DNA match snares suspect in ’04 rape

DNA from a suspect’s discarded cigarette led Pierce County prosecutors to charge a 20-year-old man Friday with the 2004 rape of a teenage girl in South Tacoma.

“This is just plain old good police work,” deputy prosecutor Mary Robnett said.

She charged Donald Robert Morgan with first-degree kidnapping and two counts of first-degree rape for the attack Nov. 22, 2004, on a 15-year-old high school student walking to her bus stop. He pleaded not guilty in Superior Court in front of Judge Bryan Chushcoff.

Robnett said that after news of the attack was published, police got an anonymous tip that the suspect might be in an apartment in the 4300 block of Puget Sound Avenue.

Patrol officer Darren Kelly interviewed Morgan on Nov. 24, 2004. Morgan smoked a cigarette and threw the butt onto the ground as they talked. Afterward, Kelly picked up the butt and booked it into evidence.

On Dec. 21, 2004, a detective submitted the butt along with evidence taken from the girl’s body at the hospital to the Washington State Patrol Crime Laboratory, where it joined a backlog of hundreds of samples awaiting testing.

On July 6, 2006, the detective learned the two were a match. On Tuesday, the girl picked a photo of Morgan from a series of pictures as the person she thought attacked her, charging papers say.

On Thursday, two detectives contacted Morgan, who initially denied he committed the rape. Morgan agreed to provide DNA for comparison, telling detectives his DNA would not match the DNA from the rape.

But when the investigators told Morgan that DNA from his cigarette butt did match DNA found in the girl, he told them about the attack. He said he had grabbed her from behind and she yelled, “Help,” the charging papers say.

He said he raped her, took her backpack and later threw it away and then ran to the house of a friend, the papers say. He told one person what he’d done.

The girl was attacked about 7 a.m. in the 4200 block of South Pine Street, police said. She told police a man grabbed her and threatened to shoot her. He pulled her behind three large cable boxes by an office building and raped her. She also told police he said he would stab her. She later said she didn’t see a gun or a knife. She said he hit her on the head six or seven times before running away, the charging papers state.

The girl called 911 from her cell phone and reported the attack. She said she didn’t know the attacker. Paramedics took her to Mary Bridge Children’s Hospital and Health Center, where the DNA samples were taken.

Morgan’s trial is scheduled for Aug. 31. He was being held in the Pierce County Jail.