DNA test leads to arrest of Las Vegas man in 2016 sexual assault

A Las Vegas man was arrested in December after DNA testing linked him to a 2016 sex assault of a minor, according to police.

Dwayne Downing, 19, faces charges of open or gross lewdness and sexually assaulting a child under the age of 16, according to his arrest report. He was arrested Dec. 5 and booked into the Clark County Detention Center.

Police were told of the sexual assault, which allegedly occurred on July 5, 2016, in September 2016, according to the report. Detectives were told that a teenage girl got pregnant after being raped at a party after passing out.

The victim said she knew the pregnancy stemmed from the assault because she had never had sex outside of the attack, the report said. Her parents brought her to get an abortion, after which police did DNA testing on the fetus in an attempt to identify a suspect.

She told police she didn’t remember much of the night. According to the report, she said that she and a friend met up with a group of boys at an Albertson’s Grocery Store, where the boys stole some bottles of vodka.

Everyone drank from the bottles before going to a friend’s house, and later to a nearby 7-Eleven.

The victim said she doesn’t remember anything after getting to the 7-Eleven, and that her next memory was of waking up at another friend’s house the next day, the report said. She was wearing the same clothes as the night before, but noticed that “her underwear were … wet,” the report said. She told police that she also had bruises all over her body and was so sore that it hurt to walk.

The victim’s friends told her that a group of five boys they didn’t know had followed them back to the house from 7-Eleven and invited themselves to the party. Once inside, they “tried to run the house,” one witness told police, according to the report.

A friend of the teen told police that the victim passed out in the bathroom and a male, later identified as Downing, went in to check on her. He said the door was closed, but he could hear the two kissing in the bathroom, and “you could tell she didn’t want it,” the report said.

After a few minutes, Downing left the bathroom and her friends found her naked on the bathroom floor, according to the report. Someone carried her to the couch and put a blanket over her, the report said.

Once the victim was on the couch, witnesses said the group of boys that had followed them home from the 7-Eleven crowded around her and talked about assaulting her. When friends tried to intervene, the boys pulled guns out of their waistbands, the report said.

Downing denied assaulting the girl and told police he saw two other boys have sex with the victim before he left the house. He said he went outside because “there was nothing they could do about it,” according to the report.

Up to an hour passed before the boys left the house and the victim’s friends returned to find her topless, with her pants and underwear around her knees, the report said. They dressed her, put her in a clean pair of boxers and brought her to her friend’s house, where she woke up the next day.

Police took the boxers in for DNA testing and, though Downing told police he didn’t do anything more than kiss the victim, his DNA was found on the boxers. But the report said he was “excluded as the biological father” of the fetus.

As of Tuesday, no other arrests had been made in the case, according to the Metropolitan Police Department’s public records unit.

The department put out a warrant for Downing’s arrest on Dec. 29, 2018, and he was arrested nearly a year later on Dec. 5. He is being held at the Clark County Detention Center without bail. His first court appearance is scheduled for March 11.

Contact Alexis Egeland at aegeland@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0335. Follow @alexis_egeland on Twitter.