A 61-year-old Michigan man has been detained in connection to a pair of 1998 rapes that took place in Florida thanks to a genealogy database.
Robert Brian Thomas, a resident of Niles, Michigan, was arrested and charged with two counts of sexual battery - one count from the Pinellas County Sheriff's Office and the other from the Venice Police Department. According to a press conference with Pinellas County Sheriff Bob Gualtieri, Thomas is currently being held in the St. Joseph County Jail.
He is awaiting extradition to Pinellas County. Genealogy databases confirmed on December 10 that Thomas' DNA was a match to the incidents that occurred in Venice and Indian Rocks Beach in 1998. In October 1998, an then-20-year-old female told detectives that she was sexually assaulted and forced to perform oral sex on a nude man who approached her at Indian Rocks Beach. She told detectives that the suspect then forced her to go into the Gulf of Mexico and clean herself before he fled. DNA obtained from the victim was sent to the Florida Department of Law Enforcement (FDLE), but no matches were initially found.
In May 1999, FDLE matched the DNA to another sexual battery that occurred in 1998 in Venice, Florida. Law enforcement personnel from Pinellas County and Venice identified more than 90 people of interest throughout the course of their investigation and over the span of two decades. In December 2018, the FDLE accepted the cold case for genealogy mapping - letting detectives work backwards to identify the suspect using a known family member.
By March the next year, the unit was able to match to a distant relative of Thomas' before eventually narrowing down to five possible suspects. Earlier this month, detectives obtained a sample of Thomas' DNA. They confirmed it was a match to the two cases on December 10. Thomas was arrested on December 12 and taken to the Niles Police Department, where he was interviewed by the two Florida agencies.
The man admitted to either living or visiting the areas during the timeframe of the allegations but asked for his lawyer once notified that his DNA evidence was found.
Cc: dailymail
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