Missouri will receive a third federal grant that will help the state finish clearing the state's backlog of untested sexual assault kits, Chris Nuelle, spokesman for Missouri Attorney General Eric Schmitt, said Wednesday.
The statewide effort to identify and process these kits has tested 5,246 so far, which makes up 85 percent of the backlog, according to data from the SAFE (sexual assault forensic evidence) kits initiative. In the immediate aftermath of a sexual assault, a victim often undergoes a forensic examination to collect evidence of the assault. A SAFE kit is the standardized kit used to collect the evidence.
The grant will provide DNA testing for 1,171 additional sexual assault kits, which will likely get the state "across the finish line" of testing the remaining kits in the backlog by 2025, Nuelle said.
The three-year, $2.5 million National Sexual Assault Kit Initiative (SAKI) grant announced in late-November comes from the Department of Justice's Bureau of Justice Assistance. The 2022 SAKI grant is the third of these grants Missouri has received since 2019, when Schmitt launched the initiative and appointed former Jasper County Judge M. Keithley Williams to helm the effort.
The SAKI initiative is a nationwide undertaking that began in 2015 to help states inventory and test sexual assault forensic evidence (SAFE) kits and upload offender DNA profiles into a national database, according to the Attoeny General's SAFE kits site. States are then able to investigate and prosecute cases in which offender DNA profiles match existing records in the database.
To date, there has been one conviction obtained through this initiative and currently five more cases are set for trial, Nuelle said.
The single conviction obtained through this initiative occurred in 2022 when a Boone County man, Andrew Barbee, was charged with forcible rape and sentenced to seven years in prison for an incident that occurred in 2010.
Original charges were never filed, and the sexual assault kit was never sent to a lab. Eventually, the DNA was filed, and a match was found in February 2021 after Barbee was convicted for child sex crimes.
"That was a really good day for us," Nuelle said. This case wouldn't have gone forward, and she wouldn't have gotten justice without the SAFE kit initiative.
According to online court records, Barbee was given credit for time served. He is currently spending 75 years in prison for the child sex crimes.
'Appalling' backlog builds up
In 2017, Missouri was in the minority of states that had never done a statewide audit counting the number of untested sexual assault evidence kits in Missouri, according to an investigation by the Columbia Missourian.
Multiple law enforcement agencies had said their agencies didn't send evidence to be tested unless the survivor wanted to move forward with possible charges. But that made it harder to link repeat offenders to more than one victim. And they couldn't match unknown perpetrators to DNA profiles that might already be in the system.
Nuelle said there isn't a singular answer as to why the state didn't have the organization to process the kits from as far back as the 1980s in spite of collecting them, but he suggested a lack of funding, storage capabilities, personnel and organization.
The three federal grants Missouri has received since then have sought to fill those gaps and develop procedural, evidence tracking abilities to prevent future backlogs, he said.
"When I launched the SAFE Kit Initiative back in 2019, my aim was to clear the backlog and obtain justice for victims of these crimes," Schmitt said in a statement. "With Judge Keithley Williams at the helm, we have made incredible progress toward that goal."
Current kits are being tested as they are received, Nuelle said.
Angela Hirsch, executive director of the Rape & Abuse Crisis Service (RACS) in Jefferson City, told the News Tribune in September the progress made on clearing the backlog is good, but it should never have piled up like it did in the first place.
"I think that's appalling," she said of the 40 untested kits recorded in Cole County at the time. "Why would we put a survivor through that process only to have it sit there for, what's it been now, two to four years? I mean, why?"
How to clear a backlog
In 2018, fueled by the number of untested sexual assault kits reported in an informal survey of law enforcement agencies and hospitals, the Attorney General's Office and the Missouri General Assembly applied for and obtained its first SAKI grant.
The first half of each of the grants went toward building an exhaustive inventory of all the untested SAFE kits. The initiative will conduct a third inventory for this third grant, Nuelle said.
"With this grant, we can test the rest of the kits that we have identified now and also the kits that will likely be part of the next inventory.
Once the inventories had been completed, the initiative was able to obtain the second halves of the grant funding, which enabled Williams, who helms the initiative, to collect the kits and send them to a private lab in Virginia called Bodie Technology. This prevented state Highway Patrol labs from getting overwhelmed with kits, while they handled current ones, Nuelle said.
The first grant funded testing for 1,660 kits collected before April 30, 2018, as well as partially tested kits collected before 1997. The second grant obtained in 2020 funded testing for 777 kits collected between 2018-20, as well as partially tested kits collected after 1997.
While waiting for the second half of the first grant, the state Legislature independently set aside $2.6 million to continue shipping and testing some of the kits to three additional labs while still working on the inventory. This funded testing for an additional 1,799 kits.
How the data is used
After the tests are processed in a lab, they're sent to Marshall University in West Virginia where a DNA analysis is conducted. The analysis is sent back to Missouri where the Missouri Highway Patrol and Attorney General's Office consolidate and forward the information to prosecutors. Working alongside victims, the prosecutor determines if a prosecution should move forward.
Kits eligible to be uploaded into the FBI's Combined DNA Index System can be compared and matched with identical results from previous offenders. To date, Missouri's backlog has seen 254 "hits" in this database.
"We're just scraping the surface of testing the kits we found in the second inventory, so I would imagine the hit number goes up," Nuelle said.
These kits get uploaded into the FBI's Violent Criminal Apprehension Program, which helps investigators identify the behaviors and patterns of serial offenders.
But it's not a perfect system. Most of the kits aren't eligible to be uploaded into these databases due to damage to the kit, the age of the kit, or insufficient evidence collection techniques that don't render a strong enough data profile.
"It also could be that the DNA is the victims and nobody else's or from a consensual sexual partner," Nuelle said, though he didn't specify how the process determines a consensual sexual partner.
He said of the kits they get back, 38 percent are upload eligible and 27 percent aren't upload eligible, meaning the DNA was from the victim or a consensual partner. The remaining 35 percent are classified as negative, meaning no DNA was found.
How to prevent future backlogs
In the first inventory report from 2019, the initiative made suggestions to the Legislature and other relevant entities. In the next legislative session, Sen. Andrew Koenig, R-St. Louis County, sponsored SB 569, a bill that codified these recommendations into statute 595.220 under subsection nine.
The law statutorily required law enforcement agencies and health care facilities to enter tracking information they receive into an evidence tracking system called SAFE track.
"We're working with law enforcement partners and health care partners to provide them with the training so they're comfortable on the interface and are able to comply with the statutory requirements and get that data uploaded to SAFE track," Nuelle said.
Another section of the law ensured that all of the various components of a testing kit, which includes fingernail scrapings and mouth swabs, went into the tracking system, instead of just certain components. It also altered the exterior information on SAFE kits, making them more informative and easier to track, store and inventory. Inside the kit, there is now a barcode victims can use to track their kit throughout the system.
The law also established a central repository to store unreported kits for long periods of time. Nuelle said it currently holds around 1,000 of these kits, which were not reported to police and not tested. If a victim or survivor decides they do want to submit a police report, their kit will be obtained from the central repository and sent for DNA testing.