DALLAS — A man whose DNA directly tied him to two Dallas County cold-case sexual assaults has been sentenced to 60 years in prison, according to the Dallas County District Attorney's office.
Adrian Cortes, 61, was found guilty by a Dallas County jury after just 19 minutes of deliberation. At the time of trial, 28 years had passed since the initial assault. But despite the passage of time, both victim survivors testified at trial, the DA said.
“What a powerful display of courage and justice,” said Dallas County Criminal District Attorney John Creuzot. “To hold the man responsible who committed these heinous crimes and to have the women he assaulted aid in that process is simply remarkable. We thank those women for their bravery, strength, and trust in our office that we would see to it Mr. Cortes would pay for his crimes.”
The 2001 assault case
In 2001, a woman was loading her 3-year-old toddler into his car seat in the parking lot of their apartment complex when an unknown man approached her from behind and forced her into the vehicle with a sharp object pointed at her back, officials said. The suspect covered the victim's face with her son’s baby blanket, and drove her to an unknown location where he sexually assaulted her in the car while her child was in the backseat, the DA's office said.
The man then drove to another location where he left the woman, her son and the car, and then left the scene, officials said. The surviving victim reported the sexual assault immediately and went to the hospital and took a sexual assault examination, according to the DA's office.
However, the DA's office said, the kit from that 2001 examination went untested for nearly two decades.
Sexual assault kit links man to 1996 case
After 18 years, as a part of the Sex Assault Kit Initiative (SAKI) program at the Dallas County District Attorney’s Office, the 2001 kit was finally tested in 2019, the DA's office said. A case-to-case match provided a new investigative lead for law enforcement, officials said.
The case-to-case match came from an unrelated, unsolved sexual assault from 1996, the DA's apartment said.
In the 1996 case, a pregnant woman was walking to a bus stop early in the morning on her way to work when an unknown man wearing a ski mask came up behind her, covered her eyes with a jacket and put a gun to her head, according to the DA's office.
According to officials, the masked man threatened to kill the woman if she screamed, then dragged her to a nearby field and sexually assaulted her at gunpoint before he left the scene. As with the 2001 case, the surviving victim immediately reported the sexual assault and went to the hospital that same day, according to police. A sexual assault examination was performed, but because there were no workable leads or suspects, the case went cold, the DA's office said.
Years later, the defendant’s DNA was uploaded to the Combined DNA Index System (CODIS) as a result of an unrelated conviction, the district attorney said. That system finally provided the missing link to connect the two sexual assaults and give a face to the unknown man who attacked these women, a press release about the conviction explained.
"Sometimes the system fails survivors of sexual assault," said lead prosecutor and member of the Dallas County District Attorney’s Office SAKI Team Deborah Bankhead. "The mission of the SAKI project is to go back and right those wrongs. Every single woman in Dallas County deserves justice for the life-changing tragedy that was forced on them, whether it was perpetrated last night, last decade, or in this case, last century."
The Dallas County District Attorney's office encourages survivors of sexual assault who would like more information regarding the status of their sexual assault kit tests to email DallasKits@dallascounty.org or call (972)955–4923.
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