The arrest of the Rev. Geoff Drew on Monday almost didn't happen.

For 30 years, the man who accused Drew of raping him when he was an altar boy didn't call police or prosecutors to report his claim. When he finally did a few weeks ago, it was almost too late.

But a series of changes to Ohio law in the past two decades made it possible for a grand jury to indict Drew on nine counts of rape – even though the alleged crimes occurred so long ago.

The changes all involve the statute of limitations, or a limit on how much time can pass between the commission of a crime and when that crime is reported to authorities.

The legal theory behind statutes of limitations, which exist for most offenses other than murder, is that justice delayed for many years will not lead to a fair outcome.

Evidence can go missing. Memories fade. And prosecutors and defense attorneys both have a harder time making a case. If something bad happened, the theory goes, victims have an obligation to come forward in a reasonable amount of time.

Back in 1988, when Drew's accuser said he was raped for the first time by the priest, the statute of limitations for rape in Ohio was six years.

Because the accuser was 10 years old at the time, the clock for the statute in his case did not start to run until he turned 18 in 1996, which means it should have expired in 2002.

But it didn't, because the Ohio legislature in 1998 passed a law extending the statute to 20 years. Since time had not yet run out in Drew's case, the clock kept ticking a while longer.

Even so, with the new 20-year limit, the statute would have run out in Drew's case in 2016.

But the Ohio legislature unwittingly came to the rescue again when it extended the statute to 25 years in 2015 – just one year before it would have run out in Drew's case.

That second revision of the statute gave Drew's accuser until 2021 to report his claims to authorities.

He beat that deadline by two years when he contacted Hamilton County prosecutors a few weeks ago, said Prosecutor Joe Deters.

The accuser told prosecutors he decided to come forward after he learned Drew had been suspended for inappropriate behavior while serving as pastor at St. Ignatius of Loyola in Green Township.

Deters said the man, now 41, was an altar boy at St. Jude in Bridgetown when the alleged rapes occurred.

"He felt he had to do something," Deters said of the accuser, who has not been named. "It took a lot of bravery to do what he did."

If not for the changes to the statute of limitations, it wouldn't have been possible.