The Ohio Bureau of Criminal Investigation tested 75 of the 76 submitted rape kits from Athens County law enforcement agencies since a testing initiative launched in 2011.
Ohio Attorney General Mike DeWine launched the initiative, and he announced Jan. 3 that 12,000 of 13,931 kits, all submitted after the Sexual Assault Kit Testing Initiative, have been tested in Ohio.
The initiative was introduced upon the discovery that rape kits across the state weren’t being submitted to the BCI for testing. The initiative called for all untested kits to be submitted by law enforcement agencies at no cost to those agencies.
BCI’s Public Information Officer Jill Del Greco said in an email that as of Jan. 1, the Athens County Sheriff’s Office submitted 10 kits, the Nelsonville Police Department submitted six, the Athens Police Department submitted 15 and the Ohio University Police Department submitted 45.
OUPD Lt. Tim Ryan said nine of the kits from OUPD were submitted in 2016.
Every kit, except one submitted by OUPD, has been tested. The kits have led to nine hits in the Combined DNA Index System, also called CODIS.
The FBI’s website defines CODIS as a “program of support for criminal justice DNA databases as well as the software used to run these databases.”
“It’s pretty rare (to get a match in the system). It doesn’t happen very often, but it happens occasionally,” Ryan said in an email. “When you get a CODIS hit … based on whatever circumstances you’ve been investigating and how that ties in, you follow up accordingly.”
BCI DNA Technical Leader Lewis Maddox said once a rape kit has been conducted in Athens and has been sent to the Athens BCI branch, it gets transported to the London branch. Once there, samples are taken from the kit before it’s worked on or finally transported to the Richfield branch for DNA testing.
Maddox said the testing initiative focused first on kits collected prior to 2000 and then began working backward from kits collected in 2011.
“The point in doing that (was) to give law enforcement plenty of time for investigation of any hits so that they’re not coming up against the statute of limitations with older cases,” Maddox said. “Then we started working on newer cases because some of those individuals might still be out there committing offenses.”
Maddox said it takes two to three weeks for the DNA testing process to be completed.
“If any foreign male DNA profile (is obtained), any profiles that are eligible would be entered into CODIS and searched,” Maddox said.
Maddox said it is up to a law enforcement agency on how an investigation is carried out once results are acquired.
“If there’s a hit, we go find the person. Usually we can get a warrant for their arrest. It just depends on the crime,” APD Chief Tom Pyle said. “Specifically sexual assault, you know, there’s more than just, ‘Well, hey, we have a DNA hit, they’re under arrest,’ but it does give us substantial evidence linking people.”
According to a news release by the Ohio Attorney General’s office, Senate Bill 316 went into effect on March 23, 2015, which called for all remaining untested kits to be submitted within a year and stated no future rape kits shall be left unsubmitted “to a crime lab within 30 days after law enforcement determines a crime has been committed.”
“It’s rare that we don’t submit the kit. Usually, it’s because there’s no evidence of the crime or … it has to not fit the parameters that BCI wants for these kits for us not to submit it,” Pyle said.
The news release also stated that 294 law enforcements agencies submitted kits under the SAK Testing Initiative, which led to 4,367 hits in CODIS.
“Part of the ability by BCI in order to accomplish this goal is the staffing resources that Mr. DeWine hired and dedicated to this project,” Maddox said.
— Bailey Gallion contributed to this report.
