Genealogy leads to arrest in 1998 Pinellas County sexual battery case

Nearly 28 years after a 20-year-old woman was attacked after leaving a Ybor City club, Pinellas County detectives finally had a name to put to the case. Investigators arrested Lester Austin III, 53, on May 26 and booked him into Pinellas County Jail on two counts of armed sexual battery.

The assault dated to March 8, 1998. The victim had been out with friends in Ybor City, then left alone. Two unknown men approached her outside the club and offered her a ride home to Pinellas County. After one man was dropped off, the other kept driving, then stopped in a wooded area north of the Gandy Bridge. There, deputies say, the man locked the door, struck her multiple times in the face, sexually battered her while threatening her with a firearm, then ordered her out of the vehicle and drove away toward Tampa. The woman ran to safety, reached a passerby, and was taken to a nearby business to call 911 before being transported to a hospital because of the severity of her injuries.

What kept the case alive was the evidence collected after the sexual assault victim examination. The DNA profile from that SAVE kit was preserved and submitted to state and national databases, but no match came back. For years, the file sat in the long stretch familiar to cold-case units: strong evidence, no name, no arrest.

The break came only after investigative genetic genealogy entered the picture. The Pinellas County Sheriff’s Office said the case was accepted for genealogy mapping in October 2019. By September 2021, the suspect family tree had been narrowed to three names. In April 2026, additional information from the Florida Department of Law Enforcement’s genetic genealogy team pointed investigators to Austin. FDLE says its team works by finding DNA matches to relatives in public genealogy databases, then combining genealogy, analytical research, forensics and investigations with local law enforcement.

By the time detectives moved, the trail was finally tight enough to act on. The U.S. Marshals Task Force located Austin at his Tampa residence, 3317 South 74th Street, and took him into custody. The sheriff’s office listed his date of birth as February 28, 1973. FDLE had already been rolling out the technique statewide for years, and by the end of 2018 its genetic genealogy initiative had covered 19 cases across Florida. In this one, the old DNA sample did not change, but the science around it did, and a case that had sat for nearly three decades ended with a suspect in jail.