Investigators arrested Jesus C. Mezquia in the Miami area late Friday night after DNA evidence linked him to the death, department spokeswoman Deanna Nollette said. Mezquia, a resident of Marathon, in the Florida Keys, was being held without bond Saturday at the Miami-Dade County Jail for investigation of first-degree murder.

Zapata, the 27-year-old lead singer of The Gits (pronounced with a hard G), was last seen alive shortly after 2 a.m. on July 7, 1993, after a night of hard drinking in Seattle’s Capitol Hill neighborhood. She was strangled with the drawstring of her Gits sweatshirt, and her body was left 1.6 miles away on the curb of 24th Avenue South. Her arms were outstretched, her legs crossed at the ankle, as if she had been crucified.

“I’m still in disbelief,” bandmate Steve Moriarty said Saturday. “It’s something I’ve been beating my head about for the past 10 years.

“Without being grandiose, I would say she was one of the best rock lyricists that ever lived. She was kind of a blues singer who had a punk-rock temperament, but she was also just a really brilliant person. She was an intuitive, compassionate woman, a poet and painter.”

Last year, Seattle police submitted evidence to the Washington State Patrol Crime Lab for DNA testing. Initially, no match was found.

But in December, a DNA profile entered into the National DNA Index System matched the sample. The profile was that of Mezquia, a felon in Florida, the news release said.

Police said subsequent investigation revealed that Mezquia, then 39, had been in the Seattle area at the time of the killing. It was not immediately clear what Mezquia had been convicted of or whether he had obtained a lawyer.

Zapata was little-known nationally but popular locally at the height of Seattle’s grunge-rock scene in the early ’90s. Her death prompted an all-night vigil attended by 1,000 people as well as the creation of a self-defense group, Home Alive.

The Seattle music community – including Pearl Jam, Nirvana and Soundgarden – raised $70,000 to hire a private investigator for three years, but eventually the funds dried up.

“It’s just a great relief,” said Charles Cross, longtime editor of the defunct Seattle music magazine The Rocket. “Mia was a great singer, and with the timing of it – how powerful a stage presence she was and what a major talent she was – the band clearly was on to much bigger things.”

The Gits met at Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio, and began playing together in 1986. They took their name from a Monty Python skit: “The Sniveling Little Rat-faced Gits.”

Three years later they moved to Seattle; Los Angeles was too expensive, and Seattle was as far as they could get from the Midwest, said Moriarty, the drummer.

The popularity of grunge rock was about to explode, but The Gits remained below the radar. They released two singles and an album, Frenching the Bully, and were finishing up the vocals on a second album when Zapata was killed.

The band continued playing together for about five years afterwards and led the private investigation into the case, hoping to keep it in the spotlight.

“It’s been a long, hard road,” Cross said. “But she was not forgotten, and that’s one of the good things to come out of the sad loss of this tremendous talent.”