Harris County prosecutors Monday charged a known sex offender in the 2002 attack on an 8-year-old boy, for which an innocent man spent six years in prison until DNA evidence cleared his name.

Andrew Wayne Hawthorne, 55, faces one charge of aggravated sexual assault of a child, Harris County District Attorney Pat Lykos confirmed.

Hawthorne is expected to be brought to Houston from the Amarillo prison where he is serving a 60-year sentence for three other, strikingly similar, attacks on young boys.

Hawthorne committed each of those sexual assaults while Ricardo Rachell sat in prison wrongfully convicted of the October 2002 crime.

Lykos said her office will report on the factors that led to Rachell’s wrongful conviction and is “committed to presenting the unvarnished truth — all of it — regarding the circumstances of Mr. Rachell’s imprisonment.”

Hawthorne was arrested in 2003 after DNA evidence linked him to a different attack.

But neither police nor prosecutors suspected him in the crime for which they pursued Rachell until last year, when the DNA evidence that cleared Rachell matched Hawthorne’s profile in a DNA database.

Rachell, convicted largely on the testimony of the 8-year-old victim and one of his friends, maintained his innocence from the start.

He pleaded with his trial attorneys and others to look into the fact that similar attacks on young boys continued in his neighborhood even after his arrest.

No one listened.

Felt like ‘a scapegoat’

“It made me feel like somebody else who committed the crime was getting away with it … like I was a scapegoat,” Rachell said Monday at the University of Houston Law Center, where he spoke to about 50 students interested in his case.

Rachell, 51, has spent the days since his release living with his stepfather, reconnecting with family and contemplating surgery to reconstruct his face, which was disfigured years ago by a shotgun blast.

Rachell plans to apply for a pardon, which, if granted, would make him eligible for some $300,000 in compensation from the state.

No one has been able to explain why the biological evidence that proved Rachell’s innocence was not tested earlier.

Rachell’s first defense attorney, Ron Hayes, has insisted that he never knew a rape kit was collected.

Police records, which prosecutors released to the Houston Chronicle under public information laws, show that one day after the attack, a Houston Police Department officer noted collecting the victim’s clothes and other samples and requesting the HPD crime lab perform tests.

Interviews conducted by the Chronicle found that three different assistant district attorneys handled the case against Rachell in the seven months between his arrest and trial.

The case has prompted changes in prosecutors’ procedures for deciding when to seek DNA testing. Assistant District Attorney Roe Wilson said: “Our office is taking steps to ensure that would not happen again.”

roma.khanna@chron.com