “gutter chain” wrapped around his neck. He surrendered and police put him in the back of a patrol car, but he let go of his handcuffs and tried to hurt himself.

Police said they had to cut the seat belt and remove Lewis’ shoelaces. According to court records, Lewis spat at officers and kicked an officer’s knee.

Lewis’s aunt said her nephew had behavioral problems since he was a child, especially since he was 15 years old.

Lewis’s father, also named Aubrey Ulysses Lewis, was convicted of forced prostitution in Oregon in 1993 when he pleaded guilty to forcing a 17-year-old girl to have sex for money. He was convicted of sexual abuse in 2000, also in Oregon, when he abused a girl under 18 who was “physically helpless,” records show. And he was convicted in Idaho in 2003 of sexually assaulting a minor child, according to his records on the Nevada sex offender registry.

— Fedor Zarkhin is a breaking news and business reporter. Do you have a story? Reach him by phone or text at 971-373-2905 or by email at [email protected].

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