AURORA | An Arapahoe County jury on Wednesday convicted a 32-year-old man of first-degree murder for the 2007 slaying of a 65-year-old woman in her Aurora home.
Daniel Jesus Lopez faces a mandatory sentence of life in prison without the possibility of parole for killing Yong Soon Kirk in February 2007 at her apartment near East 10th Avenue and Dayton Street.
Officers found Kirk’s body Feb. 16, 2007, in her apartment after neighbors complained of a strong odor coming from the apartment. In the following days, police revealed she had been beaten to death.
In the days and weeks after Kirk’s death, police said they had no information about possible suspects.
After Lopez’s 2009 arrest, police credited a 2007 law requiring convicted felons to submit a DNA sample with breaking the case.
Lopez submitted a DNA sample to authorities after pleading guilty to felony drug charges stemming from an arrest in Denver in 2008.
The DNA sample was added to the national DNA database — called the Combined DNA Index System, or CODIS — and in January 2009 police in Aurora learned that Lopez’s DNA matched samples collected at the Kirk crime scene, police said.
Even after Lopez’s arrest, the case moved slowly.
He was scheduled for trial in 2010, 2011 and again last year, but each time the trial was delayed. In June 2011, Lopez’s lawyer asked for an indefinite delay because Lopez had recently suffered a seizure and was having trouble understanding the court preceding.
“Justice demands trying the most challenging cases, even those that may have been forgotten,” Arapahoe County District Attorney George Brauchler said in a statement announcing the conviction.
Yet Lopez’s fingerprints or DNA were not on murder weapon, a knife. She was not killed by an a piece of furniture. Justice was not served and someone walks free and Aurora police know it. An appeal will be filed and Project Innocence has been contacted. This is being ;posted by his mother.