On New Year’s Day in 1987, a beautiful teenager struggled against an attacker in an empty parking lot in Sunset Park, Brooklyn, scratching him as he fatally stabbed her and left her to die.

Twenty-five years later, police have finally matched the DNA from under Lissette Torres fingernails to a violent neighborhood parolee — or as the girl’s still-grieving family calls him, an animal, at long last caged.

“I want to look him dead in the face,” the victim’s best friend, Lizzette Sierra, 45, said last night of Edwin Alcaide, 53, the convicted pedophile and drug dealer now charged with the murder.

Sierra and Torres were both 19 when the murder separated them forever. The two had hoped to raise their kids together, she said.

“I want to ask him how can he be a human being and leave her the way he did. What kind of person could he be?”

Alcaide is on the sex-offender registry for abusing an 8-year-old child he was baby-sitting in 1997.

He has been in and out of prison for decades for violent crimes, including a 1975 attempted murder, a 1978 rape and a 1983 robbery.

His most recent arrest was for drug dealing in 2010, authorities said.

Although he was questioned at the time of the murder and had scratches on his face, the NYPD did not have the evidence to charge him.

But about 18 months ago, detectives began anew, posting fliers around the neighborhood and running DNA tests on the tissue samples recovered from Lissette’s fingernails.

Recently, they got a hit — a match with Alcaide’s profile on record in the state’s DNA database from his previous crimes.

“I thank God I can now die in peace,” the girl’s mother, Rosa Torres, said of the dark-haired daughter who had walked out of her home on New Year’s Eve 1986 promising to return in time to ring in the new year with her family.

Lissette’s sister, Lourdes Garcia, said: “It’s happy news that there’s closure. But it’s sad news because it brings back the past.’’

The family still lives in the same apartment on 44th Street, about a mile from where Torres’ body was found under the Gowanus Expressway.

Only a couple of years ago did the family begin again to decorate for Christmas and New Year’s, the father said.

“This year,” said her dad, José, “we’re going to celebrate. We’re going to roast a pig.”

Additional reporting by Kirstan Conley and Brad Hamilton