DNA helps in rape arrest

Police say Thomas Pritchard brutally raped a woman on the 200 block of Otisco Street in Syracuse last June.

"It was a very brutal, stranger rape. This woman did not know this man at all. She was approached by him in the street. She walking along, it was about 12:30 at night. She got approached by this man, assaulted, beat up and dragged behind a building and brutally raped," Sgt. Tom Conellen of Syracuse Police said Thursday.

Police didn't have many leads on the case, and it eventually went cold. But they got lucky when he was recently pulled in for probation. By law when certain crimes are committed, a swab is taken and DNA is collected. It then goes into a database.

"This mans DNA was put into this databank because he was put on probation. And DNA sample was put into the data bank, and eventually we got a hit on that," Connellan said.

If it wasn't for the mandatory swab, Prichard may have run free a little while longer. But thanks to prior arrests and forensics, he's now behind bars.

"It's getting to be easier, nowadays, for us to solve cases like this with the DNA databank that we have and with the advances that we have and evidence collection, and preserving evidence and the fine lab work that's going on," Conellan said.

At the Center for Forensic Sciences in Syracuse, Dr. Kathleen Corrado says two different databases allow that to happen.

One exists with DNA collected from crime scenes. The other, DNA collected by law. When a name pops up in both, it's called a 'hit'. That's just what happened with Prichard.

Director of Laboratories Dr. Kathleen Corrado said, "Generally what happens is, we get a hit to the database to his sample, and then the police generally bring us another sample directly that they obtained from that person that we can compare to the evidence."

Thanks to both databases, one man is behind bars for this brutal crime.