Category Archives: Transhuman News

DNA has linked a convicted burglar to a brutal night-time rape at a South Beach lifeguard stand in May.

Newly released court records show Blitz Santana Monestine, 29, is the chief suspect in the previously unpublicized attack. A second man remains unidentified.

Miami Beach detectives served a warrant recently to obtain a second DNA sample from Monestine, who is in a downtown federal detention center awaiting sentencing in an unrelated federal gun case.

So far, Monestine has not been charged with sexual battery as investigators await the results of the second DNA test.

According to a search warrant, the attack happened on May 5, when a woman in her 20s had just left the Club Duce Bar, at 222 14th St. The time: 4:30 a.m.

The woman admitted she was intoxicated at the time. But she remembered that a group of men outside the bar began to insult and scream at her, according to the warrant.

One of the men began walking with the woman toward the beach. At 17th Street, the man led her up the lifeguard stand. Suddenly, a cohort appeared and the men pinned her to the floor and began to rape her, according to the warrant.

Please stop, please stop. Please let me go, the woman told detectives she screamed.

If you scream you are going to die, she said one of the men told her.

One of the attackers choked her. She injured her hand as she fought, according to the search warrant filed in Miami-Dade circuit court by Miami Beach Detective Gustavo Sanchez.

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Suspect identified in brutal South Beach lifeguard-stand rape

By WILSON RING/Associated Press/December 24, 2013

MONTPELIER, Vt. (AP) A Vermont man who killed a Stowe woman and remained free for 14 years while the victims parents urged the Legislature to create the DNA database that was used to identify him as their daughters killer, died in prison Tuesday.

Howard Godfrey, 67, of Kirby died in the medical unit of the Southern State Correctional Facility in Springfield, said Vermont Corrections Commissioner Andy Pallito. He did not give a cause of death, but said Godfreys death of natural causes was expected.

Godfrey was convicted in 2008 of the sexual assault and killing of Patricia Scoville, 28, and was serving a sentence of life without parole when he died.

Scovilles body was found in a shallow grave at the Moss Glen Falls, a scenic spot outside Stowe village. She had ridden her bicycle there on Oct. 23, 1991. Her body was found several days later. She had been hit in the back of the head and sexually assaulted.

Scovilles death went unsolved for years while her parents, Ann and David Scoville, of Canadaiga, N.Y., lobbied the Vermont Legislature to create a DNA database of people convicted of certain crimes.

David Scoville, reached at his New York home Tuesday, said Godfreys death marks the end of another chapter since the death of his daughter.

We always say there is no such thing as closure other than having Patty back, but this is a closure of sorts, said Scoville, who along with his wife continue to speak in favor of DNA database proposals since the Vermont law led to their daughters killer.

In 2002 the Scovilles received the National Crime Victim Service Award for their efforts. And after Godfreys 2008 sentencing, the Scovilles were honored by state officials for their efforts to enact Vermonts DNA databank. The states DNA laboratory was named in their daughters memory.

Godfrey gave a DNA sample in 2000 after he was convicted of a non-fatal aggravated assault of a woman in 1996 in Morrisville, not far from where Scoville was killed. That sample was not entered into the national database that linked him to Patricia Scovilles killing until 2005. He was arrested several days later.

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Man in killing that led to Vermont DNA law dies