TOO LONG A WAIT
It took a decade for the system to process her rape kit — and finally put her attacker behind bars
ON Aug. 6, 1993, 20-year-old Natasha Alexenko was fiddling with her keys outside her Morningside Heights apartment when she felt a gun pressed against her back.
“If you don’t do everything I say I’ll blow your brains out,” she heard a man’s voice rumble.
He led Alexenko to an empty stairwell in her building, where he sexually assaulted her at gunpoint. But the rape kit she submitted at the hospital that night — which would contain DNA evidence to help identify her assailant — wouldn’t be tested for almost a decade.
Alexenko tells The Post she was “relieved” when she first got the call from the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office telling her that her kit had finally been tested 10 years later.
“I was like, ‘This is great, it’s moving forward — I can’t believe it after all these years,’ ” says the now-45-year-old Bay Shore, LI, resident, who has written a book about her experience, “A Survivor’s Journey: From Victim to Advocate” (Amazon Publishing).
“It wasn’t until later that I thought, ‘Holy mackerel! Why on earth did this take so long?’ ”
Alexenko’s situation is not unique. It turned out her rape kit was one of 17,000 unprocessed kits languishing in a storage facility in New York. (The city has since eliminated its rape-kit backlog.) A USA Today investigation in 2015 found that there were at least 70,000 unprocessed rape kits in the US; some estimates put the number at hundreds of thousands.
“It just doesn’t make sense,” says Alexenko. “Why would you put someone through this very invasive, whole-body exam, which is traumatizing in itself, take their rape kit and just let it sit there?”
After her rape, Alexenko — who had moved to NYC to study filmmaking — went back home to Ontario. While she had the support of her mother and friends, she found herself drinking heavily to numb her pain.
“I just felt so much grief,” says Alexenko, who felt particularly guilty for not being able to recall her assailant’s face to police. “I blamed myself for not being able to help catch this man.”
In 2007, four years after she received that hopeful call from the DA, police caught Alexenko’s rapist, Victor Rondon. In 2008, he was found guilty of burglary, robbery, two counts of rape, sodomy and sexual abuse and was sentenced to 44 to 107 years in prison.
“I was just grateful that he was put behind bars,” says Alexenko, who fainted when she saw him at his trial. “My body just shut down. It wasn’t just that I was remembering stuff; it was like I was there [at the scene of the crime again].”
Now, Alexenko is fighting so that other survivors can have the chance to get closure regarding their cases. In 2011, she founded nonprofit Natasha’s Justice Project. The goal: to get rid of rape-kit backlogs in every state and implement a method to process all new kits within 30 days.
The big problem is that there is no uniform way to process rape kits — and it can be timeconsuming and costly.
“We have a lot of cases where police don’t think of somebody as being a credible witness, so they won’t [do it],” says Alexenko.
Typically the hospital transfers rape kits to local law enforcement, which catalogs them and then sends them to a forensic lab for analysis. The forensic scientists then upload the DNA profile into a government system that can compare the DNA against profiles of convicted offenders. But some local police departments lack the technology to connect to the federal database.
Some communities are beset with enormous backlogs. Memphis police, for example, found more than 12,000 unprocessed kits in 2013. (Rape kits can pile up in various locations: at the hospital, at a lab or at the police department.) Although it costs between $1,000 and $1,500 to process one kit, money can be saved when serial rapists are caught before they attack again.
The Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network estimates that processing the kits could save $12.9 billion a year in potential medical costs, lost wages and other damages to victims.
Still, Alexenko says that people are taking sexual assault — and the rape-kit backlog — more seriously. In 2015, the US Department of Justice announced it would be dedicating $41 million in federal grant money to test the 70,000 known unprocessed rape kits nationwide, and many communities have taken advantage of it.
“There’s been such a shift — and I think it’s because there have been so many survivors who have come forward,” says Alexenko. “There are so many amazing people who are fighting so hard, and this book really is to express my gratitude to them.”