FORT WORTH, Texas (AP) -- Nearly 19 years after an 11-year-old girl was raped and strangled in her home, police have arrested a former friend of the family who investigators say attended the girl's wake.

Investigators say DNA taken from Vanessa Villa's body matched that of 42-year-old Juan Segundo, a convicted felon who previously served time in prison for burglary and driving while intoxicated.

Homicide investigators and Johnson County sheriff's officers arrested Segundo on a capital murder warrant at his Johnson County home early Wednesday morning. Segundo was being held in Mansfield Jail on Thursday morning with bail set at $300,000.

On the day she was attacked in 1986, Vanessa had stayed home instead of going with her mother, Rosa Maria Clarke, brother and little sister to run an errand. When they returned 30 minutes later, they found her raped and strangled. She was rushed to a local hospital but was pronounced dead within an hour.

''When we came back, I went straight to my room and my mom opened her door and then started screaming,'' recalled Vanessa's brother, Enrique Balderas. ''I went to the room and then I saw my sister lying in the bed.''

Police believe Segundo entered Vanessa's home through her bedroom window late Aug. 3, 1986. Some belongings were in disarray as if Vanessa had struggled with her attacker.

Police say the attack holds striking similarities to two crimes Segundo was convicted of in the years after Vanessa's slaying.

In June 1988, Segundo pleaded guilty to a charge of burglary of a habitation and was sentenced to 10 years in prison. The 40-year-old victim told police that she had awoke to feeling someone touching her and turned on the light to find a man kneeling beside her bed with his pants and underwear pulled down.

The woman told police the man covered her mouth with his hand and began hitting her in the mouth and face. The victim's daughter, who ran into the room during the attack, recognized the fleeing suspect as a man she had previously worked with, according to a police report.

Segundo was paroled from prison in July 1989 but returned again in 1991 following a conviction of misdemeanor burglary for a similar attack in 1990.

Segundo was paroled again in January 1993 but was sentenced to five years in prison in September 1995 for driving while intoxicated/felony repetition. He was released on mandatory supervision in June 2000 and discharged from parole a month later.

Rosa Maria Clarke, her sister and Balderas had worked with Segundo's former wife at a nursing home in Lake Worth. Soon after Vanessa's death, the family lost touch with Segundo.

Balderas said the family never suspected the man had anything to do with his sister's death.

Since his final discharge from prison, Segundo changed a lot, said his stepbrother, Jesus Garcia. Though they had not gotten along well before, Garcia said he and Segundo grew closer.

''He hadn't been getting into drinking like he used to. He changed his ways a lot,'' Garcia said.

''It's hard for me to believe,'' he said.

Police say the break in the case came last week when they were notified that a database called the Combined DNA Index System, or CODIS, had linked semen taken from Vanessa's body to Segundo.

CODIS compares the entered DNA profiles against those of convicted offenders and DNA evidence from other unsolved crimes.