Darius Amontee Cole, 21 of Jackson plead guilty today in Circuit Court to two counts of Rape of Child in connection with a 2002 attack on a then five-year-old girl. Cole was sentenced to an effective 20-year sentence consecutive to an unrelated sentence he is serving for a May 2004 attack on a 65-year-old woman. That sentence was due to end on September 25, 2013. Rape of a Child is a Class A felony and is served at 100%.

RECAP
On November 22, 2002, around 4:20 in the evening, a child was playing outside at a neighbor’s house in the 300 block of E. Forest Avenue. A stranger walking down the street approached her. He took her behind a chair that was on the front porch, raped her and fled the scene.

Police were called and she was taken to a local hospital where medical personnel completed a standard sexual assault evidence collection kit, which was later submitted to the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation Crime Lab for DNA testing. A DNA profile was obtained and searched in the CODIS (Combined DNA Index System) database for forensic unknown samples. No matches were initially detected.

During a later search of the Tennessee State DNA Index System, a match occurred between the unknown DNA sample from the 2002 rape and the Convicted Offender Specimen belonging to Cole. Jackson police investigators went to Northwest Correctional Complex in Tiptonville, served a search warrant for DNA on Cole, collected an evidentiary sample and submitted it to the TBI for comparison. A subsequent test confirmed the match.

Cole was 13-years-old at the time of the attack.