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It's been almost four years, and still, every day Isa Cekic remembers the horror - the blood trickling from a cut above her right eye, the pain and the humiliation. A victim of rape, she suffers daily from the fear that it might happen again.
But Cekic believes her trauma could have been prevented.
If the law Mayor Bloomberg and the city's five district attorneys introduced last week were on the books when career criminal José Fuentes committed his first crime, he would have been locked up. And Cekic would have been safe on Sept. 1, 2002.
"I can't help what happened to me," she told The Post. "But I'm here to help everyone else."
"I don't want even one girl to suffer what I went through."
The mayor and the prosecutors are urging the state Legislature to pass a law requiring that a DNA swab be collected from every person convicted of a felony or misdemeanor. The information would be added to the New York DNA database that's used to match offenders with unsolved crimes. Currently, only those busted for felonies have genetic samples taken.
In 1999, Fuentes was convicted of misdemeanor assault in Nassau County. In January 2002, he raped a woman in Brooklyn and evaded detection.
"Had the earlier DNA sample been taken in 1999, they would have caught him immediately on the rape," said Marjory Fisher, who heads the Queens DA's Special Victims Bureau. "But he continued his rampage."
Fuentes' second rape happened in the Astoria coin laundry where Cekic worked. He choked her and dragged her around by her blond hair. He threw her against the change machine until she was nearly unconscious.
After a 2004 bust for attempted robbery, police took a DNA sample and matched him to the two rapes. Fuentes was convicted of the Brooklyn rape and pleaded guilty to assaulting Cekic. He'll be sentenced Tuesday.
"Sometimes I think I'll never move on," she said.
But she pushes forward. She has three jobs and two children to support.
Now she's adding this cause to her list of things to get done.
"I will pray day and night to get this law passed," she said.
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