Coroner’s office is overwhelmed with Cincinnati rape kits

CINCINNATI — The Hamilton County coroner said Wednesday her crime lab will no longer process rape kits from Cincinnati because of a backlog of work. The city manager said it will causes delays, but the coroner said it will only speed things up.

In a letter to Cincinnati police dated July 6, Coroner Lakshmi Kode Sammarco said she was placing a moratorium on rape kit testing that would last at least through the end of the year.

“The backlog of cases with our DNA section continues to grow, and as such we have been forced to look for a way to triage the cases that are submitted to the laboratory,” Sammarco wrote in the letter.

Seventy-four unprocessed kits were sent back to the Cincinnati Police Department.

In a memo to the city council, City Manager Harry Black said the coroner’s decision was made without warning.

“For years, the city has relied on the Hamilton County crime lab to perform this function so vital to solving rape cases,” Black wrote. “CPD will now send these kits to the State of Ohio for processing through their lab. Significant delays are expected as a result of this sudden and unexpected disruption.”

However, Sammarco told The Enquirer she feels Black’s memo is misleading. She said the entire reason for her decision was to speed up processing of the kits and she had spoken to CPD, the state Bureau of Criminal Investigations and the prosecutor’s office before writing the letter.

She said her DNA section, made up of four full-time technicians, has a backlog of 556 cases, and each technician can work on only one case at a time. She explained that staffing has been a concern and that it took nearly two years for the county to approve hiring one more DNA technician who was brought on this spring.

Sammarco said it would have taken her lab at least four months to process all of the evidence. The current turnaround time for BCI in London, where CPD’s rape kits will now be processed, is 21 to 25 days. Police Chief Eliot Isaac said BCI informed him most requests could be processed within two weeks.