Las Vegas man arrested after DNA links him to 2015 rape

A Las Vegas man was arrested Thursday after his fingerprints linked him to a sexual assault from 2015.

Around 3:40 a.m. June 27, 2015, a 20-year-old woman called police and reported that a man had broken into her apartment and raped her, according to a recently released arrest report. Years later, the man was identified as Safari Summit, now 26.

The woman told police that she left work around 11:30 p.m. the night before and headed to her apartment, where she lived alone. When she got home, she said she noticed a man sitting on a power box outside her apartment, but he didn’t say anything to her.

She said she went inside, locked the door behind her, took a shower, called her boyfriend and fell asleep at 1:30 a.m., leaving her bedroom door open about a foot, the report said. But she woke up around 3 a.m. and noticed her door was wide open.

She climbed out of bed with her iPhone’s flashlight on and found the man lying on the ground next to her bed, the report said. When she asked him what he wanted, she told police he tackled her into her closet door and threw her phone.

According to the report, he began to fight with her, kicking and biting her before forcing her to lay facedown on the ground. The woman told police that he raped her multiple times.

She told police that after the man fled through the back door and over her balcony wall, she locked her back door again, grabbed a kitchen knife and ran to her room to call her boyfriend, her mother and 911.

The woman had a sex assault examination done, and male DNA was found, but it didn’t match any profiles in the national DNA database.

When officers inspected her apartment, they noticed that a window in her living room “was not fully closed or secured, yet the lock latch was activated. The activated lock prevented the window from closing completely” and left the window open about an inch, leaving a possible point of entry.

In April 2019, fingerprints from the window returned as a match to Summit after he was fingerprinted for a work card, the report said. Officers ran Summit’s name and found that at the time of the assault, he lived in the apartment complex just north of the victim’s.

In August, an undercover officer went to Summit’s work and got a DNA sample from a cup he drank from. In December, a forensic report linked the DNA to the swabs from the woman’s 2015 sex assault examination, the report said.

Summit was arrested at his work and booked into the Clark County Detention Center on charges of sex assault, battery to commit sex assault, kidnapping, burglary and coercing someone into sex with force or threat of force. He is due in court Feb. 13.

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