It was a crime three decades ago that left a young Ventura County woman traumatized.
"She was a high school student, a week away from summer vacation," said Ventura County District Attorney Eric Nasaranko. "She had just gotten off her shift at a local department store. She decided to seek the quiet peace of the ocean. She drove to a parking lot at the end of Perkins Road in Oxnard. She was met by the horror of two men who confronted her, ordered her out of the car at gunpoint, and demanded money. One of those men forced her down an embankment and sexually assaulted her."
He added that despite the efforts of detectives at the time, the June 1990 kidnapping, robbery, and assault in Oxnard went unsolved. The victim is now in her mid-50's.
"In speaking to her, she told me she never thought an arrest and prosecution would happen," said Nasaranko. "Too much time had passed," she told me. In her own words, she said, 'This case is dead.'
Oxnard Assistant Police Chief Rocky Marquez said detectives gathered key evidence. While it didn’t solve the case at the time, it set the stage for an arrest almost exactly three decades later.
"Evidence was properly collected, documented, and submitted to the crime laboratory for analysis, and detectives worked diligently with the tools, resources, and technologies available to them at the time. One of the things detectives did exceptionally well in 1990 was to preserve the evidence. Despite their efforts, investigators exhausted all workable leads, and the case became a cold case."
"At the time, it was standard practice for sheriff's office personnel to preserve portions of the evidence samples known as derivatives, and to store them for future analysis," said Ventura County Jim Fryhoff. "While the original sexual assault kit was eventually returned to the investigating agency and later purged, the preserved derivative was carefully maintained for more than 30 years. It was still available when new DNA technology became capable of providing answers that simply weren't available in 1990."
The Sheriff said that a small DNA sample was sent to a lab specializing in the latest DNA technology. "Our Forensic Services Bureau submitted that sample to Bode Technology for advanced DNA testing. Their analysts were able to develop a male DNA profile from the evidence collected," said Fryhoff. "Our crime lab then uploaded the profile into the combined DNA index system, also known as CODIS. The profile generated a match for Bobby Rollins Junior, providing investigators with a critical lead which resulted in his arrest."
Rollins had family members in Ventura County at the time of the crime in 1990. The 55-year-old man was arrested without incident this week in Long Beach.
Prosecutors said he’s charged with kidnapping with the intent to commit robbery. He’s also facing a number of special allegations.
The District Attorney said that because so much time has passed, Rollins can’t be charged with the sexual assault. But, he says, it’s the DNA from that attack that set the stage for solving the case.
"Evidence collected at the hospital after the assault was instrumental in identifying the defendant," said Nasarenko.
Rollins hasn’t appeared in court yet to enter pleas to the allegations.
"Back then, the technology only had the ability to look at six or seven locations on the DNA genome," explained Christina Tokatlian, a forensic scientist with the Ventura County Sheriff’s Office who worked on the case. "Now, we can look at 23 locations and get much more discriminatory information to better identify individuals."
Detectives and investigators are hoping this will be one of the first instances of being able to use DNA advances to solve a backlog of cold case sexual assaults in Ventura County. Fryhoff said special federal funding set the stage for pursuing those unsolved cases.
The county is still waiting to see if more federal funding will be available to extend the program.
For now, investigators are hoping to cross at least one of those unsolved cases off the list, with the arrest of Bobby Rollins.
Detectives are still looking for the second person involved in the June 1990 attack. And, they said they are also trying to determine if Rollins might have been involved in other unsolved crimes in Ventura County.
