$1 MILLION RAPE KIT EFFORT: 140 DNA hits, no arrests
It’s been more than two years since the Palm Beach County Sheriff ’s Office began a $1 million effort to examine previously untested rape kits dating back to 1980 for potential DNA matches. So far, here’s what’s been found.
In December 2015, the Palm Beach County Sheriff ’s Office embarked on a $1 million project to test 1,500 rape evidence kits that had been sitting on its shelves for as long as 40 years.
The initiative came on the heels of both state and nationwide efforts to test DNA in years-old rape cases. Similar efforts in other cities have led to dozens and even hundreds of arrests, giving victims long denied a chance at justice the opportunity to face their attackers in court.
As of March, nearly 1,000 rape kits had been tested, producing 140 DNA matches to suspects in a national crime database. The testing created dozens of new leads in unsolved cases, yet many have since been closed and sheriff ’s deputies have failed to make a single arrest.
A Palm Beach Post review of more than 1,200 pages of police reports also shows that deputies did not attempt to contact the victim or suspect in at least half the 82 cases with new leads. In 11 of those cases, investigators said the statute of limitations had expired, but in the vast majority, they made no such claim.
Several suspects in those cases went on to get arrested in other rapes while the kits containing their DNA collected dust. This includes a man who later was charged in the rapes of at least five women in Palm Beach County and a man accused of raping a woman who used a wheelchair just weeks before DNA from a 2012 kit linked him to the rape of a woman from Belle Glade.
Detectives declared 62 of the 82 cases with new leads inactive without ever contacting a suspect. That includes three men Post reporters easily found at their homes.
Detectives said they didn’t contact victims because in the days and hours following the alleged attacks, the victims had been either “uncooperative”
or had signed paperwork declining to press charges. But in sexual assault cases, which hinge on a victim’s cooperation, advocates, prosecutors, defense attorneys
and survivors themselves say using the victims’ decisions at the height of their trauma is wrong.
“You can’ t assume the person’s frame of mind the night of the attack is the same fifive or 10 years later,” said Sharon Daugherty, outreach coordinator for Palm Beach County’s victims’ services center. “Their heads are spinning. They’re so traumatized they don’t know what to do.”
Sheriffff ’s offifficials declined to answer The Post’s specifific questions about why there have been no arrests and why so many cases remain inactive. In a written statement, approved by Sheriff Ric Bradshaw, officials said “there are good re asons” for detectives not to contact victims.
“These re asons have everything to do with our ability to move forward and prosecute
their particular case,” Capt. Steven Strivelli wrote. “We at PBSO, Special Victims Unit, are being very careful not to unnecessarily re-victimize a sexual battery victim/survivor when there simply isn’t a good reason to, as some victims and their families become quite emotional upon contact from a detective.”
Strivelli said the department is still investigating “a number of cases.” The Post’s review showed 20 cases marked “active,” includ
ing one case that was closed but then reopened after the newspaper’s review began. The cases remain open even though in most cases the DNA matches were made a year ago or longer, the records show.
Detectives in some cases made no attempts to follow up on new leads until The Post requested the reports. In the most extreme case, detectives reopened the case nearly two years after the sheriffff ’s offiffice received the DNA report from the crime laboratory.
Palm Beach County State Attorney Dave Aronberg, whose offiffice is responsible for prosecuting the crimes, said bringing rapists to justice is one of his top priorities.
But he declined to comment on the sheriffff ’s lack of arrests and failure to follow up on new leads.
“Our experience with PBSO has been that they’re a very professional organization that does great work,” Aronberg said. “As
far as this issue, I don’t want to get involved with the inner workings of the agency.”
A ride, then trauma
Just after midnight on the day before Thanksgiving six years ago, a woman standing outside Bobby’s Market on Third Street in Belle Glade accepted a ride home from a man in a gray Ford Focus.
The man introduced himself simply as “Isaac.” He let her stop at a McDonald’s drive-thru to order a cheeseburger and oatmeal. Then, she told police, the
man drove her to a fifield near the Belle Glade Marina, got in the back seat with her and raped her.
Like women across the country who report rape, the Belle Glade woman in 2012 agreed to let hospital workers conduct an extensive physical exam to collect evidence from her body that might identify her attacker. But the sheriff ’s office did not test that evidence until 2016, as part of its initiative to process backlogged rape kits.
In March 2017, detectives received a break in the case: The DNA evidence collected from her body matched Isaac Johnson, a man already in the national database of violent of ff ff ff ff ff fenders. Moreover, it wasn’t too late to prosecute the case. Yet detective s never attempted to inform the woman of the DNA match and to see whether she wanted to move forward with prosecution, a police report shows. Sgt. Mike Sclafani
closed the case without any follow-up, writing, “This case will remain inactivated, as the victim was not cooperative.”
Sheriffff ’s detectives had stopped checking on the case in 2012 after she, like many victims, stopped communicating. Before that, she was interviewed separately by a nurse and a deputy, who questioned why she didn’t scream, run away or fifififight offff her attacker. The deputy noted in his report that she was yawning, looked bored and her clothes did not appear disheveled.
“He’s four times my size ,” the woman told the deputy. “I couldn’t do anything.”
How is your TV dressed?
Such questions, said attorney Takisha Richardson, who until recently prosecuted rape cases as head of the Special Victims Unit of the Palm Beach County State Attorney’s Offiffice, are inappropriate in sexual assault cases and a sign of problems with “rape culture” across the nation.
Richardson, who now rep - resents sexual assault victims in civil litigation at the Cohen
Milstein law fifirm, remembered how she and other prosecutors
enlightened prospective rape case jurors about the problem. She asked jurors to imagine they had gone home and found their television had been stolen.
