Arrest made in 1987 case
By Joey Pitchford
Published in News on September 27, 2016 9:57 AM
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Sylvester Earl Braswell
Police say a DNA-match and other evidence led to the arrest of a Goldsboro man Friday in connection with a cold case that dates back nearly 30 years.
Sylvester Earl Braswell, 52, of 1903 Palm St., will now answer for the rape and attempted murder of a local woman investigators say he committed in 1987.
Officials said Monday that a combination of "modern evidence examination techniques" linked Braswell to the sexual assault.
According to a news release, on Feb. 1, 1987, a woman reported that she had been sexually assaulted while leaving a Pizza Inn restaurant. A subsequent Goldsboro Police Department investigation turned up no suspects, and over time the case went cold.
Three decades later, a routine reexamination of an old case file gave the investigation new life.
Maj.Anthony Carmon, head of the police department's investigations division, said that it is unclear why the investigation took so long to resurface.
"I wasn't around back then, and there is very little documentation from that time," he said.
But in early 2016, the case was assigned to an investigator, James Sturgill.
Carmon said Sturgill processed the submitted evidence from 1987 and was able to bring up Braswell as a suspect.
"What (Sturgill) did was he looked at the evidence that had been submitted, and he had some evidence re-examined, and (Braswell) came up," Carmon said.
Carmon said that Sturgill "looked for things that we can do in 2016 that would not have been available" at the time of the alleged assault. He said that DNA testing was one of the methods Sturgill used to reexamine evidence.
Braswell was already in custody for probation violation when he came up as a suspect in the cold case, Carmon said.
He is charged with first degree rape, first degree kidnapping, assault with a deadly weapon with intent to kill inflicting serious injury, and breaking and entering.
Braswell is being held at the Wayne County Jail under an $805,000 secured bond. He is set to appear in court Oct. 3.