A 32-year-old man whom Baltimore County police accused in February of sexually assaulting two young girls now faces additional charges in the city after police arrested him Thursday morning in connection with the abduction and rape of two teenagers in separate attacks in 2000 and 2004.
Authorities said they linked the suspect to the earlier rapes through DNA collected from the man when he was arrested in the county four months ago. He had posted bail pending his August trial, and city police said they rearrested him at his house in Halethorpe.
Police identified the suspect as Gregory Leslie Brown of the 2400 block of Tionesta Road, just south of the city line, and said they had charged him with two counts of rape and two counts of false imprisonment
The case is one of the first under an expanded Maryland law that took effect in January that requires law enforcement to collect DNA from individuals charged with committing or attempting to commit violent crimes. In the past, authorities could collect DNA only after someone had been convicted.
Police routinely compare newly acquired DNA to preserved evidence from unsolved cases. Police said detectives in the city's Sex Offense Cold-Case Unit learned on May 27 that samples taken from Brown matched those taken from the victims in 2000 and 2004.
"This case illustrates in the clearest of ways just how effective this new law is in making our neighborhoods and our families safer," Gov. Martin O'Malley said in a statement. Mayor Sheila Dixon, also in a statement, said she was pleased that city police "have already taken advantage of this new DNA law to solve one of the most heinous and most violent crimes in our society."
Court documents and police said Brown has an extensive list of arrests on drug and robbery charges but only a handful of convictions. He was found not guilty in 2004 in a rape case.
Baltimore County police arrested him in February on multiple sex offense charges in connection with attacks on two girls, ages 7 and 8. Police said the two are related to him.
The earlier attacks city police have charged Brown with are described by a department spokesman as "random attacks against children."
Baltimore police spokesman Anthony Guglielmi said the first attack occurred in 2000 when a 14-year-old girl was picked up from a bus stop at East 33rd Street and The Alameda by a man driving an older-model brown station wagon operated as a hack, or an illegal taxi. He said girl was driven to a dark parking lot, threatened with a razor and raped.
In 2004, Guglielmi said, a man in a station wagon picked up a 13-year-old girl at the light rail station in Cherry Hill, drove her to the back of a shopping center on Patapsco Avenue and raped her. The spokesman said that the man did not threaten the girl with a weapon but did "threaten to kill the victim" and then pushed her out of the car and "made her face a Dumpster under the threat of being shot."
