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It took Selma police nearly 25 years to arrest a man who allegedly raped a woman at a downtown convenience store. But as investigators celebrate the case’s closure, questions remain about how it was initially handled — including the disappearance of the associated case file.
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The 911 call came on Aug. 24, 2001, asking officers to come to the Brotherhood Market on South Pollock Street, according to a search warrant in the case. The sobbing caller reported she’d been violently raped by the store’s owner, Jaman Al-Jasi, after he allegedly locked the door and dragged her into a cooler.
Corroborating evidence appeared to exist from the start, the search warrant says, noting the survivor’s torn underwear presented to police and several small injuries on her body. A .40-caliber handgun and a blanket from the cooler floor were also apparently retrieved from the scene, according to the warrant; the survivor told officers Al-Jasi had threatened to kill her with the gun.
The survivor went to the hospital, where a sexual assault kit and her clothes were collected, according to the search warrant.
It’s not clear if Al-Jasi remained at the scene after the alleged attack. In any case, the investigation stalled until this January, when DNA from a Michigan assault case came back as a match for the survivor’s rape kit, according to the search warrant.
“It should be noted that the report doesn’t explain how [redacted] escaped from Jaman or if Jaman was questioned at the scene,” a detective wrote in the search warrant.
That was a hole in the investigation that the current lead detective, Capt. Dylan Bowen, still can’t explain.
“I really don’t know what challenges they were facing,” he told The News & Observer. “I wasn’t able to speak to the gentleman who was actually investigating the case, so I don’t know what challenges occurred then to stop them from making an arrest at the time.”
And that hole is just one of many that concern retired New York Police Department Sgt. Joseph Giacalone, a professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice who once led the Bronx’s cold case squad. Giacalone provided his opinion on the publicly known details of the case to The N&O earlier this month.
“There’s a lot of holes in that story,” Giacalone said.
Al-Jasi, now 71, was arrested on charges of first-degree rape, kidnapping and a sexual offense and extradited from Michigan in July, court records show.
But why did it take almost a quarter of a century?
The North Carolina State Bureau of Investigation reported the DNA match Jan. 29, 2026, according to the search warrant. But Selma police didn’t discover the hit until March 11, when a detective happened upon it while entering evidence in another case into the department’s SBI portal.
“We normally check [the portal] when we’re going to send new evidence to the lab,” Bowen said. “It’s not something we check daily, which is why there was a little bit of a delay.”
Selma Police Chief Justin Vause confirmed that policy in an email to The N&O, writing that the department enters evidence into the state crime lab portal as needed.
That policy is a problem, according to Giacalone.
“They should abandon that immediately, if that’s the policy,” he said.
At the New York Police Department, the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner would almost immediately notify detectives of hits on their cases, according to Giacalone.
“[T]hey need to abandon that immediately and figure out a way that these things get centralized so that you don’t have a situation where you have a guy that you could have taken off the streets … and you’re only hoping that somebody is going to enter something into the system,” he said.
And as the detectives on the case this year tried to put together a narrative, they found crucial pieces were missing — like the name of the officer who wrote the initial incident report, and the complete case file, according to the search warrant. A case file contains all the documents collected in a criminal investigation and is often referred back to in criminal trials.
“We cannot definitively determine what happened to the original case file,” Vause said.
Investigators tried contacting the officers who worked the case in 2001, but they were either dead or didn’t remember it, the warrant states. One former officer said he thought Al-Jasi, who was from Yemen, might have fled to his home country; he last reported a North Carolina address in 2004, when he reportedly lived in Raeford.
It’s also not clear if the store had cameras or, if it did, if officers tried to get the footage from them.
“We are unable to determine whether surveillance cameras were present at the location at the time of the incident,” Vause wrote. “The original investigative report and the records available to us do not document the existence of surveillance cameras, the collection of video footage, or any attempt to obtain such footage.”
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Because the survivor’s telephone number and address weren’t recorded, detectives also struggled to find her, though they eventually reached her after finding her son through a search of a genealogy website, according to the warrant. The son said his mother had returned to Mexico out of fear of Al-Jasi, but would cooperate with police.
It’s possible police may have charged Al-Jasi soon after the incident; Bowen found a first-degree rape warrant for him in an Aug. 24, 2001, incident, that was entered into the courts system as never served in July 2002. But because officials used paper records at that time, clerks at the Johnston County Courthouse told Bowen they couldn’t find the warrant, he said.
Arrest warrants don’t generally expire, according to Giacalone, who questioned why the warrant was marked unserved relatively quickly.
“I can’t understand how that ball got dropped,” he said. “If it’s just that they had the warrant and they just couldn’t serve it, that’s a whole other issue. But yeah, that should have been documented.”
And the possibility that Al-Jasi could have moved to Yemen also merits further investigation, Giacalone said. In his experience, an investigator might contact the U.S. Department of State to try to verify the move before deeming the arrest warrant unservable.
“All you do is close out the case with … an exceptional clearance,” he said. “So there’s a lot of holes in that story.”
Vause and Bowen told The N&O they don’t know why the 2001 arrest warrant was never served.
In any case, Al-Jasi eventually moved to Michigan, where he was arrested last November on charges of felonious assault with a dangerous weapon and domestic violence, Michigan court records show. That’s what led to the DNA swab that matched the 2001 Selma rape kit.
Selma police announced the news last month in a press release praising investigators’ efforts.
“They reviewed aging reports, tracked down information that many believed had been lost to time, and refused to let this case be forgotten,” Vause said in the release.
Bowen said he was able to find pieces of the original case file, but not the complete file; he attributes that to the police department moving buildings several years ago.
“[I’m] just happy to be able to work with other agencies to make an arrest to try to get the victim the results they deserve, even though it’s been this long time for them,” he said.
All told, Giacalone said, the initial handling of the case points to possible issues with supervision.
“The supervisor and the detective squad needs to be on top of these kinds of things, because you have a situation where once somebody has partaken in this type of event, the likelihood of further victimization is much higher,” he said.
Al-Jasi doesn’t appear to have ever been charged with other sexual crimes in Michigan or North Carolina, according to court records.
Learning of the DNA match sooner also doesn’t guarantee probable cause for an arrest, Giacalone noted.
“There’s still a further investigation that needs to be conducted in order to make sure that you have probable cause,” he said.
But that doesn’t negate the questions he has.
Al-Jasi was indicted on the charges last week and remained jailed without bail as of Tuesday afternoon. His next court hearing is tentatively scheduled for September.
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This story was originally published August 19, 2026 at 7:11 AM.