Berkeley police arrest man on alleged connections to decades-old sexual assault cold cases | Law and Justice

On Jan. 13, the Berkeley Police Department, in collaboration with agencies across the Bay Area and in Texas, arrested Lashay Durisseau for his alleged involvement in a series of violent sex crimes occurring between 1994 and 2008.

The city of Berkeley alleges the 56-year-old man is connected to multiple kidnappings and sexual assaults, involving seven victims over the 14-year period.

In 2015, evidence from an assault that took place in Berkeley was processed after the Alameda County District Attorney’s Office received a grant to process previously untested rape kits. The testing allowed authorities to match the DNA from this case to five other cases. 

Five years after this initial testing, an additional grant of $312,284 from the California Department of Justice allowed more than 500 cold sexual assault cases to be processed, including Durisseau’s alleged assault in Berkeley, which was previously regarded as cold. 

“DNA technology has advanced significantly in recent years including better DNA recovery from clothing and objects using ‘touch DNA’. The Special Victims Unit applied for grant funding in order to reexamine unsolved cold cases for opportunities to test more evidence using more modern DNA recovery techniques,” said a 2020 brief on Berkeley Police Department grant acceptance. 

After the processing allowed by the grant, authorities tied Durisseau’s alleged assault that took place in Berkeley to an extended series of assaults in Richmond and Oakland in the East Bay and Beaumont, Texas. The police departments from the three cities began to work collaboratively on the case. 

In 2022, detectives used familial DNA data to narrow down the suspect following assistance from the California Department of Justice. According to the U.S. Bureau of Justice Assistance, this process involves using DNA profiles to identify relatives of suspects to find leads on the case. The FBI managed to obtain the suspect’s DNA, matching the DNA with the rape kits’ DNA.

After narrowing down Durisseau as the suspected perpetrator, BPD detectives coordinated with Houston-based tactical FBI forces and the Fort Bend County Sheriff’s Office to arrest Durisseau in Texas on Jan. 13.

Durisseau is in custody and was arrested near his home in Richmond, Texas, according to BPD.