Metro

DNA nails ’98 rapist

Smoking was definitely bad for this rapist.

Fourteen years after 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.

Guerrero, 34, of Staten Island, will serve 15 yearplus five years’ probation, after pleading guilty yesterday to rape, sodomy, burglary and robbery in the 1998 attack.

The victim was coming home to her apartment at Orchard and Rivington streets just before midnight on a November night when Guerrero threatened her with a jagged piece of glass, dragging her into an alley and raping her.

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 both blood DNA and rape-kit DNA.

Guerrero was finally linked to the rape 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 his discarded cigarettes at the time. DNA on the butt matched the evidence from 1998.

laura.italiano@nypost.com