Court records show the last time Daniel Santucci Jr. was charged with assaulting a young girl, she told police her assailant choked her in the bushes outside an Elsmere home and said, "I'm sorry I have to do this."

Santucci, charged earlier this week in the abduction of a Pike Creek girl, has a scheduled preliminary hearing Friday on charges of kidnapping, sexual assault and attempted murder – seven years after he first became known to law enforcement.

The 2010 charges against him, which did not involve sexual assault, were dismissed in 2011 because of a lack of evidence, according to a spokesman for the Delaware Department of Justice. Santucci's attorney argued the victim identified him as the assailant only under pressure from her guardian. Her guardian denies that.

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On April 6, a 4-year-old girl was snatched from a park in the Village of Plum Run, molested and dumped in a pond. Police believe Santucci is responsible.

That girl was discovered in Banning Park near Newport by a passing motorist only hours after her friends reported a man in a dark sedan took her while they played outside.

She was barely dressed when found and, authorities later revealed, had been thrown into a pond at the park following the assault.

The day after the abduction, New Castle County Police Col. Vaughn Bond called the perpetrator a monster and promised the full weight of his department would be set to solving the crime. A few days later, Elsmere police suggested Santucci was a person of interest.

In a news conference Monday announcing Santucci's arrest and return to Delaware after his capture in Florida, Bond would not comment on what led Elsmere law enforcement to give Santucci's name and why he skipped town on the same day county police received the tip.

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Santucci grew up in Elsmere on New Road, where an attack on an 8-year-old girl took place on April 4, 2010, court records show. Santucci, then a sophomore at A.I. du Pont High School, initially was charged with endangerment and third-degree assault in the attack. However, those counts were dropped on June 27, 2011.

According to the case's writ of probable cause, an Elsmere police corporal met the 8-year-old girl at Nemours/Alfred I. duPont Hospital for Children, where she'd been taken after family members reported she was kidnapped from a New Road home.

She wasn't taken far.

Asked to describe her attacker, the girl said he "looked like Danny."

Family members told the Elsmere corporal "Danny" was Daniel Santucci Jr., according to the writ. Santucci knew the girl, but it was the first time she'd slept over at his parents' house.

The court documents show the girl was sleeping on the floor of a rear bedroom in the New Road home with an 8-year-old boy when she woke to a male choking her. That person, records say the girl told police, looked like Santucci but "not exactly like him because he was wearing different clothes."

She was lifted from the floor while the young boy near her slept and was taken outside where her assailant placed her in the bushes and continued choking her, according to the writ.

The girl pretended she was dead, and her attacker let go of her throat. She later ran back inside the home where Santucci was the first to find her, according to the writ.

There were no signs of a sexual assault, according to the court documents.

There were no signs of forced entry into the house, according to the records.

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A piece of the police interview with the girl's guardian included in the writ shows, after a hospital examination, the victim struggled with what happened to her.

"Mommy, it looked like Danny with a buzz haircut. But I know he wouldn't do that to me because he likes me," the court records reveal the girl told the guardian she calls her mother. "Mommy, maybe he was just trying to play with me and it was an accident."

But court records show her guardian answered: "Whoever did this meant to hurt you."

According to court records, the girl's face was red and was bruised on the right side. There was a visible line of bruising from her forehead over her right eye and down the corner of her lip. Her head was marked by signs of bleeding, and the girl said her neck hurt, all signs of strangulation.

Santucci is being held at Young Correctional Institution.

Contact Adam Duvernay at (302) 324-2785 or aduvernay@delawareonline.com.