The key clue that led police to a rapist and suspected murderer came from a routine police task: running a suspicious license plate. Two Arlington County police officers are being honored for their roles in using an everyday object — the license plate — to solve violent crimes.
Cpl. Timothy Clifford and Officer Andrew Nucelli won the International Association of Chiefs of Police’s Looking Beyond the License Plate Award, which honors officers who use the plates to make arrests in non-traffic-related crimes. The two won for using a license plate to track down Jorge Torrez, a former Marine corporal who has been convicted in an Arlington rape and a separate robbery attempt there.
Since his arrest in Arlington, Torrez has been charged with one murder and is being investigated for two others.
The two investigators separately noticed a silver Dodge Durango missing its required front license plate in early February 2010, and Clifford checked its registration, Richard Ashton, the IACP grant and technical manager, wrote in Police Chief magazine.
Later that month, the officers recognized that the vehicle matched the description of an SUV used in a violent rape and abduction, Ashton wrote.
Within 12 hours, Torrez was arrested.
He was convicted in the two Arlington attacks after a jury trial last October. He is now facing charges in the 2009 slaying of a Navy petty officer at Fort Myer-Henderson Hall and is linked through DNA evidence to the 2005 killings of two young girls in Illinois, where he used to live.
The IACP says on its website that the license plate award is intended to highlight the importance of the plates as law enforcement tools because 70 percent of serious crimes involve the use of a vehicle. The plates are crucial to tracking down owners, the organization says.
