The investigation into the rape of two pre-teen Benton County girls led to the arrest of a Bella Vista man Friday, according to a probable cause affidavit from the Bentonville Police Department.
Aaron Paul Adams, 41, was arrested Friday on suspicion of two counts of child rape. He remained Monday in the Benton County Jail on $150,000 bond, according to the Benton County Sheriff’s Office.
Police said a local 10-year-old girl, who was eight years old at the time, told her grandmother last month that a neighbor’s boyfriend raped her and her 11-year-old friend two years ago. The girl said she and her friend lived near Adams two years ago, and he once locked them in his room. The suspect then forced the girls to perform a sex act on him, after threatening to kill them if they did not cooperate, according to the probable cause report.
The girls never mentioned the incident to anyone until last month because they were afraid of Adams, the report states.
The grandmother and the girl came forward to police in late September, and a subsequent investigation found that Adams is a Level 3 sex offender. Police said Adams once exposed himself to a 9-year-old girl in California, then moved to Arkansas and registered as a sex offender.
Adams, during an interview with police, initially denied touching the girls, then said that one of the girls tried to touch him sexually on two occasions, police said. The suspect told officers the incident described by the victims may have happened, but he could not remember, possibly because of a head injury he sustained in a car accident, according to the probable cause affidavit.
Adams described one of the girls as sexually curious, and said he remembered the girls trying to touch him sexually. He said he rejected their advances and kicked them out of his room.
Following the interview, police arrested Adams and booked him into the Benton County Jail.
