Posted at: 08/26/2009 6:23 PM
By: Becky Nahm

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DNA Leads to Arrest in 2 Sex Assault Cold Cases

Five years after one sexual assault, and three years after another, Hennepin County authorities used DNA to link one man to both crimes.

An investigation by the relatively new Hennepin County Cold Case Team led to the arrest of Fernando Bladimer Perez, 33, of Dayton, Minn.

Perez is accused of sexually assaulting one woman in 2004 in Brooklyn Center and another woman in 2006 in Minneapolis.

In the 2006 case, the victim said she was attacked after arriving at a house to interview for a job cleaning homes.

The Brooklyn Center victim said she was assaulted in the Brookdale Mall parking lot.

In February, a month after the Cold Case Team was formed, a member of the team took another look at the 2006 case. He uploaded DNA evidence from the 2006 case into CODIS, the national DNA database. It matched DNA evidence collected in the 2004 case. But investigators still didn't have a name to go along with the DNA.

That changed when detectives put together suspect descriptions and other information collected during investigations of the two assaults. Their work led them to suspect Perez. They learned he was recently convicted of a felony and therefore would soon have his DNA entered into CODIS.

When they were able to obtain his DNA profile, they matched it to the DNA collected from the two sexual assaults.

The Hennepin County Attorney's Office charged Perez with several felonies including two counts of first degree criminal sexual assault. He is currently in custody at the Hennepin County jail.

The Cold Case Team was formed in January with a grant from the U.S. Department of Justice-National Institute of Justice. The team was created to investigate unsolved homicides and sexual assault cases with DNA analysis.

According to the Hennepin County Sheriff's Office, this is the first case that has been submitted for prosecution since the Cold Case Team began its work.