DNA helps Volusia detectives solve cold rape case from ’08

A man who raped a tourist near Ormond Beach nearly 10 years ago was arrested by Volusia County deputies Tuesday after DNA found on the victim matched his, officials said.

Adam Gregory Shuman, 41, of Vero Beach is charged with sexual battery and was being held in the Indian River County Jail on $50,000 bail, sheriff’s spokeswoman Laura Williams said. He had been living in Vero Beach as a registered sex offender.

Florida Department of Corrections records show Shuman spent a little more than a year in prison for lewd and lascivious indecent assault on a child younger than 16 in 1998. He was charged in another lewd incident with a child in 2003 but wasn’t prosecuted. Five years later, on Sept. 14, 2008, the woman was raped near Ormond Beach.

According to a charging affidavit, he approached the woman, who was walking on State Road A1A, in his car twice. He asked her to come with him, telling her he was in the Navy and “into older women.” The woman was 47 at the time. She told the man to leave her alone, then walked onto the beach and laid down a towel. Shuman showed up again about a halfhour later and told her he wanted to have sex with her. When she tried to leave, deputies say, he dragged her into the dunes and raped her.

The woman was physically injured and horrified, according to the report.

After an initial investigation, all leads were exhausted, and though the woman submitted to a forensic examination, investigators eventually lost touch with her and the case went cold.

A male DNA profile was found in the evidence in September 2017, and weeks later, funding for backlogged rape cases provided the chance to send the findings to the Florida Department of Law Enforcement, the report states.

In October, the DNA findings were entered into a national database and they matched Shuman, the report states, giving the case the suspect it never had.