Suspect tied to 1985 Miami-Dade rape by DNA jailed after failing drug test – NBC 6 South Florida

A man tied to a 40-year-old Miami-Dade rape case by a DNA test was put back in custody Friday thanks to a test of different sort – a drug test.

And his victim, who had told NBC6 Investigates she was disappointed when he was allowed to plead guilty last year to a lesser crime, said she was happy to see prosecutors kept their word and are now prepared to demand he go to prison for years.

It was a drug test for cocaine that put Gustavo Rivero back in jail, the same drug his victim said Rivero offered her in January 1985 on the night she reported she was instead taken to an open field and raped.

Assistant state attorney Mari Jimenez wasted no time asking Miami-Dade Circuit Judge Ariel Rodriguez to do with Rivero, now accused of violating his probation.

“Judge, at this time the state requests he be taken into custody pursuant to the violent career criminal statute,” she said, citing a law that Rodriguez said gave him no option but to jail Rivero for now at the state’s request.

Rivero was 24 when he and an unidentified accomplice left what was Dave’s Bar in Miami Beach with a woman who thought she was headed to a party but instead wound up fighting for her life.

“They took me out there to kill me,” Nancy Crowden said in an interview last October. “I know that.”

She was found in a lot adjacent to what was a construction site, just north of the old Pan American Hospital. She was beaten and sexually battered, police said, but the assailants were unknown until 2023, when DNA from the scene was connected to Rivero, who had to submit DNA after a drug conviction.

With time passed and memories sketchy, prosecutors let him plead guilty to aggravated battery with a deadly weapon – a knife Crowden said was pulled on her – and he got 12 years’ probation.

For months, he complied with the terms, assistant public defender Adam Felber told the judge, noting his probation officer reported “that he has been a model probationer, that he has checked in every time he’s been asked to check in, that he has complied with the MDSO program.

That stands for the mentally disordered sex offender program Rivero had to enter, but he also had to submit to three drug tests a month. And that, the state alleges, was his undoing, as he may have foreshadowed when he stated in May 2023 to the detectives who would arrest him: “When I have coke, I do coke and when I don’t have coke, I do weed.”

It was the coke that showed up in a June urinalysis, his probation officer wrote in an affidavit.

As Natalie Snyder, the sex crimes division chief, told us in October, “If he violates, he goes to prison… We’ll do everything we can.”

And, if ultimately found in violation, it could be for a long time.

“The state is going to be seeking a sentence within guidelines so we can start from there,” prosecutor Jimenez sternly told the court and the defense. “The bottom of the guideline is 76-point-something months up to 15 years.”

So that’s a minimum of 6 years and four months in prison, if Judge Rodriguez rule she violated probation and stays within sentencing guidelines.

Crowden, Rivero’s victim, watched the proceedings on Zoom from her home 4,000 miles away in Alaska and later told NBC6 Investigates, “I was hoping the state attorney would stand up for me like they told me they would.” And she said she was not disappointed. “Yes, they did. They really did.”

As for the man she said attacked her so long ago, she added, “This just goes to show you screw up once and it can come and bite you in the butt.”

Rivero, now 64, and his attorney declined to comment.