On the Job 

Who would argue when Cuyahoga County Assistant Prosecutor Rick Bell calls these offenders the “worst of the worst”?
 
Elias Acevedo raped and murdered two women, in 1994 and 1995, and raped four others — three of his daughters and his pregnant sister-in-law.
 
Ralph Kent committed multiple crimes against four women — rape, attempted rape, felonious assault, and kidnapping — in 1978, 1994, and 1995. Another case was not prosecuted.
 
Charles Steele raped four women in Cleveland and two women in Cincinnati in a two-year span. He was sentenced in February to a minimum of 65 years in prison.
 
These are among the offenders being held accountable for horrific crimes as a result of Attorney General Mike DeWine’s Sexual Assault Kit (SAK) Initiative. And these are the crimes we know of.
 
Task force runs with lab results
 
The SAK initiative is identifying rape suspects across Ohio, but nowhere is the number of untested kits so great or the cases advancing so rapidly as Cuyahoga County, where Prosecutor Timothy J. McGinty has formed a DNA Cold Case Task Force to investigate and prosecute the crimes. The Attorney General has assigned two BCI agents to the task force long-term, and additional agents work cases as time allows.
 
In his first case with the task force, BCI Special Agent Rob Surgenor interviewed Acevedo twice when investigating the 1993 rape of Acevedo’s sister-in-law.
 
“I locked him into a story of being with her, arguing, pushing her. He denied three times having sex with her,” said Surgenor, who then revealed that a recently analyzed rape kit contained Acevedo’s DNA. “And he kind of just looked at me, and you could see his wheels spinning, and at that point the tears came on and he just started crying.”
 
Believing Acevedo could be responsible for other crimes, BCI agents alerted the appropriate agencies, and soon the FBI interviewed him about two unsolved homicides. He eventually confessed to raping and murdering the two women, who had been missing for decades, raping his sister-in-law when she was almost six months pregnant, and sexually abusing his daughters for many years. Acevedo pleaded guilty to 297 counts and was sentenced in December to 445 years in prison.
 
Cuyahoga County CODIS hits top 40 percent
 
As of Sept. 1, Ohio law enforcement agencies had submitted 8,744 kits to the BCI lab for testing under the SAK initiative, including 4,230 from the Cleveland Police Department. Of the 2,574 Cleveland kits tested so far,             CODIS hits have been returned on 41.6 percent, exceeding the initiative’s statewide hit rate of 36 percent.
 
“We’re very grateful to the Attorney General’s Office, first of all for the testing,” said Bell, who heads up the Cuyahoga County task force. “Attorney General DeWine is committing resources for the laboratory testing of all rape kits on the shelves of police departments across Ohio. And he’s not leaving the police in a lurch after he does the testing. He’s taken the largest city with the most rape kits on its shelves and committed his investigators to work inside the task force. It’s very, very helpful.”
 
The task force has 14 investigators — representing BCI, the prosecutor’s office, the Cleveland Police Department, and the Cuyahoga County Sheriff’s Office — three prosecutors, a supervising prosecutor, and a director.
 
The results are impressive: By Sept. 1, the prosecutor’s office had gained indictments against 188 defendants. Of the 59 whose cases had been heard by that point, prosecutors had won convictions in 67 percent, 29 through pleas and 11 in cases that went to trial. The office expects to prosecute about 1,000 individuals.
 
High percentage of serial rapists
 
More than 23 percent of the people Cuyahoga County has indicted to date are suspected serial rapists whose DNA has shown up in two to seven rape kits. (Elsewhere, BCI has identified the DNA of one incarcerated individual in 14 kits.) Not surprisingly, many have long rap sheets of other crimes.
 
“If we make the community safer by putting away these worst of the worst offenders, there will be a big ripple effect not only in safety, because they’re away and not committing crimes, but also because there will be greater cooperation with police, a greater feeling of justice, and people will actually move back into the city because there’s greater confidence in the system,” Bell said.
 
BCI Special Agent Supervisor Mark Kollar agrees. “When you see an offender’s pattern of arrest, jail, back out, arrest, jail, back out, and all of a sudden you get them on an SAK rape case, now they’re going to be incarcerated potentially for the rest of their life,” Kollar said. “You’ve just broken that cycle. And it’s safe to assume that had you not made that arrest, the cycle would have continued and they would have continued offending throughout the remainder of their lives.”