Smoking was definitely bad for this rapist.
Fourteen years after ski-cap-wearing fiend Lerio Guerrero violently violated a 28-year-old college professor in a Lower East Side alley, he’s finally going to prison — thanks to DNA on a cigarette butt he discarded last summer.
Guerrero, 34, of Staten Island, will serve 15 years upstate, plus five years probation, after pleading guilty today to rape, sodomy, burglary and robbery in the 1998 attack.
“This was a very serious offense,” Manhattan Supreme Court Justice Bonnie Wittner said in accepting Guerrero’s plea.
The victim had been coming home to her apartment at Orchard and Rivington just before midnight on a November night when Guerrero threatened her with a jagged piece of glass, dragging her into an alley, raping and sodomizing her, and then stealing her wallet.
“He is captured on video holding the glass to her neck,” prosecutor Martha Bashford said in court today.
Unsatisfied with her cash, Guerrero then forced the terrified woman to two nearby ATM machines, taking $800.
Because Guerrero had cut his own hand on the glass – and his blood had dripped on the woman’s coat — investigators had blood DNA and rape kit DNA.
But those samples matched no-one in the state DNA data bank, since even though Guerrero had added driving, marijuana and disorderly conduct offenses to his rap sheet, his crimes were not then DNA eligible.
They will be soon — the new “All Crimes” DNA law took effect August 1, and will begin collating databank samples from people convicted of misdemeanors as minor as fare-jumping.
Prosecutors won an indictment against Guerrero in 2005 — charging his DNA profile, since they still didn’t have his name.
But Guerrero was only linked to the rape by name in May, 2011, when he was arrested for trespassing and knife possession in Brooklyn near the scene of another sex assault.
Investigators retrieved one of is discarded cigarettes. DNA on the cigarette matched the rape kit and blood evidence from 1998.
“He had some issues in his childhood,” including substance abuse, his lawyer, James Palumbo, said after court.”He was pulling himself together.”