Crime labs all over the country have piled up a backlog of rape kits to be tested, some dating back to the 1990s. That is unconscionable and no excuses are acceptable! A rapist can continue to assault more victims as long as he remains undetected.
EVIDENCE IN TEEN’S 1995 RAPE LEADS TO NEW CHARGES
Key suspect Roland Ali Westbrooks already is serving time for a similar rape in 1997
By Anita Hassan
Houston Chronicle
July 12, 2011
In August 1995, a 16-year-old Houston girl was awakened in the middle of the night by a strange man standing in her bedroom doorway.
He walked over and put a pillow over her head. As she wept, he raped her, ordering her not to make a sound or he would kill her. Then he stole some money and left.
After calling police, the teen underwent a sexual assault examination. That rape kit evidence was placed in the Houston Police Department property room — and that's where it sat, untested for 12 years.
Last month, after a Houston Police Department investigator re-examined the case and requested the evidence be tested, the identity of the alleged rapist was uncovered: Roland Ali Westbrooks, 36, convicted and sentenced in 1997 for raping another Houston woman.
Westbrooks, serving a 28-year sentence in a Texas prison after pleading guilty to the 1997 rape charge, was charged Monday with aggravated sexual assault of the 16-year-old, according to court records.
This is the first such case to come to light since the Houston Chronicle reported last month that almost 4,000 sexual assault kits — some dating to the 1990s — sit in an HPD property room freezer awaiting testing.
HPD crime lab officials have said the slow process in testing the evidence is due to a lack of resources. In the past, HPD officials have declined to comment how the evidence is being processed by their crime lab personnel in cases that are considered to be active investigations.
State Sen. John Whitmire, D-Houston, on Tuesday said the Westbrooks case is an example of how the backlog of untested evidence by HPD's crime lab can and has delayed justice for rape victims.
"What if they (HPD) had done their proper test in 1995?" said Whitmire, who has spoken on the issues concerning untested sexual assault evidence for years. "Maybe the 1995 (case) would have been solved in a timely manner and the 1997 (case) would have never occurred."
It is unknown at this time when or how long Westbrooks, who has a criminal history in Harris County dating to 1994, was entered into the FBI's Combined DNA Index System, also known as CODIS, a national database used to store DNA profiles that includes convicted offenders.
In September 2007, a Houston police officer assigned to review the 1995 case discovered that evidence collected from the victim had "never been submitted to any laboratory for any analysis," according to court records. The officer in the case could not be reached for comment on Tuesday.
The same month, the officer requested the evidence be tested. Two years later, she learned a forensic analysis recovered an unidentified DNA profile from evidence in the sexual assault kit, according to court records.
That DNA profile was then submitted to the DPS crime lab to be entered into CODIS, and nine months later yielded a match to Westbrooks.
After conducting a follow-up interview with the victim in the 1995 case, the investigator learned Westbrooks was in a Texas Department of Criminal Justice facility for the 1997 case. Another DNA sample was taken from the alleged rapist to compare it to the evidence from the rape kit.
On June 30, HPD crime lab results showed the DNA found on evidence from the sexual assault kit belonged to Westbrooks.
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