Humberto Gonzalez, 26, was found guilty of kidnapping, criminal restraint and several counts of assault and could face up to 50 years in prison for the May 22, 2005 incident
A case that was considered “cold” for years and unlikely to ever be solved came to a conclusion this week, when a jury convicted a man of dragging a Princeton woman into a township park and sexually assaulting her.
Humberto Gonzalez, 26, was found guilty of kidnapping, criminal restraint and several counts of assault and could face up to 50 years in prison for the May 22, 2005 incident.
The victim, who was 53 at the time of the attack, was immediately taken to the hospital after the attack and a DNA sample of the assailant was recovered and recorded in a national database, but there was little more for detectives to work with than the few details the woman remembered and a sketch based on her vague description of the man.
Despite an effort by the Princeton Police Department to solve the crime, the case went cold for five years.
In 2010, the big break came, when a match for the DNA sample hit. Belonging to Gonzalez, it was entered from Texas, after he had been booked there for an aggravated assault with a deadly weapon in a separate case.
Excited at having finally identified a likely suspect, but still proceeding with caution, Mercer County Assistant Prosecutor Robin Scheiner immediately ordered another DNA sample be taken from Gonzalez. When that, too, turned out to be a match, she arranged for him to be sent to New Jersey after serving out his two-year sentence in Texas for his crime there.
“When you get a hit on a cold case, it’s just an investigative tool,” Scheiner said. “We had to make sure it was him.”
But the DNA match was compelling evidence. According to Scheiner, once the DNA match was confirmed, the odds that someone else perpetrated the Princeton crime shot up to one-in-20.9 quadrillion.
Faced with the evidence that the DNA found on the woman was his, Gonzalez — who was 17 at the time of the crime but was tried as an adult — claimed the woman had consented to having sex with him. He said the 53-year-old woman was on the prowl, standing on the corner and asking to have some fun with him, Scheiner said.
“With the DNA evidence really eliminating the odds that it was anyone else, he had to say it was consensual,” Scheiner said.
Residing in the country illegally, Gonzalez also has a criminal history in Louisiana and Arkansas.
While the victim and her family were not able to make it to court when the verdict was read, Scheiner said they were crying tears of joy over the result — and the closure that came with it.
“It was unbelievable,” Scheiner said. “The husband was crying, the son was crying, and she was just screaming on the phone that she couldn’t believe it. She was so happy.”
The verdict also offers Scheiner some closure. With the chance to retire at the beginning of the year, she chose instead to bring this last case to trial and will retire at the end of the month.
“To be 53 and have this happen to you — it just meant a lot to me to be able to do this for her, and to do this for her family,” Scheiner said. Still, she demurred, “It’s never about me, though. It’s about the victims and helping them find justice.”
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