A Brooklyn man landed up to 20 years behind bars Friday after a decades-old rape kit finally implicated him in the gunpoint sex assault of a teen girl.
In 1994, Franklin Gardner forced the then-15-year-old to the roof of her Flatlands building, where he raped her, authorities said.
She immediately told her parents, who accompanied her to a hospital where a rape kit was administered.
But the case grew cold, and the rape kit sat in a backlog, untested, until 2002, when it was finally processed and a male profile created.
Authorities indicted the unknown DNA profile as “John Doe” in 2004 in order to work around laws at the time that made the statute of limitations in a rape case just 10 years if an offender was unknown.
Meanwhile, Gardner was arrested and convicted for a New Jersey carjacking. He served out a 20-year sentence in prison, submitted a DNA sample following his release in 2015 — and was then nabbed for the rape.
The now-48-year-old man pleaded guilty to first-degree rape and other charges in April.
“Rape results in trauma that lasts a lifetime, and we will never stop seeking justice for those who have been sexually violated,” Brooklyn District Attorney Eric Gonzalez said in a statement. “With today’s sentence, the defendant has been held accountable for this deplorable 24-year-old crime, affording the victim a measure of closure for the horror inflicted upon her as a teenager.”