Sexual Assault Initiative identifies suspects in thousands of unsolved West Virginia cases

In the hope of finding a suspect, evidence from thousands of sex crimes across West Virginia that had been collected but never reviewed has now been identified and examined.

The reason for this is that West Virginia joined the state's Sexual Assault Kit (SAKI) initiative in 2015. The goal of this initiative is to identify evidence of sexual assault that, for various reasons, was never sent to a laboratory for DNA testing.

“To make a long story short, we did an inventory of all the unsubmitted kits, sex crime kits for the state of West Virginia, and we found that there were over 3,200 kits that had not been previously submitted,” said Larry Hasley, a SAKI spokesman and coordinator for the Monongalia region.

Of these 3,200 cases, around 2,600 have now been tested, SAKI officials said on Wednesday. Of these, 438 were compared with possible suspects in a federal DNA database, which led to several arrests.

“Since the beginning of this year, we have identified at least two cases in which we have made an arrest. There was one case at the Westover Police Department in [Monongalia] County, a 24-year-old sexual assault case. The perpetrator was identified and an arrest was made just a few months ago,” Hasley said.

A second arrest was also made in Monongalia.

“This was a 31-year-old sexual assault case. The suspect was identified and arrested about two weeks ago,” Hasley said.

Through similarities with attacks in West Virginia, suspects have been identified as far south as Puerto Rico and as far west and north as Alaska – although most of them still live here.