Would an offifficer arriving at the scene ask them how the television was dressed? Would they ask whether the juror was sure he or she really didn’t want the thief to steal it?
“No, they would just start offff by believing them,” Richardson said. “If someone snatched your purse and you could provide a description of who took it, law enforcement would be on the lookout. But when someone violates another person’s body, oftentimes we don’t put a value on that.”
Richardson said a few sheriffff ’s detectives assigned to tackling backlogged cases, including Sclafani, were among the best. But even she said a previous lack of cooperation should not stop deputies from attempting to contact victims when new leads arise.
“That’s not OK,” said Richardson. “You make the attempt no matter what.”
Woman in a wheelchair
The report also shows no indication the sheriffff ’s offiffice attempted to contact Johnson, who just three weeks before the break in the Belle Glade woman’s case had been arrested on sexual battery charges.
A paralyzed woman told West Palm Beach police Johnson dragged her out of her wheelchair and raped her at the dead
end of 20th Street just before 11 p.m. When the woman tried to scream, Johnson choked her and
hit her head with his fifists and a piece of wood, she told police.
Police photographed her injuries. Two witnesses said they heard someone yell: “Help! I don’t want to be raped.”
Johnson told police the woman was a prostitute and the sex was consensual. He said he heard the woman say “no” but thought it was because he hadn’t paid her yet
and she wanted the money fifirst.
The woman refused to get a rape kit examination, and Aronberg’s office declined to press charges.
“Although there was probable cause to make an arrest, the evidence cannot prove all legally required elements of the crime alleged and is insuffifficient to support a criminal prosecution,” Assistant State Attorney Lindsay Bruno wrote.
Invasive examinations
After someone is sexually assaulted, she or he has the option to go to a hospital or health facility for a free “rape kit” examination. It can include a test for sexually transmitted diseases, a pregnancy test and the collection of DNA evidence left behind by the perpetrator.
Evidence collection can be invasive. It involves getting poked and prodded in the same places where the person was violated. The examiner may collect biological samples, including blood, semen, urine and hair.
The evidence is placed into a box called a “rape kit” that is turned over to law enforcement if the victim chooses to report the rape to police. A crime laboratory can test the biological samples for DNA, which can be searched for possible matches against an FBI database of violent offffffffffffenders called the Combined DNA Index System, or CODIS.
Yet police agencies and crime laboratories across the country have allowed hundreds of thousands of rape kits to go untested for decades, denying justice to countless survivors while letting
many accused rapists walk free. Ilse Knecht, director of policy and advocacy for the Joyful Heart Foundation’s End The Backlog program, which aims to pass rape kit reform in all 50 states, said for decades the criminal justice system has “failed to take sexual assault cases seriously.” Sexual assault cases are not prioritized in funding, training, labs or prosecution, she said.
Kits went untested
An audit of Florida’s backlog published in January 2017 found more than 13,000 untested rape kits, including 1,800 in Palm Beach County dating to the 1970s. The audit was a driving force behind
the Legislature’s enactment in March 2017 of a law requiring police to submit rape kits for testing within 30 days and crime labs to test them within 120.
The backlog in Florida built up in part because, until three years ago, the Palm Beach County Sheriffff ’s Offiffice and other law enforcement agencies had a practice of not testing rape kits unless they knew who the alleged attackers were and could get samples of their DNA to test against, several sources said. However, the sheriffff ’s offiffice denies it ever had such a practice.
In fact, said Cecelia Crouse, who retired in May as its crime lab director, the sheriffff ’s offiffice had a policy since 1994 to test all rape kits. Since 2010, Crouse said, nearly 30 percent of DNA reports from rape kits analyzed in the lab were in cases in which no suspect had been identifified.
She did not address the backlog of untested rape kits.
While the Legislature discussed the bill in late 2015 and public support for it mounted, Bradshaw set aside $1 million to eliminate the agency’s backlog, Crouse said. The cost per kit, reports show, was at least $645.
Taking issue with this story after its publication Wednesday online, Crouse added: “The PBSO initiative team has spent thousands of hours locating, researching, evaluating, testing and reporting on
the status of the (sexual assault) cases involved ... for the purpose of showing good faith effffffffffffort to address the past and move forward into the future.”
As of March, 994 kits had been tested, roughly a third of which contained usable DNA samples, sheriffff ’s offiffice records obtained by The Post show. The sheriffff ’s office searched those samples against CODIS and found 140 matches.
New lead, no follow-up
Although the cases were sometimes decades old, most contained supplemental reports from the past two years detailing the actions the sheriffff ’s offiffice took after learning of the matches.
The supplements often listed the name and birth date of the suspect. All the victims’ names were redacted from public view, a requirement of state law.
In several cases, the DNA matches were of little value to the sheriffff ’s offiffice because they matched men already known to deputies, including many who said the sex was consensual, and several men deputies arrested at the time. In others, the victim or the suspect had died.
The Post identifified 62 cases in which a DNA match created a new lead because the DNA matched a previously unknown suspect or one who had not claimed consensual sex with the alleged victim. The sheriffff ’s offiffice said that the statute of limitations expired in 11 of them.
Of the 62 cases, the sheriffff ’s office did not attempt to contact the victim in 40 and did not speak to any suspects.
In four cases, detectives followed up with the victims only after The Post began its review, even though records show the sheriff’ s office had received reports from the crime lab roughly a year to two years earlier. One case status was changed to “active” only after The Post requested its supplemental report.
The most common reason the