For first time in Orange County, DNA from a female family member leads to arrest
DNA from a female relative was used to help identify a man accused of kidnapping and raping a 6-year-old Santa Ana girl, law enforcement officials announced on Tuesday, the first time such a technique has led to an arrest in Orange County and only the second time in California.
At a Tuesday press conference at the Sana Ana Police Department’s headquarters, authorities described how advancements in the use of DNA, along with the tenacity of Santa Ana detectives, led directly to Francisco Javier Lopez, now 45, being charged with the July 2012 abduction and sexual assault.
Lopez, a Montebello resident, is facing a dozen felonies, including kidnapping to commit a sexual offense and sexual intercourse with a child under the age of 11. He has not yet entered a plea.
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The girl was playing with a 4-year-old boy in front of her home in the 1400 block of South Townsend during the daytime when a man lured her into his car. He took her to a parking lot, “brutally sexually assaulted her,” and then “essentially dumped her out of the vehicle” in the neighborhood he had initially taken her from, Santa Ana Police Chief David Valentin said.
Detectives were left with few clues, beyond a description of the vehicle used in the abduction, a general description of the suspect that was used to create a sketch of the man, and DNA recovered from the crime scene.
The DNA was quickly submitted to a state database, but there were no hits. Valentin said detectives continued submitting the crime-scene DNA on an annual basis, but years went by without luck.
In 2014, a woman related to Lopez was convicted of an unrelated crime in Orange County and her DNA samples were sent both to a local DNA database and the statewide system, Orange County District Attorney Todd Spitzer said. The DNA sat in the database for several years, Spitzer added, until technology caught up.
For “particularly heinous” crimes, officials with the state crime lab are able to search for familial DNA matches, in which a DNA profile from a crime scene is tracked to genetically similar family members of suspects, said Elissa Mayo, an assistant director for the California Department of Justice’s Bureau of Forensic Services.
It wasn’t until 2018 that state DNA scientists could compare familial DNA between male and female family members, Mayo said.
Prior to that, matches involving the DNA of women weren’t considered reliable enough to identify suspects. The number of genetic markers used in DNA matches by the state lab workers has since increased, Mayo said, allowing familial matches such as the one in the Lopez case.
The Lopez case marks only the second time in state history where a woman’s DNA profile was used to identify a related male suspect, Mayo said, and the first time in Orange County.
It wasn’t clear how authorities zeroed in on Lopez in particular.
After the familial DNA helped point detectives toward Lopez, they began to conduct surveillance, Spitzer said. The investigators collected a DNA sample of Lopez’s “based upon things he discarded,” Spitzer said, and the Orange County Crime Lab made a direct match to the DNA from the 2012 crime scene.
Valentin said that at some point before the abduction and sexual assault, Lopez lived in that same Santa Ana neighborhood. But the police chief added that there was no indication that Lopez ever knew the girl or her family.
“As you can expect, she is a survivor,” Valentin said of the girl. “I cannot overstate enough the brutal nature of this crime. This is a lifetime recovery.”
Spitzer said the Lopez case demonstrates the importance of the DA’s DNA collection program, which has drawn criticism in the past by those who argue prosecutors should not be amassing their own DNA samples because of concerns they could have an inherent conflict of interest.
“If the Orange County District Attorney’s Office did not have the local DNA database, or we did not have the ability when we have a conviction to submit this sample to the state database, (the case of) a 6-year-old who was brutally kidnapped and sexually molested on the streets of Orange County would arguably continue to remain unsolved today,” Spitzer said.
If convicted as charged, Lopez faces up to life in prison without the possibility of parole.