Dora Brimage was raped and murdered by a man who offered her a ride home after a party.
A Boston mother, who waited 30 years for her daughter's killer to be punished, told the convicted murderer that she forgives him.
James Paige, 51, was sentenced to life in prison without parole Tuesday for raping and strangling 19-year-old Dora Brimage in 1987.
"I forgive him even though he did this to my first born," Doris Brimage told the judge. "I just want him to know that. Because I know that if I forgive him, then God will forgive me," the Boston Herald reported.
Paige was linked by DNA to the grisly murder nearly 29 years after Brimage died alone in an abandoned building.
He had been ordered to submit genetic samples following a felony conviction, authorities said. His DNA profile was entered in a national database. DNA evidence form Brimage's body was entered sometime after 1998, when Massachusetts joined the directory.
Eventually, a match was made between the two samples. Detectives went back and re-interviewed all witnesses and retraced Paige's steps on the night of Brimage's murder.
Investigators said the teen had left a party in Roxbury when Paige stopped his car and offered her a lift. She accepted, authorities said. He then drove her to an abandoned building undergoing renovations, where he raped her, beat her and strangled her, police said.
Construction workers discovered her half-clothed body the next morning.
Paige claimed in court he had nothing to do with Dora Brimage's death. "DNA did not put me at the crime scene," he said. "My mom didn't raise no fool, and my mom didn't raise no killer."
But there are limits, apparently, on the forgiveness bestowed by Dora's mother on the man who murdered her daughter.
"I hope you rot in hell," the mother told him as she walked across the courtroom, the Herald reported.
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