A 36-year-old man already locked up on charges of threatening to kill and rape strangers during a knife-wielding rampage in Miami Beach is now also charged in a sexual battery from months earlier, after his jailhouse DNA sample matched evidence collected from that earlier victim. Ahraya Crespin faces nine charges across three separate criminal cases after police say his DNA connected him to a March 27 rape near the 6800 block of the beach.
According to NBC 6 South Florida, Crespin was already detained at a Miami-Dade corrections facility following his August 25 arrest when a Miami Beach detective ran his DNA profile through the FBI's Combined DNA Index System and matched it to evidence from the March sexual battery victim, per the arrest report. That kind of match is possible because Florida law requires county jails to collect buccal swab DNA samples from anyone booked on felony charges, according to the Florida Senate's text of Florida Statute § 943.325, feeding the samples into statewide and national databases upon arrest.
The March 27 attack happened around 1:30 a.m. near 68th Street and Collins Avenue along Atlantic Way in North Beach, per the arrest report cited by NBC 6. The victim told police a man jumped on her, struck her, removed her clothing and sexually battered her, then forcibly took her phone. Per the report, the attacker warned her, “If I had a gun, I would shoot you,” before fleeing the scene. The victim went to a rape treatment center afterward.
A String of Prior Run-Ins in the Same Corridor
Court records show this wasn't Crespin's only brush with police in the area. He was arrested April 2 for trespassing after allegedly causing disturbances inside the Publix parking garage at 6876 Collins Avenue, and the arrest report states he took a fighting stance during that incident. Unable to pay a $3,000 bond, he was released on his own recognizance on May 12, according to jail records reviewed by the outlet's report.
Those two addresses sit within blocks of each other in the Miami Beach Police Department's North Beach district, which stretches along Collins Avenue from 63rd Street north to the Surfside border at 87th Terrace, per past reporting from Hoodline on the department's North Beach patrol boundaries. The stretch mixes residential buildings with commercial corridors along State Road A1A, the kind of dense coastal blocks where Crespin's arrests kept piling up.
The August Rampage That Led to His Arrest
The case that ultimately triggered the DNA match unfolded on August 25, when police responded to the 6900 block of Collins Avenue on a report of a man with a knife screaming at people and hitting storefront windows, according to the arrest report. Officers say Crespin approached a woman who was locking her bicycle at a bike rack, kicked several of the bikes, then cornered the woman against a wall and prevented her from leaving.
The report states Crespin threatened three people with death and rape threats, telling at least one, “I kill you.” He allegedly tried to strike another man with a knife-corkscrew combination tool, but a bystander blocked the attack before anyone was cut, per the same arrest report. Officers eventually used a stun gun on Crespin and took him into custody, finding the knife-corkscrew tool in his shorts pocket.
Charges, a Judge, and a Documented Record
Crespin now faces three counts stemming from the March incident — sexual battery with no serious personal injury, strong-arm robbery, and battery after a prior conviction — along with six counts from the August incidents: three counts of aggravated assault with a deadly weapon, assault, and resisting an officer without violence, court records show. Miami-Dade Circuit Judge Laura Maria Gonzalez-Marques, appointed to the Eleventh Judicial Circuit bench in August 2023 by Governor Ron DeSantis, has been assigned to preside over the consolidated cases at the Richard E. Gerstein Justice Building.
Court records reviewed by NBC 6 describe an extensive criminal history for Crespin, including a 2022 battery conviction along with past convictions for cocaine possession and grand theft of a motor vehicle. Sports-Reference records separately show Crespin once played college football as a defensive lineman for the University of New Mexico Lobos during the 2009 season under then-head coach Mike Locksley.
Under Florida Statute § 794.011, sexual battery without serious personal injury on an adult victim is a first-degree felony, carrying up to 30 years in state prison, up to $10,000 in fines, and mandatory lifetime registration on the state's sexual offender registry if he is convicted. It remains an open question how the court will weigh his bail across the three consolidated cases given his documented record and the fact that he was previously released on his own recognizance after failing to post a modest bond following the April arrest.
Hoodline has previously covered other sexual battery cases along the Miami Beach shoreline, including a shoreline rape arrest in May and a rooftop attack case in April, underscoring a pattern of violent sexual assault reports in the same coastal district this year.
