By Esteban Fernandez
Times West Virginian, Fairmont
BRIDGEPORT, W.V. — West Virginia reached an important milestone on Monday in Bridgeport with its sexual assault kit backlog.
Members of state law enforcement and victim advocates said the state has caught up on its untested kit back log. This achievement will make it easier to catch serial predators.
“When we talk about the Sexual Assault Kit initiative project, it makes me think of the gaps that have occurred over the past decades that have enabled these kits to not be submitted for testing to the crime lab,” Nancy Hoffman, state coordinator for the WV Foundation for Rape Information Services , said. “The quote it made me think of was, ‘when you have a gap in a system or a hole, that’s the hole that a victim falls through and it’s also the hole that perpetrators crawl through.’”
The SAKI Initiative is a national project from the Bureau of Justice Administration that got its start in West Virginia in 2015. The project was born after Marshall University helped officials in Detroit, Michigan process a backlog of 11,000 untested kits found in a warehouse. The program began in Cabell and Monongalia counties before going statewide, making West Virginia the first state to have such a program.
Larry Hasley, coordinator of the state’s SAKI project, revealed results from the project at the press conference. Hasley said over 3,200 sex crime kits had not been submitted for testing. Of those, 2,665 have been tested. The tests revealed around 1,100 DNA profiles. After submission to the FBI ‘s Combined DNA Index System, the initiative received 438 hits. As a result of the work, the state has no outstanding sexual assault kits to test.
Twenty eight states had hits to profiles associated with the initiative. Hasley said the initiative provided resolution to two long-standing cases, one a 24-year-old case from Westover and the other a 31-year-old State Police case. The Westover case was tied to a case in Montana where the offender was already charged and the State Police case led to the perpetrator serving three 20-year sentences.
The press conference was part of a larger event dedicated to training investigators, prosecutors and victim advocates on how to investigate and prosecute cold cases and how to identify victims. Reaching out to victims can be a fraught process. There may be anger from not having their case initially investigated or it may reopen wounds a victim spent a long time working to mend. Other victims may wonder why it took so long to get to them.
“Victim notification is one of the hardest things to do, and there really isn’t a good answer — I’d like to know the answer to the question, why it took so long, also,” Hasley said. “But here we are now moving forward.”
Hasley said centering the victim’s experience and learning about how trauma works was crucial in those contexts. Also crucial was apologizing to victims for the delay.
“Even though it’s potentially not your fault, apologize that it’s taken so long,” Hasley said. “We’re here now, and we’re here to move this case forward if they choose to do that.”
Hasley credited the West Virginia State Legislature for supporting SAKI’s efforts. Hoffman said in 2014, the legislature established a sexual assault forensic examination commission, which focused on getting every kit that was collecting dust into a lab for testing. In 2020, the state passed new legislation allowing a victim to send their kit directly to the state lab for testing from the hospital if they chose to report. There’s also a tracking system with victim access that lets a victim know when the kit leaves the hospital, reaches a lab for testing, and when it’s sent back to law enforcement for investigation and prosecution.
Sometimes, murky circumstances around an assault make it difficult to secure a conviction or discourages a victim from going forward. In those cases, having a kit sent to the lab and entered into CODIS means if the offender assaults someone else, there’s a trail establishing a pattern. That could mean saving future victims from assault.
West Virginia’s SAKI is also working to decrease the sometimes yearslong wait period for the results of a sexual assault kit reduced down to between 60 and 90 days.
Although West Virginia is forward thinking when it comes to documenting sexual assault and empowering victims, more work remains. Ilse Knecht, director of policy and advocacy for the Brooklyn, New York -based Joyful Heart Foundation, said the state had fulfilled five of the six pillars it advocates for under its project called End the Backlog. Joyful Heart is a watchdog agency that works to identify where sexual assault kit backlogs exist and push for reform to ensure no kit is forgotten.
The fifth pillar Joyful Heart advocates for is ‘fund reform.’ Knecht said they look for a specific line item in a state’s budget that’s dedicated specifically to testing sexual assault kits. Most agencies rely heavily on federal grants.
“We have internal conversations sometimes about when a state gets done with their backlog, it’s almost like they should get a check mark for that because there’s no backlog left to fund,” Knecht said.
What Joyful Heart really wants to see, she said, is to see the problem resolve in perpetuity.
“When we see the state government put money into this specifically, we know then there’s that investment in making sure the backlog never happens again,” she said.
On Aug. 13, Gov. Jim Justice’s office announced $1.2 million more in SAKI grants to continue projects to hold sex criminals accountable.
Knecht said making sure the backlog never returns is important because survivors are already asked to do many intrusive tasks after they’ve been assaulted. Their body has become a crime scene, she said. It’s a stressful four to six hours talking to law enforcement.
“They do that because they believe, and the public believes, that these kits will be tested,” Knecht said. “I always ask the question, ‘why would we be collecting evidence in these cases, if we’re not doing something with it?’”
Victims of sexual assault can call a victim information line for more information on a kit they may have submitted at 304-379-8970.
Reach Esteban at efernandez@timeswv.com
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