State makes progress in processing thousands of untested sex offender kits

INSTITUTE, W.Va. (WCHS) — Working with SAKI (Sexual Assault Kit Initiative), state officials and agencies have made great progress in recent years in tracking down thousands of untested sex crime kits sitting on police department shelves.

Larry Hasley, the SAKI coordinator for West Virginia, participated in SAKI training and a panel at West Virginia State University on Wednesday. During the panel, he shared that 3,203 untested kits have been collected since SAKI started in West Virginia in 2015. Sexual abuse kits are performed on victims in hospitals and typically contain intimate swabs and clothing for DNA testing. He said the reasons why thousands were never given to the lab or were left on the shelf vary. Hasley said some may never have been prosecuted and others may be waiting for better technology to test them.

“I realized pretty quickly that many of the cases were already being handled,” Hasley said. “I certainly wouldn't point the finger at law enforcement or say anything negative about them because many of these cases have already been handled. But if we find cases and identify cases that have not been handled, the SAKI project has the resources to assist law enforcement with those cases.”

Of the 3,203 DNA tests collected, 2,665 were tested and 438 matches were found in the national DNA database. The kits collected date from 2018 to the late 1980s, when sexual assault detection kits became more common. Now, if these kits are brought to the West Virginia State Police forensics lab and a DNA profile can be identified and meets the criteria, it is entered into the FBI's Combined DNA Index System (CODIS), which is available nationwide and can create hits or matches to other cases.

Melissa Runyan is West Virginia's CODIS administrator. She is also the biology database manager at the West Virginia State Police Forensic Laboratory. During the panel discussion, she presented maps showing the 438 matches in the system from kits collected by SAKI within the state and nationwide.

“We've sort of listed it as offenders that are in our state database. Those are the red pins. The black pins represent hits that have occurred in our database for offenders in other states,” Runyan said.

SAKI is a national project of the Bureau of Justice Administration. It began in West Virginia in 2015 when Marshall University's Forensic Science Center helped Detroit address a large backlog after more than 11,000 untested test kits were discovered in a warehouse in 2011.

That inspired the idea to look closer to home, said Hasley, who came on board as a former Morgantown police detective at the time. With funding from SAKI, they started with Cabell County and Monongalia County and then went statewide, the first in the country with SAKI, Hasley said.

He said he had to go from department to department, make phone calls and visits to get everything together, but he believes they now actually have all the known untested kits.

Troy Ball, another coordinator of SAKI, pointed out that the system presents another challenge across the country: collecting all the DNA data for CODIS. In West Virginia, convicted felons or sex offenders are required to submit their DNA data to the state. But collecting that data isn't always easy, especially when offenders aren't required to report to prison.

Ball said during the panel that 10,082 people in West Virginia have not submitted their required DNA tests. SAKI would like to work with lawmakers in the future to somehow improve this.

One law that has helped them is a bill passed in 2020 that now requires all sexual assaults to be reported to the State Police Laboratory within 30 days.

David Miller is the forensic lab chief for the State Police. He said SAKI and the law have helped tremendously in ending the problem of unsubmitted test kits. He said since the law was passed, they have seen an increase of 200 test kits submitted per year.

“It allowed more entries to be added to the database, so there are more test kits that can potentially be linked to other cases in the country,” he said. “It was also a big push for us to pass this mandatory submission law. We needed to prevent test kits from not being submitted.”

He described the process of collecting the untested kits as first going to the Marshall Forensic Science Center and BODE Technologies, and then the results going to the State Police lab for professional and technical review. He said that's where they determine whether the results meet CODIS eligibility requirements, meaning whether the results are crime-related and presumed to have come from the perpetrator.

Not only have there been hits, but this year has also seen the first arrests and indictments. In July of this year, U.S. Marshals in Connecticut arrested and charged 50-year-old Tyron Jermaine Walker with an unsolved 2000 sexual assault case in Westover, West Virginia. Another hit linked a Mount Olive inmate to a 31-year-old unsolved sexual assault case in Morgantown.

Tony Bethea, 53, faces four counts of sexual assault after his DNA matched evidence of an assault reported by a victim in March 1993, according to the Monongalia County District Attorney's Office.

Hasley said that's what made all the effort worthwhile.

“All of this work contributes to bringing justice, even if it's just to one person. I mean, that's pretty powerful stuff,” he said.

Victims who have questions about the process or need support during this time are encouraged to call their local rape victim crisis center or the West Virginia State Sexual Assault Coalition Victim Assistance Coordinator at (304) 379-8970.