DNA match leads to arrest in 2013 South Florida sexual battery case

A South Florida sexual battery cold case that sat for 13 years finally moved when preserved DNA from the assault linked investigators to 39-year-old Jose Bello, and the victim later identified him in a photo array as someone familiar to her.

Broward Sheriff’s Office said the attack happened on Jan. 20, 2013, during an event called Igloo South Florida near the 2600 block of SW 31st Street in Dania Beach. Investigators said the victim became incapacitated at the event, later woke up in an unknown vehicle with two unknown men, and realized her pants had been pulled down. One of those men left DNA evidence behind, the piece of the case that would eventually carry it across more than a decade of dormancy.

The breakthrough came only after the file was reassigned in November 2025 to BSO’s Special Victims Unit. Detectives submitted the biological evidence to CODIS, the national DNA database, and received a match to Bello. That changed the case from a long-unsolved sexual battery file into an active suspect identification, with investigators now able to connect the old evidence to a named person rather than an unknown profile.

From there, detectives built the case outward. They showed the victim a photo array, and she reportedly recognized Bello as someone she knew from before the assault. BSO then worked with the Hall County Sheriff’s Office in Georgia, secured a DNA warrant, interviewed Bello there and collected a fresh sample. The Broward crime lab later confirmed that Bello’s new DNA sample matched the original evidence recovered from the victim.

Bello was arrested on May 5 on a charge of attempted sexual battery of an incapacitated victim and was expected to be extradited to Broward County. The case is another reminder that cold-case work is not limited to homicide files. In Florida, preserved DNA can still revive a sexual assault investigation years later, especially when a sample survives long enough to be rerun through modern databases and then backed up with victim identification and a current DNA comparison.

FDLE says Florida’s DNA database averages more than 4,500 hits to unsolved crimes each year and is designed to compare DNA from unresolved cases against known offenders and other unsolved cases under state law. In this case, that system turned a 2013 assault in Dania Beach into a live arrest in Georgia, with the long delay ending only after the evidence got a second look.