A Boston man is facing charges in two rape cases that had gone unsolved for years, prosecutors said Friday.
New DNA evidence connected Irving Pierre, a 40-year-old from Roslindale, to the violent rape of a woman in the city's Arnold Arboretum in 2013 as well as a 2007 rape of a 16-year-old in the city, according to the Suffolk County District Attorney's Office.
Pierre was in court Friday in the 2013 case, in which prosecutors say he repeatedly punched the woman in the head and sexually assaulted her on Aug. 31, prosecutors said. He was held on $25,000 bail.
He's due back in court Monday in the earlier case, in which the teenage girl woke up to find her shirt had been removed on April 1, 2007, according to prosecutors. A subsequent sexual assault examination found DNA evidence, though the girl hadn't consented to having sex.
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People accused of crimes in Massachusetts generally have not guilty pleas entered on their behalves in court.
The DNA evidence collected in each case was matched this January, bringing a renewed investigation to identify the attacker, prosecutors said. Detectives narrowed in on Pierre and matched his DNA -- collected from a small bottle of alcohol he was seen drinking and then threw out -- to the unsolved attacks.
"I cannot emphasize enough how courageous the survivors of these assaults are. It is human nature to want to leave such trauma in the past, and we are grateful for their role in helping us hold their attacker accountable," District Attorney Kevin Hayden said in a statement.
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Sex assault resources are available at the National Sexual Violence Resources Center and the National Sexual Assault Telephone Hotline at 800-656-4673. Since it was first created in 1994, the National Sexual Assault Hotline has helped more than two million people, according to its website.
