A stabbing suspect on the lam for almost two decades was finally apprehended this week when Chelsea Police spotted him drinking in public just a block away from the scene of the crime, Suffolk County District Attorney Daniel F. Conley said.

WILMER ROMERO (D.O.B. 7/8/73) was arraigned in Chelsea District Court yesterday, 17 years to the day after he allegedly attacked a rival with a knife inside a Chestnut Street building.

Assistant District Attorney Andrew Miller recommended that he be held on $50,000 cash bail; Judge D. Dunbar Livingston set bail at $10,000. Romero was charged in two complaints: one charging the older stabbing case and one charging him with the use of phony identification during his arrest.

Romero was arrested Monday by Chelsea Police as he drank from a bottle of Hennessey cognac near the Chelsea campus of Bunker Hill Community College. At booking, he allegedly presented identification cards in the name of “Marlon Walters,” which the officers quickly concluded were fraudulent.

Police ran Romero’s fingerprints and soon learned that he was the subject of a 1995 Chelsea District Court warrant charging him with armed assault with intent to murder and armed assault with intent to maim for allegedly plunging a knife into a 26-year-old Chelsea man in the hallway of 284 Chestnut St. and fleeing the scene.

Among the officers who responded to the Feb. 21, 1995, incident was one Brian Kyes – then a sergeant and now Chief of the Chelsea Police Department. The victim, who was transported to Massachusetts General Hospital, was unable to give a statement, but the officers spoke with a man at the scene who stated that he’d heard the victim say “Coco” stabbed him.

The witness gave a description of the assailant consistent with Romero’s appearance. He also explained that he was a friend of both the victim and “Coco,” whom he said had previously been arrested for stabbing someone else in Chelsea.

That detail was corroborated by Romero’s record, prosecutors say. Romero was convicted of assault and battery with a dangerous weapon at a 1993 bench trial in Chelsea District Court, appealed that conviction, and then defaulted on the proceedings. Authorities believe Romero fled the area after the 1995 stabbing, picking up an assault case in Virginia six months later.

He has subsequent convictions in that state and Florida up through 2009.

Conley’s office has prosecuted numerous cases as old as or even older than Romero’s. In recent years, Suffolk prosecutors have secured the convictions of EPIFANIO LUNA for a 1991 assault and battery upon his ex-girlfriend, obtaining $585 in restitution for that woman in lieu of cash and jewelry he stole from her before fleeing the charges, and EFREMIDIS ELIAS, currently serving a six-year state prison term for trafficking cocaine in Dorchester in 1988 and defaulting for more than 20 years.

Another defendant, RICHARD MATTHEWS, is currently charged with operating under the influence for allegedly driving while intoxicated on Jan. 12, 1989. Matthews was arrested by Metropolitan Police, an agency that no longer exists, in the erstwhile Dewey Square Tunnel, then part of the Central Artery. His default on that case was discovered when he appeared in court on an unrelated case.

“We’ll never give up while there’s a case to be made,” Conley said. “Sometimes a defendant has to learn that lesson the hard way.”

Irma Correa is the DA’s assigned victim-witness advocate on the Romero case. The defendant was represented for bail purposes yesterday by attorney Audrey Marinelli. He will return to court on March 23 to be appointed a new attorney.