WHERE WAS CHARLIE BAKER?
HOW COME NO ONE IS ASKING?
WHAT ABOUT OTHER COUNTIES?
STATE LABS FAILED PRIOR TO HIS ELECTION.
Man indicted for 2001 Fairhaven rape through DA Quinn's Untested Rape Kit Initiative
Published Dec 16, 2022
FALL RIVER — Bristol County District Attorney Thomas M. Quinn's Untested Rape Kit Initiative has resulted in another indictment connected to a rape from more than two decades ago.
Patrick Avila, 37, of Attleboro has been indicted by a Bristol County Grand Jury on a charge of rape of a child with force in connection to the rape of a 13-year-old girl in Fairhaven in October of 2001, according to a press release.
Avila, who was initially charged earlier this year in Juvenile Court due to his age at the time of the crime, had his case transferred to adult court by a Juvenile Court judge after a transfer hearing was held in September. Since that time, the grand jury indicted him. He was arraigned in Fall River Superior Court Tuesday afternoon and posted $10,000 cash bail. He is due back in court Feb. 7.
More on the DA:The DA is pushing to identify unclaimed bodies. They've already identified one person.
On Oct. 26, 2001, the victim went to a school dance where she later met up with a 17 year old named Brandon St. Don, who was known to her. At some point during the evening, the victim left the dance with St. Don and went to a location where he provided her with alcoholic mixed drinks.
She became dizzy after drinking and felt like passing out. St. Don then took her to a friend’s home on Delano Street, telling her he was taking her to “a safe place.” They eventually arrived at his friend’s house, at which point he dragged her into a car where she blacked out. While she was unconscious in the car, a witness observed St. Don inside the vehicle raping the victim.
The witness was upset upon seeing St. Don with the victim, whom he knew to be a child. Upon seeing this, the witness pulled St. Don off of the victim and punched him and forced St. Don to leave the property. Hearing this commotion caused the victim to regain consciousness. The witness gave the victim clothes and helped her to his basement where he allowed her to sleep. Patrick Avila was also present when the victim was discovered in the car with St. Don and when she was assisted by the witness into the house.
Based upon witness statements and other evidence, St. Don was charged at the time with the girl's rape. He was later convicted and served a state prison sentence. Although the victim did submit to a rape kit following the incident, that kit was one of several thousand from throughout the state that was never fully tested by the state lab.The rape kit was also one of more than 1,100 from Bristol County alone that was never fully tested by the state lab. However, after the Bristol County District Attorney's Office became aware of the scope and breadth of the problem with untested rape kits throughout the state, it took action to obtain a federal grant.
The DA's Office then began the painstaking process of inventorying and prioritizing all untested rape kits in the county, and is now in the process of getting all 1,148 previously untested Bristol County rape kits fully tested by a private lab under the Sexual Assault Kit Initiative grant obtained by Quinn in 2019.
As part of Quinn's Untested Rape Kit initiative, this previously untested rape kit was recently fully tested by a private lab. The testing revealed that Avila’s DNA (i.e. sperm cells) was found on the oral swabs from the rape kit. The victim has indicated that although she knew who Avila was at that time, she did not have any relationship with him, has no memory of seeing him that night, and never consented to any sexual contact with Avila.
When recently advised that there was evidence of sexual contact with Avila on that date, the victim was shocked and upset. It is now alleged that defendant Avila sexually assaulted the young victim in the basement after she had already been raped by St. Don.
Avila's DNA had been uploaded into CODIS (Combined DNA Index System) in 2010 as a result of a felony conviction. If the victim's rape kit had been fully tested, this defendant would have been arrested and charged in connection with this incident 12 years ago. If Quinn had not undertaken this initiative and brought this issue to light statewide, the kit would likely never have been fully tested and the case would have remained unsolved, according to the release. This is now the fourth cold case rape the office has solved as a result of Quinn's Untested Rape Kit Initiative."I am very pleased our initiative has resulted in criminal charges being brought against another defendant," Quinn said. "The victims and law enforcement had a right to have these kits fully tested. We look forward to completing the testing of all of the rape kits in Bristol County within the next month or two. I am very proud that our office identified this very serious problem and did something about it."
It was discovered that so many rape kits throughout the state were not being fully tested after a defendant by the name of John Loflin was convicted in late 2013 for the cold case 2002 murder of Marlene Rose in New Bedford. Loflin had previously been charged with a 1997 New Bedford rape, but the case was eventually dismissed after the alleged victim left the country.
The alleged victim in that case submitted to a rape kit. That rape kit was sent up to the state lab three weeks after the rape, but unbeknownst to law enforcement, it had never been fully tested. After Marlene Rose was murdered in 2002, DNA evidence was collected and sent to the state lab for testing. If the 1997 rape kit had been fully tested at the time, the Marlene Rose DNA evidence would have matched to that 1997 case and Loflin would have been arrested in connection to the Marlene Rose homicide.
