A Utah man was sentenced to prison this week after he pleaded guilty to reduced charges in a rape case police say they solved two years after the crime thanks to a DNA match to sexual-assault kit evidence.
Richard Simon Garcia, 47, pleaded guilty in 2nd District Court in July to first-degree felony rape. He was accused of sexually assaulting a 14-year-old girl who was riding her longboard home in Davis County on Aug. 8, 2014.
On Monday, Garcia was sentenced to serve a five-years-to-life term at the Utah State Prison, according to court records. A judge ordered the sentence to run consecutive to a prison sentence Garcia is already serving for an unrelated case.
Charging documents allege that Garcia approached the young girl — who he did not know – and asked her if she wanted to go to a party. When she said no, he pulled her to a secluded area and sexually assaulted her.
The girl couldn’t identify her attacker, according to court records, but underwent a sexual-assault exam and her rape kit was sent to the crime lab for analysis.
But testing to identify an attacker took a year, and it was another year before the match was confirmed. In late January — nearly 2½ years after the girl’s assault — prosecutors filed charges in the case.
In March, Crime Lab Directory Jay Henry estimated that it took the lab’s DNA forensics section about a year to process a single sex-assault kit or any other sort of DNA evidence. Since then, the workers have moved into a new, bigger crime lab with a new robotics station that automates some of the DNA extraction process. Henry has said he hopes their turnaround time will soon be 30 to 60 days.
Garcia has a string of criminal convictions, some for sexual-related offenses, that stretch back as far as 1989. He is currently serving a prison sentence for a 2015 aggravated robbery conviction.