Atlanta police say detectives believe they have identified the man responsible for the 1995 cold case rape and murder of Nacole Smith and a 2004 East Point sexual assault.
The suspect, 49-year-old Kevin Arnold, died of liver and kidney failure while in hospice care in Aug. 2021 in Fulton County. He was never charged or arrested for the crimes he's accused of. in 1995 in northeast Atlanta. Police linked DNA from her murder case to a 2004 sexual assault in East Point. Investigators said they used genealogy and ancestral databases to identify the suspect in 2021.
Retired Atlanta homicide detective Vince Velasquez, who re-opened the case in 2002, said the teenager was assaulted, raped, and shot twice in the face. Her body was found on Childress Drive. While police had a DNA match to the suspect, they had not identified them. Velasquez passed off the case to Detective Scott Demeester upon his retirement.