Instead, Loflin was not identified as Rose's murderer until 2011 when he was arrested in Tennessee on unrelated charges. Loflin was compelled by Tennessee law to provide a DNA sample as a result of his criminal charges in that state. Once that DNA sample was uploaded to CODIS, it immediately matched with the 2002 DNA evidence connected to the murder of Marlene Rose. Loflin was then charged here in Bristol County with Marlene Rose’s murder and was eventually convicted and sentenced to life in prison in November of 2013.
After learning about the 1997 rape case and discovering that the rape kit in that case had never been tested, Quinn's office began looking into other cold case rapes and attempted to determine whether there were other rape kits that were also not fully tested by the state lab. Quinn poured a number of resources and man hours into this review. After inventorying many rape kits from all 20 of Bristol County’s cities and towns, it began to become clear that there were a great deal of rape kits that were not being fully tested. The office then researched and applied for the federal SAKI grant. In October of 2018, the office was notified that the grant application was approved and that federal grant money would be awarded.
In June of 2019, the federal grant money was deposited into the Bristol County District Attorney’s Office account. It was immediately used to hire a retired Massachusetts State Police detective to assist staff members in the office with training, inventorying and prioritizing the untested rape kits. The Bristol County District Attorney’s office is the first in the state to undertake this large-scale initiative and obtain the federal grant program.
After numerous delays due to COVID and other issues with the state lab, the first batches of prioritized untested rape kits were sent to a private lab (Bode Laboratories) for testing in April of 2021, according to the release.
Although the testing got off to a slow start, the office has been informed that all 1,148 previously untested rape kits will be fully tested by the private lab by the end of January.
All defendants are presumed innocent until proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt.
A thousand Bristol County rape kits were never tested. Here's why the DA is changing that
Published May 6, 2022
FALL RIVER — The Bristol County District Attorney’s office has launched an initiative to identify previously unidentified bodies, in the hopes of closing cases that in some instances have gone unresolved for decades.
“I’m not promising that they’re all going to be solved, but we’re putting in the effort to show that these cases aren’t forgotten and their families aren’t forgotten,” said DA Thomas Quinn.
In April, Quinn’s office announced it would expand its Cold Case Unit to include a renewed effort to identify unidentified human remains from the past 40 years, taking a second look at old cases using new technology and resources.
The county has the remains of a dozen people who could not be identified with traditional methods like fingerprints or dental records, Quinn said. This includes anything from bodies, skeletal remains and, in a handful of cases, just a skull.
The DA’s office is using an array of tools to hopefully connect the remains with a missing person. This includes working with groups with access to more resources than Bristol County investigators may typically have access to, like the FBI and the University of North Texas Center for Human Identification, and non-profits focused on solving cold cases like the DNA Doe Project and Season of Justice. Recent advancements in fingerprint matching and DNA technology means that running new tests can link remains to a person who was reported missing and never found.
The DA’s office has also published what they know about the unidentified remains on its website, including descriptions when possible and the circumstances in which remains were found. These include cases like the remains of a newborn boy discovered near a Route 24 rest area in Freetown in 1983 after apparently dying of exposure, skeletal remains found at the Raynham landfill in 2000 and the body of a woman in her 30s that was found wrapped in garbage bags floating in the water at Popes Island Marina in New Bedford in 1996, a case that Quinn says has stayed with him since he was a new prosecutor.
“If these cases are publicized, maybe someone will come forward,” he said.
Not every unidentified body is definitely a murder victim, Quinn said. A skull that washed up on a local beach could be the remains of a fisherman who was lost at sea, for example. Still, linking remains to an identity can help families with the grieving process, he said.
“There’s always going to be that uncertainty and anxiety associated with it (when a body is never found or identified)” he said. “It’s good to have some closure.”
Trying to solve cold cases
This isn’t Quinn’s only foray into taking another look at previously unsolved cold cases. His office is currently in the process of getting a major backlog of untested rape kits finally processed, a project that has already led to an arrest in a previously unsolved 2010 New Bedford rape. Investigators also recently used new DNA technology to identify and arrest a perpetrator of a series of rapes during the 90s.
Untested rape kits:A thousand Bristol County rape kits were never tested. Here's why the DA is changing that
The unidentified bodies project has also already yielded results. Earlier this month, the DA’s office announced that, working with the Massachusetts State Police Unresolved Unit and the Fall River Police Department, it had identified the body of a man previously classified as a John Doe as Leon Brown from Boston.
Brown’s body had gone unidentified since it was found at the BFI landfill site on Airport Road in 2005. But, upgrades to fingerprint technology meant that investigators could identify him the second time around.
Investigators still aren’t certain what happened to Brown or if his death was a homicide. But information they have now, like the fact that he usually wore leg braces which were not recovered with his body and that he was not reported as missing right away, have led investigators to treat his death as “suspicious” and investigate whether foul play was involved, Quinn said.
Why identifying remains is so important to investigations
This points to why identifying found remains is a key part of determining whether a death requires further investigation and where to look for clues, he said.
“It’s really difficult to investigate a case unless you know who the person is,” he said. “You don’t know who to turn to, who last saw them.”
Members of Quinn’s office recently placed flowers and a temporary marker on Brown’s unmarked grave in Fall River.
“We can give him the dignity of at least identifying his burial site and letting his family pay their respects,” he said.
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