Manhattan Turnstile Jumper Charged in Bronx Rape - NYTimes.com

Held for Evading a Fare, Then Charged in a Rape
By AL BAKER

An arrest in an East Harlem subway station on Friday led, through an unusual set of circumstances, to the suspect being charged a day later with the rape and beating last month of a 79-year-old woman in the elevator of her Bronx apartment building, the police said.

By the time all the detectives’ reports were filled out and filed, the suspect, Shon Holland, who has a lengthy arrest record, had been charged with three crimes in two boroughs.

The sequence of events began about 10 a.m. Friday when a captain and an officer on the Police Department’s Transit Anti-Terrorism Task Force noticed a man ducking under a turnstile at the No. 6 subway station at 116th Street and Lexington Avenue.

The officers apprehended the man, Mr. Holland, 40, of West 126th Street in Manhattan. A check turned up an open warrant for Mr. Holland over an arrest in the Bronx’s 45th Precinct in June for violating an order of protection against a former companion.

The transit officers charged Mr. Holland with theft of services and took him up to the 45th Precinct’s station house on Barkley Avenue to face additional criminal contempt charges.

“As all this was going on, Bronx Special Victims gets a DNA match from the rape in July,” said a law enforcement official, who requested anonymity because the case remained unresolved. “They call the 45 to say, ‘We got a DNA hit,’ and the guys there say, ‘He’s right here.’ ”

DNA recovered after the July 19 attack on the 79-year-old was linked with a biological profile of Mr. Holland that was on file in the state DNA database because of his previous legal troubles.

Mr. Holland has been arrested 14 times since 1990 on a variety of charges, including robbery and weapons possession, the police say, but they could not immediately say how those cases were resolved.

In the July rape case, the police said, a man dressed in dark clothing and a black cap followed the woman onto an elevator at 1:52 a.m., punched her in the face and knocked her to the floor before sexually assaulting her and fleeing, the police said. The police recovered surveillance video images of the attacker, and they said that when he left the building he was apparently wearing a different shirt than when he arrived.

On Friday, the police took Mr. Holland to the Bronx Special Victims Squad on Simpson Street, where on Saturday he was charged with rape and assault.

Manhattan Turnstile Jumper Charged in Bronx Rape - NYTimes.com.