Stranger broke into home, raped mom in 1992, Virginia officials say. He’s sentenced
A Virginia man was sentenced to 32 years in prison after a jury found him guilty in a 1992 cold case that reopened when DNA evidence found a match, officials said.
Vernon Gay, 56, was convicted of rape and armed burglary with intent to commit rape in September, the Norfolk Commonweath’s Attorney Office said in a Dec. 20 news release. The historic case marks the first of the Sexual Assault Kit Initiative-identified cases to reach a conviction by jury trial in Virginia, officials said.
The National Sexual Assault Kit Initiative funds the “reform of approaches to sexual assault cases resulting from evidence found in sexual assault kits that have never been submitted to a crime laboratory,” according to the website.
In 1992, Gay broke into a home through a child’s bedroom window armed with a knife and sexually assaulted a mother of three — whom he was a stranger to — in her bedroom, officials said.
The woman reported the rape to Norfolk police, and sexual assault nurses assembled a sexual assault kit with DNA evidence from the unknown man, but the case went cold after no leads were found, officials said.
Twenty years later, the case was submitted for SAKI testing, and the case reopened in 2023 when DNA evidence from the woman’s sexual assault kit matched Gay’s, according to the release.
On Dec. 20, a judge sentenced him and suspended an additional 13 years on the conditions that Gay be “of uniform good behavior and comply with supervised probation for 10 years following his release,” officials said. He was also instructed to not have contact with the woman.
“I am proud that Norfolk has secured Virginia’s first jury conviction in a SAKI case,” Commonweath’s Attorney Ramin Fatehi said in the release. “I am even more proud of the survivor of this crime, who after decades of uncertainty has come to court, shared her story, and seen her abuser held accountable.”
This story was originally published December 23, 2024 at 1:02 PM with the headline "Stranger broke into home, raped mom in 1992, Virginia officials say. He’s sentenced."
