Los Angeles police on Monday renewed their call for help finding a serial attacker known as the “teardrop rapist,” who has been linked to 35 sexual assaults over a 16-year period.
Police have no new leads and were again asking for help identifying a man who has assaulted female victims between age 15 and 35, primarily in South Los Angeles between 1996 and 2012.
“Although it has been almost two years since the last assault, the attacker is still out there,” police said on a Facebook page created to help catch the assailant. “We have no fresh leads and are still looking for the community’s help to identify the suspect.”
A $100,000 reward for help catching and prosecuting the rapist was announced in June 2013, about a year after the most recent assault.
Detectives from the Los Angeles Police Department’s elite Robbery-Homicide Division have pursued hundreds of leads, according to an LAPD press release sent out Monday.
The attacker typically approached woman on their way to work or school between 5:15 and 8 a.m., police said. He would engage them in conversation, threaten to kill them with a knife or handgun, and then force them off the sidewalk and into a secondary location where he would assault them.
He has been dubbed the “Teardrop Rapist” because of a teardrop tattoo below one of his eyes. The tattoo may have been removed, according to LAPD.
Eleven sketches of the man have been created in incidents over the years. They were provided by LAPD and the FBI when the joint federal-city $100,000 reward was announced in 2013.
Most of the attacks have occurred along the Normandie Avenue corridor, with some occurring Hollywood, Koreatown and in the unincorporated Los Angeles County territory patrolled by the Sheriff’s Department.
The most recent attack occurred in June 2012 at Naomi Avenue near 25th Street, south of downtown L.A. when the rapist spoke to a 29-year-old woman, pulled out a handgun, forced her into an alley and assaulted her. Almost all of the rapist’s victims have been Latina woman.
Police have described the attacker as a 40- to 55-year-old Hispanic man with brown eyes and brown hair, standing between 5 feet 2 inches and 5 feet 6 inches tall and weighing from 130 to 170 pounds.
He has a light complexion and possibly a mustache. He may have a teardrop tattoo or a scar below one eye.
He has been seen wearing a gray or dark hooded sweatshirt, a bandana, a black baseball cap or a dark beanie.
Anyone with information was asked to call LAPD’s tip line at 877-527-3247, or to text
the word TIPLA, a space, then the tip to 274637, or to emailrhd-sas@lapd.lacity.org. Tips call also be submitted anonymously at lapdonline.org under “Anonymous Web Tips.”