Brian Sundin, 58, is pictured in a 2017 mug shot after he was indicted for raping a disabled woman in July 2000
A bloody diaper tied a man in to the rape of a severely disabled victim 17 years ago.
Brian Sundin, 58, was indicted in February 2017 for the rape of a woman who couldn’t speak and functioned at the level of an infant was raped at an assisted living facility in Mason, Ohio, before dawn on July 2, 2000.
He appeared in court this month and is awaiting trial.
Two roommates witnessed the crime, but they had their own disabilities.
A nurse discovered the 29-year-old with blood seeping from her diaper and she was taken to the hospital where a rape kit confirmed she had been raped.
Semen found in the diaper was tested and entered into an FBI database.
Police asked the public for information about a baseball cap left behind with a skull logo and facility officials offered a cash reward.
The case went cold, and the victim died 11 years later without seeing justice.
Sundin was pulled over in 2003 when he was living in his van, pictured above, because his parents locked him out when they started to suspect him of stealing. He told an officer that he didn’t have his license and pretended to be his brother
The main suspect in the case was Brian Sundin, a 41-year-old at the time of the rape.
In 2003, Sundin was living in a 1993 blue Ford Aerostar van with a 21-year-old college student because he was no longer welcome in his parents home.
His mom changed their locks and told neighbors to beware because she suspected he had stolen from them.
One afternoon that year he was pulled over by a police officer. He lied and said that he didn’t have his driver’s license.
He gave the officer his brother’s social security number, name and address at his parent’s house before disappearing.
Sundin’s lengthy criminal record meant police were often looking for him.
He spent time in Ohio, Florida and Tennessee, usually with trouble on his heels.
Sundin once sold $50 of marijuana to an undercover cop at the Pleasure Inn Bar in Mason.
He’d been arrested after police said he hit his live-in girlfriend’s 14-year-old son in Maineville.
In Florida, a detective found him in a motel bed next to a glass pipe used to smoke cocaine.
In 2011, Mason police almost arrested his brother because Sundin had once again used his information to get out of trouble.
By then Sundin had moved away from Mason, but his DNA would soon catch up with him.
The Florida Department of Corrections entered his DNA into the same system Ohio officials used more than a decade ago and a match came up.
When prosecutors presented the new forensic results to a grand jury in February 2017, officials sealed the resulting indictment because they didn’t know where Sundin was.
Turns out he was already in jail in Tennessee, under his brother’s name.
In declining an interview request with Cincinatti.com, Dale Sundin called his brother a ‘piece of s***’.
Sundin has been extradited to Ohio where he awaits a trial date.
‘We thought we would never know,’ Kim Russell, administrator at Brookside Extended Care, said of the DNA match.
At a recent court hearing in Lebanon, his hair was long and white. He had a Santa Claus beard and reading glasses folded onto the neck of his white undershirt.
Sundin’s only company that day was a sheriff’s deputy and shackles around his hands and feet.
None of his family came.