A discarded cigarette butt has led to the arrest of a 41-year-old Woonsocket man accused of raping two women in separate attacks in Hopkinton and North Stonington, Connecticut, 21 years ago.
Robert Czerwein was ordered held without bail Wednesday after his arraignment on two counts of first-degree sexual assault in 4th Division District Court for Washington County in Wakefield. Attorney General Peter Neronha announced Czerwein’s arrest at a press conference in Providence attended by Hopkinton Police Chief Mark J. Carrier.
“It’s a good day,” Carrier told reporters. “It’s a good day for Hopkinton. It’s a good day for our community. It’s a good day for the state and the attorney general’s office to make an arrest on this case.”
Neronha said forensic DNA evidence led investigators with the Attorney General’s Cold Case Unit to identify Czerwein as the suspect who attacked a 45-year-old woman from behind as she walked along Main Street in Hopkinton between 7 and 7:15 p.m. on Jan. 5, 2005. An affidavit in court documents states the woman’s attacker covered her nose and mouth while she tried to fight him off as he dragged her by the neck behind the Verizon building where he raped her and then ran away. The suspect had covered the woman’s face with a scarf making it hard for her to see and breathe and told her he had a knife. She described her assailant as having a young male voice.
According to the affidavit, the woman sought help at a nearby home where a resident called 911. Police observed she had a cut on her nose and a swollen lip. She was brought to Westerly Hospital and consented to the use of a sexual assault evidence collection kit, which collected seminal fluid. A sample was submitted to the Rhode Island Department of Health laboratory for forensic testing, leading to a full autosomal DNA profile produced two months later. State health officials uploaded the DNA profile to the national database maintained by the FBI, but at the time there was no match to any known offenders.
Then, on Sept. 9, 2005, state health officials alerted police that the DNA database generated a match to an unknown profile uploaded by Connecticut State Police from an unsolved sexual assault of a 65-year-old woman in North Stonington on the night of Feb. 8, 2005.
The affidavit states that in this incident, the woman reported an unknown man came into the bed and breakfast where she was working at around 9 p.m. and brandished a 7-inch knife. She said he raped her. The woman suffered a broken shoulder and a cut on her chin and was robbed of $75. She described her assailant as a white male with dark hair in his mid-20s, clean shaven, between 5-foot-6 and 5-foot-7 and weighing about 130 pounds. The location was 15 miles away from the location of the Hopkinton assault.
The AG’s cold case unit, founded in 2023, reopened the case in June and consulted a private lab that examined DNA evidence. That work identified a couple who may be the parents of the assailant. Investigators learned the couple had two sons, both from the Hopkinton area.
It’s a good day for Hopkinton. It's a good day for our community. It’s a good day for the state and the attorney general’s office to make an arrest on this case.– Hopkinton Police Chief Mark J. Carrier
The affidavit reveals investigators used Division of Motor Vehicle (DMV) records dating back to 2005 and a police report with Czerwein’s physical description at the time to determine that he more closely matched the description given by the victim in the North Stonington case than his brother. DMV records noted Czerwein was 5-foot-9 with brown hair.
Czerwein is a graduate of Chariho High School and was 21, living 2 miles away from the location of the Hopkinton assault at the time it happened, investigators said.
The cold case unit determined the address where Czerwein lived in Woonsocket and put him under daily surveillance over several days in June, observing when he left his residence in the early morning and returned in the evening. Investigators compared their observations of him with his driver’s license photograph and body-worn camera footage of him from a Feb. 2, 2026, traffic stop by the South Kingstown Police Department.
On the morning of June 30, the affidavit states, two investigators observed Czerwein leaving his residence in a white Ford van and followed him to Pawtucket. At approximately 7:20 p.m., they observed him stopped at a red light while smoking a cigarette, then tossing the butt onto the public roadway and driving off. The cigarette butt, which the affidavit states was “still smoldering when it was collected from the roadway,” was submitted as evidence to the health department for forensic DNA analysis.
The health department completed testing on the cigarette butt on July 29. It produced a single male DNA profile consistent with the profile of the assailant in the Hopkinton case.
Neronha said the cold case unit’s investigators sat down with the victim of the Hopkinton case to keep her apprised of their work on the case before Czerwein was arrested.
“The conversations were, I think it’s safe to say, emotional,” Neronha said. “It’s safe to say that she is grateful that we made this first step.”
Carrier, who joined Hopkinton’s police force in 2010 and became chief in 2024, was a detective commander for the Westerly Police Department in 2005 and knew the detectives who worked on both sexual assault cases. When the cases went cold, he said it took a toll on those who investigated them.
“It’s great to call a detective who’s been retired for 10 years and say, ‘Hey, remember that case?’ We got him.’”
No plea was entered for Czerwein as is customary because both charges are felonies and under the jurisdiction of the Superior Court. A bail hearing and status conference for Czerwein has been scheduled for Sept. 2. It could not be determined Wednesday afternoon if he had yet obtained legal representation.
“I want to make very clear that the defendant retains the presumption of innocence, but I’m grateful that we have been able to make this important first step in the prosecution of this case,” Neronha told reporters.
The arrest marks the cold case unit’s third investigation resulting in an arrest. Last October, Neronha’s office announced it had cleared the homicides of Debra Stone in 1984 and Cynthia McKenna in 2007. Neither resulted in an arrest. The suspects identified in the respective cases died 1995 and 2014.
The cold case unit has two investigators, two attorneys, one paralegal, a part-time genetic genealogist, and a part-time investigative analyst. Other members of the Office of Attorney General contribute to the unit’s work on an as-needed basis.
Neronha, who is not seeking reelection because he is term-limited, said about a dozen cold case investigations are “well underway” by his office.
“I think we’ll see the fruits of that labor in the near term, hopefully a few more before I leave office in January,” Neronha said. “But I’m confident that after I leave office, that this unit will continue to deliver results because they’re just really strong, the prosecutors are really strong and the investigators are outstanding.”
This story was originally reported and published by the Rhode Island Current.
