DNA Helps Investigators Crack Green Line Sex Assault Cold Case
BOSTON (CBS) – Investigators say DNA evidence has helped them solve a mystery after nearly eight years.
Back on June 22, 2004 a woman told MBTA police a man sexually assaulted her on a crowded Green Line train.
"Shortly after he exited at Kenmore station, the woman noticed a wet substance on her shoulder bag, which had been at her feet, and on her pants," Jake Wark, a spokesman for the Suffolk County District Attorney's Office, said in a statement Monday.
Officers seized DNA evidence from the bag and five months later they learned it matched a similar incident on the Metro in Washington, DC, back in 2002.
Suffolk County prosecutors indicted the unknown suspect's unique genetic profile in 2005.
Nearly six years later, in January 2011, investigators found the DNA profile matched that of 50-year-old Timothy Day of Bethesda, Maryland. His DNA profile had been entered into a database following a federal conviction.
Day was arrested last Tuesday. He was arraigned Monday afternoon in Suffolk Superior Court on a single count of indecent assault and battery for the 2004 incident.
He was ordered held on $1,500 bail.
He's due back in court on June 27, when Wark said prosecutors will "argue in support of a confirmation DNA swab to check against the biological evidence recovered from the victim's shoulder bag."
