EVERETT — He got away with raping her. Until science caught up with him.
Ignacio Fierro-Sifuentes shuffled to the front of the courtroom Tuesday. His feet were shackled and his hands were cuffed. A Snohomish County judge sentenced Fierro-Sifuentes to a year in prison. He is expected to be deported to Mexico once he serves his time.
Superior Court Judge George Appel ordered Fierro-Sifuentes, 37, to stay away from the woman he raped on Christmas 2010. She sat in the back of the courtroom Tuesday, surrounded by family and friends.
The woman and her husband and other relatives were at Fierro-Sifuentes’ house for a party on Christmas Eve. They stayed over, sleeping in the living room, along with several children. Fierro-Sifuentes left his bedroom, where his wife and children slept, crept into living room and raped the woman, then 20.
The case went unsolved until Everett police submitted the forensic evidence gathered in 2010 during a sexual assault examination of the woman. The kit was given to the FBI in 2015 as part of an initiative to reduce the number of untested sexual assault kits across the country. Everett was allowed to submit 18 kits.
It is the department’s first conviction out of those efforts.
“It’s a huge win for us,” Everett police Capt. Greg Lineberry said Wednesday. “Even if we only caught one, it was worth it to go through this exercise.”
It’s estimated that nationwide law enforcement agencies are in possession of hundreds of thousands of untested sexual assault evidence kits. Washington lawmakers in 2015 passed legislation to reduce the number of unsubmitted kits and to address the backlog of evidence awaiting testing by the Washington State Patrol crime lab.
A few years ago Everett conducted an audit of its untested kits to determine if any that should have been tested slipped through the cracks, Lineberry said.
They have since identified about 270 cases they’d like to submit to the State Patrol for examination. In the vast majority of those cases, however, a suspect already has been identified, Lineberry said. Everett detectives have prioritized testing for cases in which the suspect is unknown to the victim, he added.
Some of those untested cases have been prosecuted without DNA evidence, while others will never be charged. In some instances, the victim doesn’t want to cooperate or the case may not be strong enough to prosecute.
Everett police detectives had closed the 2010 rape investigation for “lack of evidence.”
The kit likely wasn’t tested because of the totality of the circumstances, Lineberry said. The officers had a named suspect at the time, and he had provided a credible statement that he wasn’t involved. It didn’t appear that the case could be prosecuted, Lineberry said.
The woman told police in 2010 that she awoke to find a man lying on the floor behind her. He began fondling her over her clothing. She pushed his hands away. The woman, still intoxicated, believed it was her husband, Snohomish County deputy prosecutor Matt Baldock wrote in charging papers. The man pulled down her pants and raped her. The next morning she confronted her husband, telling him that it wasn’t appropriate behavior given that there were other people in the room.
“Her husband was surprised and adamantly denied having any kind of physical contact,” with his wife during the night, Baldock wrote. She became upset, realizing that she’d been raped.
The woman assumed that the assailant was the only other adult man who had been sleeping in the living room. Her relatives confronted him about what happened, but he denied raping the woman. He denied the allegation again when interviewed by an Everett police detective. He said he’d slept in a chair in the living room.
The woman went to a local hospital for a sexual assault exam.
Everett detectives didn’t refer the 2010 rape case to prosecutors.
If the case had been forwarded to prosecutors for review at the time, they likely would have asked Everett police to submit the kit to the State Patrol for analysis, Baldock said last year. The presence of male DNA likely would have given the detectives grounds to obtain a court order to collect cheek swabs from the men who were in the house at the time. Those genetic profiles could have been compared against the DNA recovered from the sexual assault kit, Baldock said.
The FBI notified Everett detectives in April 2016 that the rape kit had yielded male DNA. A week or so later, Everett police were told that the genetic profile was a match for Fierro-Sifuentes.
He had been required to submit a DNA sample in 2011 after he was convicted of a sexually motivated attack on a woman in an Everett bar. In that case, he forced his way into a bathroom stall, grabbed the woman by the neck and threatened to rape her. She freed herself and he was detained by a bouncer.
That felony assault happened about two weeks after the rape.
Fierro-Sifuentes was convicted of second-degree assault. He was deported after serving less than a year in jail.
Everett police detective Suzanne Eviston tracked Fierro-Sifuentes to a federal detention center in New Mexico, where he was being held under a different name. He’d been convicted of illegal re-entry into the U.S. in March 2016. He was awaiting deportation.
Eviston scrambled to get authorities in New Mexico to hold him. Prosecutors here charged Fierro-Sifuentes with third-degree rape. He was transported to the Snohomish County Jail a few months later. He pleaded guilty last month. He faced up to 14 months in prison.
“I only want to apologize. I made a mistake. I am here paying for what I did,” Fierro-Sifuentes said Tuesday.
His lawyer, Amy Kaestner, told the judge that her client doesn’t plan to return to the U.S.
“You certainly did make a mistake, to say the least,” Appel said.
Diana Hefley: 425-339-3463; hefley@heraldnet.com.
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