Attleboro

Man sentenced to prison in 1994 Attleboro rape

Eduardo Mendez, 51, was convicted of a June 1994 rape in a jury trial

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A 51-year-old man convicted in a violent 1994 rape case out of Attleboro, Massachusetts, was sentenced to prison by a Fall River Superior Court judge on Monday, the Bristol County District Attorney's Office announced.

Eduardo Mendez, 51, was convicted last week by jury trial of aggravated rape in the June 1994 case. Authorities obtained an arrest warrant for him in September 2020, but it took until 2022 to find him. He was arrested in Brooklyn, New York in 2022. On Monday, he was sentenced to 15 to 20 years in state prison.

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Prosecutors say that in June of 1994, a woman was walking near the Pleasant Street Bridge in Attleboro, when she was accosted by three men who forced her into the stairwell of a nearby building. Two of the men held her down, while a third "violently raped her," authorities said.

The victim was found by a 14-year-old who had been walking with a friend and brought her to the police station.

At the time, police took down descriptions of the men from the woman, but they were not able to identify any suspects. The woman had a sexual assault evidence collection kit done at a hospital following the assault.

That kit — along with thousands of others from around the state — was never fully tested by the state lab in the original investigation, Bristol County prosecutors said.

The Bristol County District Attorney's Office has been working with a private lab to test all of the kits in its county, with the help of a federal grant. The state is also working on its backlog with a private lab. This case was sent to a private lab through a federal grant received by the state, prosecutors and state officials said.

Investigators matched the DNA in the kit to Mendez, who was in the national DNA system from a stabbing conviction in New York later in the 1990s, a news release from Bristol County said.

“My office made it a priority to identify and test all rape kits in our County.  Fortunately, the evidence in this kit was located and sent out for testing, which identified the defendant as the suspect in this case," Bristol County District Attorney Thomas M. Quinn III said in a media statement. "I want to thank the prosecution team for their efforts and commend the victim for her perseverance over the last thirty years.  Without the rape kit being tested, this defendant would never have been charged."

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