Attacker Linked by DNA to 2 Rapes in 2001 Gets 9 Years in Prison

A man implicated by DNA evidence in two rapes more than a decade ago was sentenced to nine years in prison Wednesday, according to the San Mateo County District Attorney’s Office.

Boris Chavez, 34, was handed the sentence by Judge Leland Davis after pleading no contest to felony sexual assault in a plea agreement reached in August. He will have to register as a sex offender once he’s released, prosecutors said.

Chavez was linked to two similar sexual assaults in 2001 in South San Francisco where the victims had apparently been drugged, raped and beaten.

On May 4, 2001, a woman was found at 5:48 a.m. bleeding, beaten and naked from the waist down. She remembered little of what happened the night before, only that she had run into some friends and was partying with them, prosecutors said.

A second woman flagged down a truck driver around 3 a.m. on Nov. 1, 2001, and said she had been beaten and raped.

She told police she was drugged at San Francisco’s Castro Street Halloween festival and passed out. She awoke as three men were dragging her out of a sedan into a dirt area at the end of Haskins Way in South San Francisco.

The men beat her and left her there, according to police.

Both women received rape examinations and DNA evidence was collected, but the rapes remained unsolved for the next 13 years until Chavez was arrested on an unrelated felony last year. Investigators checked his DNA against the national sexual assault database and connected him to the two rapes, prosecutors said.

Timely testing of DNA evidence has become a nationwide issue. Rape examination kits can go untested for years, leaving an attacker’s DNA out of the national database. San Mateo County received a $196,512 award from the
National Institute of Justice in 2012 to reduce its own rape kit backlog.

--Bay City News Service, photo courtesy of the San Mateo Sheriff’s Department