Missouri receives additional $2 million grant to test backlogged rape kits
SPRINGFIELD, Mo. (KY3) - Missouri Attorney General Eric Schmitt announced an additional $2 million in grant funds meant to expedite the testing of the state’s backlogged rape kits.
The announcement was made at a news conference in Springfield on Thursday.
“It’s a national issue,” said Judge M. Keithley Williams, the director of the SAFE Kit Initiative for Missouri. “Missouri is one of the states that has decided to tackle the problem statewide.”
The effort began by securing $2.8 million in federal funds for a three-0phase plan, intended to find and inventory all the backlogged rape kit cases that had not been tested. The initiative discovered around 7,000 kits statewide dating as far back as 1980, and determined that 4,200 still had a chance of being tested successfully.
The additional grant money will allow for the first 1,500 of the untested kits to be processed at a private lab in Virginia.
“That’s why I think today is such a significant day,” said Attorney General Eric Schmitt. “Because it’s round two of the funding to actually get these kits off to a lab for testing as we get those hits to pursue justice, to pursue criminal prosecutions where we can.”
Springfield was chosen as a pilot program for the testing. So far 110 rape kits from the Springfield area have been sent for testing, with another 119 still to be done. Just one month into the testing, eleven DNA matches have been made statewide and turned over for investigation, with seven of those involving Springfield cases.
“I just want people to realize that just because there’s a hit (doesn’t mean) somebody’s going to jail,” Williams said. “That’s not the case. This is just part of the investigation. But we’re the first ones to reopen some cases and hopefully the first agency to bring forth some charges.”
With each test costing $1,000 that means the bill for Springfield’s tests alone would be $229,000 which is why officials believe the federal funding is key to the program’s success.
There’s still one more phase to come: a statewide computer tracking system will catalog every single kit. The state hopes to have that up and running by next summer.
“It’s going to bring some peace of mind to folks who’ve worried in the past about why we had a backlog,” Williams said. “Well, it’s because there wasn’t a system to track those. Every agency and hospital pretty much chose how long to keep those kits, or what to do with them if they weren’t going to be tested. So this will formalize and standardize all that so we will never have this issue again.”
Because of the cost and the time it takes to process each kit, state officials say they don’t know how long it will take to test all 4,200 of the rape kits, but they are determined to get them all done.
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