The second woman was raped before the positive DNA identification from the first case came back from lab
EDITOR’S NOTE: All people named are innocent until proven guilty in a court of law.
On Sept. 13, the Sebastopol Police arrested Tirso De Jesus Guzman-Vivar, age 26, of Sebastopol, and booked him in the Sonoma County Jail on a charge of rape against an elderly woman at the Luther Burbank Senior Living complex.
This weekend, on Nov. 16, investigators from the Sebastopol Police Department named Guzman-Vivar as the suspect in another rape, which took place in June of this year.
In that case, the victim, a 61-year-old woman, reported to police that a suspect, later identified as Guzman-Vivar, had been at her home as a guest. The victim said she was trying to provide some assistance to Guzman-Vivar, a local transient. During that visit, Guzman-Vivar allegedly drugged the victim and subsequently had sexual intercourse with her multiple times.
The victim said her attacker had provided her with a false name, and the Sebastopol Police had been unable to identify him. The police, however, collected physical evidence, including DNA and beverage samples, and sent them to the California Department of Justice (DOJ) laboratory for testing.
The Cal DOJ laboratory has an enormous backlog of cases, and the results took several months — from June to November — to come through.
“It’s not like television where they send things off to the lab and get results in half an hour,” Sebastopol Police Chief James Conner said. “We were waiting in line basically for the results.”
In addition to testing the DNA and beverage samples from the rape case in June, the lab compared Guzman-Vivar’s DNA sample to those in the DOJ Database and, due to Guzman-Vivar’s numerous prior felony convictions, they got a positive hit right away.
Sebastopol Police investigators said they learned of the positive match to Guzman-Vivar’s DNA on Friday, Nov. 15. At the same time, the lab reported that the sample from the beverage which Guzman-Vivar allegedly offered to the victim, tested positive for trace amounts of GHB, also known as the “date rape drug.”
Guzman-Vivar remained in custody at the Sonoma County Jail on the previous rape case involving the elderly victim in September. Sebastopol Police sent booking paperwork to the jail, effectively arresting and booking Guzman-Vivar for the rape of the 61-year-old woman in June. He was charged with a violation of California Penal Code 261(a)(3), or rape “where a person is prevented from resisting by any intoxicating or anesthetic substance, or any controlled substance, and this condition was known, or reasonably should have been known by the accused.” Guzman-Vivar remains in custody.
