A longtime fugitive charged in the rape and murder of a 5-year-old girl in North Philadelphia more than two decades ago has been extradited to the city from Central America, authorities said Monday.
Alexis Flores, 51, was arrested earlier this year in Lapaera, Honduras, in connection with the death of Iriana DeJesus in 2000.
He is now in Philadelphia and has been charged with murder, rape, kidnapping, and related crimes, according to law enforcement officials.
“The return of Alexis Flores to Philadelphia demonstrates our unwavering commitment to pursuing fugitives wherever they may run, no matter how much time has passed,” said Wayne A. Jacobs, special agent in charge of the FBI’s Philadelphia office.
Iriana’s killing rocked the city’s Hunting Park neighborhood, and in 2007 — when federal investigators identified Flores as the suspect — he was placed an the FBI’s Top 10 Most Wanted list.
The child was reported missing near her home on the 3900 block of North Fairhill Street on July 29, 2000. She was last seen walking with a stranger around 9 p.m., witnesses told police.
Within days, a store owner found the girl’s body in a vacant second-floor apartment above a nearby small business at West Pike and North 6th streets.
She had been raped and strangled. Her body, left in a corner facing the wall, was decomposing and had been partially concealed by a trash bag.
Investigators soon suspected the attacker was a “drifter” in his 20s who had been doing handyman work on the property. They said the man mistakenly ended up panhandling in Philadelphia after traveling from Arizona on a boxcar that he thought was headed to Chicago.
A breakthrough in the case came in 2007 when Flores’ DNA — collected during an arrest on unrelated forgery charges in Arizona several years earlier — came up in a database as a match for genetic material taken from the scene of Iriana’s slaying.
But law enforcement officials could not find him for years.
Flores had entered the U.S. without official permission and was deported to his homeland of Honduras in 2005 after his Arizona arrest.
It took until February of this year for federal law enforcement to track him down and arrest him in connection with the Philadelphia case. When word of his arrest reached Iriana’s family, her mother and around 100 neighbors in Hunting Park gathered on the block to release balloons in memory of the child, affectionately known as “Nena.”
The effort to bring Flores to the U.S. to face charges of murder and related crimes was led by the FBI’s Transnational Anti-Gang Task Force and aided by Honduran authorities, officials said.