DNA match leads to suspect in rape of SSU coed
Published: Wednesday, February 11, 2009 at 10:55 a.m.
Last Modified: Wednesday, February 11, 2009 at 5:39 p.m.
A routine search of the nation’s DNA database has all but closed the unsolved rape of a Sonoma State University student who was left unconscious in the attach 17 months ago.
The student, then 22, remembered nothing after leaving the mini-market at a Shell Gas station and walking to her car in the early hours of Sept. 23, 2007, police said.
Now, DNA collected after the incident links a former Sebastopol man to her case. The man already is facing trial for an alleged sexual assault outside Sacramento that occurred three days after the Rohnert Park attack, authorities said.
Deverick Lockett, 26, is now expected to be tried on both cases, prosecutors said.
“Without the DNA hit, we don’t have anything,” Rohnert Park Public Safety Detective John Gilson said Wednesday after returning from Sacramento. “The case is...very difficult to work because we don’t have anything but the DNA.”
The first review of DNA from the case by the Combined DNA Index System, or CODIS, failed to return a match, Gilson said. But adminstrators continued to check the samples periodically, and on Dec. 1, the system found a connection or “cold hit.”
That match was confirmed Feb. 5 through further analysis, allowing prosecutors to charge Lockett in the case earlier this week, the Sonoma County District Attorney’s Office said.
“We’re very pleased with the cold hit technology that is responsible for where we are on the case today,” District Attorney Stephan Passalacqua said.
Lockett is accused of raping the student, who has since moved back to her hometown in Southern California, after she left a party and stopped at the East Cotati Avenue Shell station.
She was struck in the face and bloodied, and after regaining consciousness, she approached a clerk inside the quick mart for help, police said.
She was unable to describe her assailant, they said.
After the DNA match was made, investigators from Sonoma and Sacramento counties collaborated on the case and agreed to have both cases prosecuted in Sacramento County to prevent the victims from having to testify more than once, police said.
Lockett was arraigned in the Rohnert Park case on Tuesday. He was charged with suspected kidnap and rape, which carry a possible sentence of 55 years to life, authorities said.
He also faces 35 years to life in the Sacramento County case, that brought charges of kidnapping, assault with intent to commit rape, attempted rape and assault with a deadly weapon.
In the attack in the Sacramento suburb of Carmichael, the victim was beaten and dragged from an apartment parking lot into a laundry room, where an off-duty firefighter confronted her attacker and was struck himself before the man fled.
A preliminary hearing in the Rohnert Park case is scheduled for Feb. 23.
Because of a prior conviction, Lockett could fall under California’s Three Strikes law and face life imprisonment if convicted.
He remained in the Sacramento County Jail Wednesday, with bail set at $1.55 million.
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