SAN ANTONIO – The Bexar County Sheriff’s Office made a significant breakthrough in a yearlong murder investigation that had seen little progress.
Stacey Dramiga, 63, was attacked, sexually assaulted and killed last September while she was on a walking trail near Dafoste Park on the East Side.
In a press conference on Wednesday, Bexar County Sheriff Javier Salazar said it was DNA that led to the alleged killer’s arrest.
The federal DNA database that pinged the suspect this week is called CODIS, which stands for “Combined DNA Index System.”
It is a computer software program run by the FBI that operates local, state and national databases of DNA profiles from convicted offenders, unsolved crime scene evidence, and missing persons.
The national level of CODIS was implemented in 1998. Today, all 50 states, the District of Columbia, federal law enforcement, the Army Laboratory, and Puerto Rico contribute to the database.
CODIS can link perpetrators to crimes and link multiple crimes to the same person, even when the person’s identity is unknown.
“A forensic sample taken from a crime scene. We don’t know who this person is, but we have their DNA. We’ll enter it in, and it starts running it through the systems, and it has to exhaust the local one before it moves onto the state. Once that’s exhausted, it’ll move onto the national,” Salazar said.
That’s what happened with the DNA found at the scene where Dramiga died.
>> ‘A monster’: Man charged with capital murder of Stacey Dramiga after DNA match, sheriff says
DNA was collected from Dramiga as well as a rock, the alleged murder weapon. It was entered into CODIS, yet nothing in the system matched it — until this week.
Salazar said it’s all thanks to a fairly new law.
“There’s a law that came into place a couple years back where anybody being booked into the jail on felony charges, even if it’s a non-violent felony, we need to be taking a DNA swab from these people,” he said.
It turned out the suspect, 23-year-old Samuel Charon, was booked in the Bexar County jail on an unrelated felony criminal mischief charge in April 2025.
Those charges were eventually dismissed, but the swab was taken and was already on its way to the lab.
“At that point, it was entered into the system, and Oct. 13 is when we got the notification that it was a positive match. For us, two days later, we had him in handcuffs,” Salazar said.
The obvious observation is that it took almost six months from the time Charon was swabbed to when his DNA hit a match in the CODIS system.
“I would love to see those samples come to us much quicker because you never know. Between a course of several months like that, there’s a lot of bad things that can happen,” Salazar said.
However, he said his focus now is on the murder suspect that is finally in hand, thanks to a system most people outside law enforcement knew nothing about.
KSAT reached out to the FBI about this story, but was told they do not have enough resources to respond to non-emergency media requests due to recent furloughs and the government shutdown.
The response said, “During the current lapse in appropriations, FBI operations are directed toward national security, violations of federal law, and essential public safety functions. Inquiries outside of these functions will be considered when the lapse in appropriations ends.”
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