A 57-year-old man has been sentenced to 48 years in prison for the cold case rape and attempted murder of a Commerce City woman that went unsolved for a quarter century, authorities say.
Dionicio Ramos-Ascencio broke into the woman’s home July 26, 1992, and attacked her with a knife he discovered there.
“He crept into her home in the middle of the night, stole a knife from her kitchen, went to her bedroom, put his hand over her mouth and stabbed her in the neck so hard that the knife was bent,” Chief Deputy District Attorney Brett Martin said at the sentencing hearing Monday in Adams County District Court. “He beat her and punched her in the face. Then he raped her on the floor of her bedroom and fled into the night.”
District Attorney Dave Young said the case was possible after the Colorado Legislature passed a law giving law enforcement the right to collect DNA from those arrested on felony charges. The case would have gone unsolved otherwise.
“The 48-year sentence that this defendant received is nothing compared to the sentence that he imposed on this defenseless victim back in 1992,” Young said. “She has had to face the trauma of what he did every day of her life.”
Martin called the case “one of the most heinous and brutal crimes I have seen. He has had 25 years of freedom that he didn’t deserve.”
Ramos-Ascencio was arrested and charged in the cold case last May after DNA collected in a 2017 Denver felony case matched DNA collected from the victim in 1992.
Martin said that in 2011 Ramos-Ascencio was caught standing on a chair looking into a window, a petty offense that Martin said “has a more sinister tone knowing what happened in this case.”
Ramos-Ascencio pleaded guilty to attempted first-degree murder after deliberation and first-degree aggravated sexual assault.
