A 54-year-old man has been arrested and linked to at least four kidnappings and sexual assaults in the Valley dating back more than 26 years, police said.

Abraham M. Ramirez has been booked on multiple counts of kidnapping and sexual assault, according to a Phoenix Police Department release.

Ramirez was arrested in California in 1994, but never convicted, for a kidnapping and sexual assault.

“The victim agreed to a sexual assault kit, and DNA evidence was collected. At the time, DNA was still a fairly new forensic tool, and there was no mandate to process the DNA or enter it into a national database,” the release stated.

Between 1998 and 2013, four kidnappings and sexual assaults went unsolved in the Phoenix area. In each case, police said, the victims consented to a forensic examination where DNA evidence was collected, and a DNA profile was developed.

It was entered into the Combined DNA Index System database, and investigators learned the DNA from all four sexual assaults matched the same suspect, according to the release. The person belonging to the profile could not be identified, as they were not in the system.

In July, the Phoenix Crime Lab was notified that a match was found related to a case out of California from 1994 identifying the suspect as Ramirez, and the sexual assault kit from the 1994 cold case was submitted to the national database.

Phoenix detectives were able to track down and arrest Ramirez a few days after the submission, police said.

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