MANHATTAN SUPREME COURT — A man recently linked by his DNA to the violent 1993 rape and robbery of a teenager on the Lower East Side pleaded guilty on Wednesday and will serve up to 20 years in prison.
In court on Wednesday, Alberto Barriera admitted to following a 16-year-old girl into her Eldridge St. apartment building about 2:30 a.m. on Dec. 16, 1993, stealing her money and jewelry and raping her.
Barriera, 47, was not connected to the brutal crime until March 16, 2010, when his DNA sample was collected in Virginia. He is still serving time in prison there on a felony drug conviction.
After his genetic profile was entered into a national database, he was matched up with the semen collected in a rape kit taken from the victim when she was treated after the assault.
Barriera will finish the seven years of his sentence in Virginia before serving an additonal 10 to 20 years in prison in New York. He is expected to be sentenced on Aug. 17 by Manhattan Supreme Court Justice Bonnie Wittner. Barriera faced 25 years in prison if convicted at trial.
Prosecutors said Barriera could have been caught sooner if state law allowed DNA samples to be taken from misdemeanor offenders, as he had several misdemeanor convictions between the time the rape occurred and his felony conviction in 2010.
Currently, New York law mandates that only felony offenders and select misdemeanor offenders are required to submit a DNA sample to the national database upon conviction.
Prosecutors presented Barriera's DNA profile to a grand jury in 2003, and secured an indictment despite the fact that his identity was still unknown at the time. Prosecutors often seek to indict based on DNA to prevent problems with the legal statute of limitations.
"Today’s conviction demonstrates that DNA evidence solves crimes," Manhattan DA Cyrus Vance Jr. said in a statement. "Using cutting-edge forensic technology, the office was able to file charges against this defendant before the statute of limitations expired — despite not knowing the identity of the defendant — and bring a violent sex offender to justice nearly two decades later."
