MEDIA NOTE: To watch a video with sound from the BSO Cold Case Unit investigator and BSO Crime Analyst, click on the photo above. For a version without captions, click here. 

At approximately 3:30 a.m., on Friday, June 19, 2009, a 36-year-old mother was asleep in her bedroom with two of her children at a residence in Pompano Beach. That mother woke up to face the unspeakable. 

A man broke into her home and sexually battered her at gunpoint. For more than a decade, Broward Sheriff’s Office investigators remained steadfast in their commitment to find the man responsible for this heinous crime. Now, thanks to relentless investigative work by the BSO Cold Case Unit and advanced DNA testing, that sexual battery suspect will face justice. 

BSO detectives have positively identified her attacker as 63-year-old Wisler Marcellus. 

That morning in 2009, BSO units responded to the 600 block of Northwest Ninth Avenue, where they found the front door of the home open. The investigation revealed the victim, and her kids were inside the home, when a man broke in through the window of an unoccupied bedroom. Detectives say the suspect went inside the room where the victim was sleeping and held a gun to her head as he commanded her to stand up. He then sexually battered her. The children slept through the incident and were unharmed. The victim described the man as having a foul body odor who was wearing a dark colored mask and gloves. 

The suspect took the victim’s purse and fled through the front door leaving one thing behind--his semen. In September 2009, BSO’s Crime Lab DNA specialists developed a profile of an unidentified person from that evidence. However, despite intensive work by detectives at the time of the crime, the case went cold for 16 years.

With the advent of new technological advances in DNA testing, investigators were able to reexamine evidence in the decade-old case. In April 2025, BSO’s Crime Lab re-quantified the attacker’s semen, and the results indicated it came from a single male contributor. 

BSO asked the Florida Department of Law Enforcement to conduct a familial search of its State of Florida Qualifying Offender DNA Database in this case. This technique uses the forensic DNA profile to search for possible first order (parent/child or full sibling) male relatives to the contributor. That testing identified a known offender who had spent time in prison and whose DNA was on file. The known offender was a close relative of the DNA contributor in this 2009 sexual battery case. That lead led detectives to Marcellus. 

In October, detectives learned Marcellus traveled to Haiti and was scheduled to return later that month. On October 20, a DNA Search Warrant was executed on Marcellus on his return at Miami International Airport. The collected DNA swabs were submitted to BSO’s Crime Lab for analysis. The results indicated the DNA collected from Marcellus matched the DNA evidence collected from the victim. 

On October 28, BSO V.I.P.E.R (Violence Intervention Proactive Enforcement Response) investigators arrested Marcellus and transported him to Broward County Main Jail. He faces one count of sexual battery with a weapon and one count of armed burglary. 

After years of wondering if the man who violated her would face justice, this victim now knows that he will, thanks to the BSO Cold Case Unit.