DNA "Hit" Identifies Rape Suspectz

This story originally appeared on Monday, Aug. 4, 2008

WEST CHESTER -- The crime is a woman’s worst nightmare: to be abducted by a stranger at night while driving home alone and then to be repeatedly sexually assaulted.

But the way police began solving the case was law enforcement’s modern dream come true: to get a “hit” on a convicted felon’s DNA sample in the state police database.

It took more than four years to the day of the crime, but in July 2007, police arrested drug dealer and part-time landscape laborer Alex Villa and charged him with rape, kidnapping and other offenses.

Villa, 26, who lived in West Chester before his conviction on drug charges and is now an inmate at the State Correctional Institution in Camp Hill, had been scheduled to go on trial in front of Judge Anthony Sarcione today. His case was continued until September, when his attorney said she expects the case to come to a conclusion.

“I’m not sure how it is going to be resolved, but it is going to be resolved (next month),” said West Chester criminal defense attorney Amparito Arriaga.

Although not predicting the outcome of the case, the lead prosecutor said in comments before the case was continued (because of medical issues that the alleged victim is dealing with) that he felt confident as well that it would be resolved.

“This is the first time I’ve had a case with a DNA hit,” said Deputy District Attorney Stephen Kelly. “I was very happy to see technology work in this case.”

The sequence of events began around midnight on May 31, 2003.

According to court documents, West Chester police say the victim — a 21-year-old school teacher, who lived in West Goshen at the time — was driving home, when she stopped at a red light at High and Market streets, in front of the Chester County Courthouse.

There, a man she did not know forced his way into the car and asked her to give him a ride. She refused and tried to call 911 on her cell phone, but the man overpowered her and broke the phone, throwing it out the window.

Over the next several hours, the man forced her to drive outside West Chester, making threatening gestures that he would kill her. He repeatedly attempted to forc her to perform oral sex on him. After no success, he eventually forced her to have sexual intercourse.

The victim told police she was finally able to get away from her attacker and run from her car. Partially clothed, she flagged down a passing motorist who found her on Route 926, several miles from the site of her abduction.

The next day, police found two things — the car the victim had been driving at the time of her abduction and, inside it, a baseball cap the woman said her attacker had been carrying with him when he jumped into her car.

As part of their investigation, the investigators, led by Sgt. Louis Deshullo of the West Chester police, cut an area on the brim of the hat and sent it to the Pennsylvania State Police’s Bureau of Forensic Services DNA Laboratory in Greensburg, where it was assigned to lab number L03-02489-1.

Four years went by.

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In January 2005, law enforcement authorities began collecting DNA samples from each person convicted of a felony in the state. Prior to that, only sex offenders were required to give up DNA samples.

According to the county’s deputy director of Adult Probation, Jody Carlini, in Chester County, DNA samples are taken either by probation officers or corrections officers at Chester County Prison or, in some cases, staff of the state Department of Corrections.

The samples used to be secured by drawing blood from the offender, but that process caused concern about blood-born diseases, and the probation department routinely called in staff from the county health department to get the samples.

State police now supply DNA sample kits that are easy to handle. The kits contain a fingerprint card, an identification form for the offender’s name, Social Security number and other personal data, as well as two sealed buccal, cheek, swabs.

The offender is directed to open the swab — which looks similar to a home pregnancy tester — and put it inside his or her mouth, next to the cheek. The offender then drags the swab against the soft inside of his or her mouth eight times on one side, then with another swab eight times on the other side.

The swabs are then sealed in a polyethylene evidence bag and sent with all accompanying information to the Greensburg DNA lab. If the felony offender refuses to do the test, those taking he sample are authorized to use force to retrieve it, Carlini said.

Don Blosser, the director of scientific services at the state police DNA lab, said last week that since police began collecting DNA samples in 1996, there have been thousands and thousands submitted for storage and recording. Every month, more come in; every month, there are more tests to see whether the samples match any DNA taken from a crime scene throughout the United States. The system by which all the samples are collected and compared is called CODIS — the Combined DNA Index System, and it is run by the FBI.

The process of ordering DNA samples has become a staple of any formal sentencing in Common Pleas Court, either in the case of someone who has pleaded guilty to a felony or who has been found guilty at trial. The DNA order is so commonplace that it sometimes is signed by a judge almost as an afterthought.

It was just such a boilerplate order that Assistant District Attorney Michelle Frei submitted to Judge Howard F. Riley Jr. on March 6, 2007, in the case of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania vs. Alex Villa, CR-4633-06.

Villa was pleading guilty to two counts of possession with intent to deliver a controlled substance. The case against him was remarkable if only because of its ordinariness: Villa had twice sold crack cocaine in April 2006 from his apartment in the 200 block of West Chestnut Street in West Chester to an undercover police officer working with the Chester County Municipal Drug Task Force.

Because the weight of the drugs in one of those sales exceeded a certain measure, the case against him was classified a felony — even though the crack was only worth $100. Villa, an illegal immigrant with an eighth-grade education, who could not speak or write English, was sentenced to two to four years in state prison; afterward, he would likely have been deported.

The DNA samples were taken by the staff at Chester County Prison and submitted to the state police lab.

In mid-May, 2007, the state police lab prepared lab report L03-02849-2 and forward it to Deshullo, who was still investigating the rape case from May 2003. What the state police report showed, Deshullo states in an arrest affidavit, was that the unidentified DNA profile he submitted four years earlier from the brim of the cap found in the victim’s car after the alleged rape “was found to be consistent with the DNA profile of a convicted offender from the state of Pennsylvania, to wit, Alex Villa, alias Alejandro Blaques.

Police, finally, had a suspect in the rape.

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The “hit” was a major break in the case, Deshullo said, but not the only piece of evidence used to charge Villa.

“It is a start on building a case,” Deshullo said last week. “But you’ve still got to be able to show the motive and the criminal action. Just because there is DNA at a crime scene doesn’t mean you committed a crime.”

Police were able to obtain other physical evidence, including a photograph of Villa wearing the cap found in the car.

Deshullo and Detective Scott Whiteside then traveled to the prison at Camp Hill on June 22, 2007, where, using a court interpreter, they interviewed Villa.

In his arrest warrant, Deshullo said Villa acknowledged he had jumped into the woman’s car after drinking beer and wandering around West Chester.

“I asked her if she wanted to have sex,” police said Villa told them during the interview. “She said no and started hitting me.” I may have hit her as I was trying to get her to stop hitting me."

At some point when the victim tried to escape, Villa said he was able to drag her back into the car and take the wheel. “I made her give me oral sex,” Villa continued. He said the victim kept yelling and hitting him the entire time they drove around. At some point, he said, when he stopped to have sex with her, she ran from the car and flagged a motorists down, so he drove away.

On July 12, 2007, Deshullo asked for a warrant for Villa’s arrest.

“It’s a great database,” Deshullo, a veteran West Chester police officer, said of the DNA lab. “But when you get a hit that doesn’t end things. That just allows you to start.”