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It may have taken a long time, but Mobile County District Attorney Keith Blackwood said a Florida woman finally has gotten justice for a sexual attack she endured almost 30 years ago.
) - It may have taken a long time, but Mobile County District Attorney Keith Blackwood said a Florida woman finally has gotten justice for a sexual attack she endured almost 30 years ago.
“This has been a long time coming for our victim,” Blackwood said following the verdict. “Again, so brave that she came up here from down in Florida to see this through to the very end. I just can’t thank her enough for making justice possible in this case. ”Tuesday that she was 15 years old in June 1997.
She said she awoke in her home in Mobile’s Orange Grove public housing complex to find a masked stranger’s hand over her mouth and a knife to her neck. She testified that he told her to shut up and then raped her. The case went unsolved until a cold case investigator ran Andre Landrum’s DNA profile through a database and got a hit from a sample that had been taken from him in an unrelated case in 2005.
“Back then, things were different from what they are now. … When that happens now, there are automatic checks for existing profiles that are in the database,” Blackwood said.
“That’s something that just wasn’t available back during the beginning of this case. ” Defense attorney Tom Walsh said his client,now 57, has a strong grounds for appeal on multiple grounds. A forensic scientist compared the defendant’s DNA profile to the profile created from the victim’s rape kit. But she was not able to re-test the sample.
“She discovered that the tip on the end of the Q-tip where the extract was is no longer there,” he said. “It was missing. It was gone. ”“If the Alabama Department of Forensic Sciences can’t re-test it, then the defendant certainly can’t re-test it, and then they still did not charge him until 2021,” he said.
Blackwood said there are other reasons why it took until 2021 to make an arrest. He said investigators had to track down the victim and get her comfortable with testifying. And he added that the pandemic slowed investigations.
“There was also another investigation that was in play at the time for a separate crime,” he said. “That crime remains to this day uncharged, but Andre Landrum was suspect No. 1 in it. ”“In that time, evidence was destroyed, witnesses have died and the scene of the crime no longer exists,” he said.
“It’s Orange Grove, and it’s been destroyed. ” Mobile County Circuit Judge Wesley Pipes set sentencing for June 18. Blackwood said he will seek the maximum penalty for each count, which would mean life in prison. Mobile man, first in Alabama convicted under gang law, sentenced to 25 years in marijuana caseMobile Police investigating shooting in west Mobile Sunday morning
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