A man arrested last year for sexually assaulting a young relative has now been linked to the 1997 rape of another teenager in Koreatown, according to recent court filings in the long-unsolved case.
The Koreatown investigation languished for nearly three decades until a DNA hit led Wilfredo Romeo Perez, an LAPD sex crimes detective, to write in an affidavit demanding Perez’s arrest.
Date. Ernesto Escoto wrote in an April 7 affidavit that Pérez became a suspect after a young woman in his family reported to authorities that he had been sexually abusing her for years.
According to the affidavit, Perez’s relative first reported the alleged assaults last April, telling Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department investigators that the abuse began when she was 11 and occurred multiple times.
Police said Perez was out on bail after being charged with persistent sexual exploitation of a minor and other related crimes. Court records show he has pleaded not guilty to the charges and is set to return to court next month.
A message left for an attorney for Perez was not immediately returned Wednesday morning.
According to Escoto’s affidavit, when police uploaded Perez’s genetic profile to a national database, they received a hit matching evidence collected in the 1997 case.
The victim in that incident, who was 14 at the time, told police that her attacker was sitting in his car and threatened to kill her family if she did not perform oral sex on him. Police said he then assaulted her repeatedly.
According to Escoto’s affidavit, the woman, now about 40, sat down for a follow-up interview late last month with some detectives from the Los Angeles Police Department and two prosecutors from the Los Angeles County District Attorney’s Office in Long Beach.
She remembered she was lost in an unknown part of town and wanted to call her mother to pick her up, the affidavit said. She told investigators that the attacker offered to take her to a nearby pay phone. She said she reluctantly sat in his car. According to the detective’s report, they drove for a short distance until he stopped and began assaulting her.
The woman remembers that as soon as he did so, he reached into the back seat to grab a metal object, which she feared was a gun, but she never saw. The affidavit states that after the attack, he threatened her and her family if she told anything about what happened.
The woman told officers that by the time she dropped him off at his home, the sun had risen. She immediately told her mother, who called 911. The girl was taken to an area hospital, where medical staff collected evidence. But until the recent breakthrough, authorities were unable to identify any suspects.
For years, the LAPD struggled to clear a decades-old backlog of unused rape kits, which at one time numbered more than 6,100. But thanks to a combination of federal grants, public money and private donations, the department launched a project in 2011 to address the thousands of pieces of DNA evidence that — despite continued understaffing in the department’s laboratory — resulted in hundreds of sexual assault arrests.
one 2020 audit The state Attorney General’s Office found that the department still had about 500 unused rape kits, the majority from cases before 2015.
Escoto’s search warrant affidavit states that in addition to the DNA evidence against Perez, he also matches the physical description of the original victim: a man in his 20s, medium complexion, heavyset build and close-cropped hair.
