A Hamilton County grand jury has indicted a 24-year-old man on charges tied to an attempted rape at gunpoint that happened in Cincinnati's Evanston neighborhood back in 2016 — a crime police say he is accused of committing when he was just 14 years old. The indictment, handed up on Thursday, comes a decade after the attack and roughly two months after investigators say a DNA database hit cracked the case open.
A Decade-Old Case Reopened by DNA
According to FOX19, the grand jury indicted Neziah Gibson on two counts of attempted rape, one count of aggravated robbery and one count of gross sexual imposition. The alleged attack happened on April 21, 2016, when District 2 officers responded to the 3500 block of Wabash Avenue in Evanston for a report of an attempted stranger rape at gunpoint, the station reported. As WLWT also reported, police could not identify a suspect at the time.
That changed on Aug. 19, 2026, when the Cincinnati Police Department's Personal Crimes Unit reopened the investigation after the Hamilton County Coroner's Office received a hit in the Combined DNA Index System, known as CODIS, per the same FOX19 account. Through forensic evidence tied to that hit, investigators were able to link the decade-old crime to Gibson, who was 14 at the time of the alleged offense and is now 24, police said.
Already Behind Bars on Unrelated Charges
Gibson is not a new name to the Ohio prison system. He is currently housed at the Madison Correctional Institution, where he's serving an 8-to-11.5-year sentence after being convicted of felonious assault and having weapons under disability in December 2025, the station's report states. Those convictions are unrelated to the Evanston case now before the grand jury.
The use of forensic DNA matching to revive long-dormant sexual-assault cases is not unique to Hamilton County. Ohio's state crime lab analyzed nearly 14,000 old rape kits between 2011 and 2018, uploading more than 8,600 DNA profiles into CODIS, according to the Governor of Ohio's office. Elsewhere in the state, the Cuyahoga County Prosecutor's Office has said its G.O.L.D. Unit used familial DNA searching and forensic genetic genealogy to identify six cold-case sexual-assault offenders, per the Cuyahoga County Prosecutor's Office.
Other Cold Cases Cracked by Forensics
Cincinnati has seen DNA technology unravel old sexual-assault cases before, though not always with a clean path to prosecution. In one case detailed by WLWT, DNA evidence identified a Cincinnati-area doctor as the attacker in a 35-year-old rape case, but an expired statute of limitations forced investigators to pursue a different legal route entirely. A similar dynamic played out in Georgia, where, according to CBS Atlanta, DNA evidence connected a former police sergeant to the sexual assault and kidnapping of two girls in a DeKalb County park nearly 15 years after the crime.
