A man arrested last year for allegedly sexually assaulting a young relative has now been linked to the rape of another teenager in 1997 in Koreatown, according to recent court filings in the long-unsolved case.
The Koreatown investigation languished for nearly three decades until a DNA hit led to Wilfredo Romeo Perez, an LAPD sex crimes detective wrote in a sworn affidavit seeking Perez’s arrest.
Det. Ernesto Escoto wrote in the April 7 affidavit that Perez became a suspect after a young woman in his family reported to authorities that he had been sexually abusive for years.
Perez’s relative first reported the alleged assaults last April, telling investigators from the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department that the abuse began when she was 11 and occurred multiple times, according to the affidavit.
Police said that Perez was out on bond after being charged with continuous sexual abuse of a minor and other related crimes. He has pleaded not guilty to the charges and is set to return to court next month, court records show.
A message left for one of Perez’s attorneys was not immediately returned on Wednesday morning.
When police uploaded Perez’s genetic profile into a national database, they received a hit matching him to evidence collected in the 1997 case, according to Escoto’s affidavit.
The victim in that incident, then 14, told police her attacker had been sitting in his car when he threatened to kill her family if she didn’t perform oral sex on him. He then repeatedly assaulted her, police said.
The woman, now in her early 40s, sat down for a follow-up interview with a pair of detectives from the Los Angeles Police Department and two prosecutors from the Los Angeles County district attorney’s office in Long Beach late last month, according to Escoto’s affidavit.
She recalled being lost in an unknown part of town and wanting to call her mother to come pick her up, the affidavit said. The assailant, she told investigators, offered to drive her to a nearby pay phone. She said she had reluctantly gotten into his car. They drove for a few blocks until he pulled over and began assaulting her, according to the detective’s report.
As he did so, the woman recalled, he reached into the back seat to grab a metallic object, which she feared was a gun, but never saw. After the assault, he threatened to kill her and her family if she said anything about what had occurred, the affidavit said.
By the time he dropped her off at her house, the sun was already coming up, the woman told authorities. She immediately told her mother, who called 911. The girl was taken to an area hospital, where medical staff collected evidence. But authorities were unable to identify a suspect until the recent breakthrough.
For years, the LAPD struggled to clear a decades-old backlog of untested rape kits that at one point ballooned in number to more than 6,100. But thanks to a combination federal grants, public funds and private donations, the department in 2011 undertook a project to address the thousands of pieces of DNA evidence — despite continued staffing shortages in the department’s laboratory — resulting in hundreds of sex assault arrests.
A 2020 audit by the state attorney general’s office found thatthe department still had nearly 500 untested rape kits, most from pre-2015 cases.
Escoto’s search warrant affidavit says that in addition to the DNA evidence against Perez, he also matches the original victim’s physical description: A man in his 20s with a medium-colored complexion with a hefty build and short-cropped hair.
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