‘A lot of predators’: 30K rape kits tested in Washington since 2015
VANCOUVER, Wash. (KOIN) — Eryn Hastay waited nearly 300 days to get her rape kit results, and 2.5 years to see her abuser behind bars. But she's not alone in the delayed justice.
"Those things need to be done and processed very quickly, because that person can be, like in my case, he was less than two miles away from me the entire time," Hastay said Monday. "It's a great feeling that it's done and this person's in prison, but it shouldn't have taken 290 days to get it done."
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Just 10 years ago there were about 10,000 sexual assault kits sitting on the shelves in Washington state , some dating back decades. Now the process is sped up for survivors and the backlog is nearly wiped out.
On Monday, a group of activists, state and local lawmakers, lawyers and victim advocates provided an update to the Crime Lab Rape Kit Backlog Report and progress that's been made over the past year.
Thanks to a partnership between the Washington State Patrol Crime Labe, victim advocate groups like the National Women's Coalition Against Violence and Exploitation (NWCAVE) and legislative leaders who began championing this work after noticing scores of untested kits.
"These ladies walk around not knowing if the person passing on the street is the person who raped them because their kit has not been tested," said Monica Alexander, the executive director of the Washington State Criminal Justice Training Commission.
"After discovering thousands of kits, you know, I was just heartbroken," Rep. Tina Orwall (D-Des Moines) said Monday. "To know we have a system in place where this is never going to happen again, those kits will never sit on a shelf, the survivor will have a voice, they can check the status of the kits in the process, I'm really proud. I'm really proud that we made things right for survivors."
Orwall helped pass a law in 2015 requiring all sexual assault kits be processed for DNA, which prompted the WSP Vancouver Crime Lab to build a high-throughput facility in 2019 to outsource and nearly eliminate the backlog in the state.
In 2018, Washington created a new system that allowed sexual assault victims to track their own test kits using a barcode . Officials previously told KOIN 6 that the state was sending 200-300 kits out for testing every month.
In May 2022, the lab began processing kits on a 45-day turnaround. As of now, the crime lab processes 87% of the state's sexual assault kits within that time frame.
To date, more than 30,000 kits have been tested since 2015, which includes in-house and outsourced kits.
"Each of those kits is a survivor whose voices were never heard, who didn't have a path for justice," Orwall said. "And it also left a lot of predators in our community to reoffend."
Washington state also introduced trauma-informed training for law enforcement and prosecutors to better work with survivors like Eryn Hastay.
"You don't just sit through a 13-hour rape kit for nothing," Hastay sid. "So believing them, and making them feel like their story matters, they matter, and that their case is going to do justice."
Oregon finished testing their backlogged rape kits in 2018 by sending about 3,000 untested kits from more than a dozen counties to a lab in Salt Lake City for testing – offering some relief to the Oregon State Police crime lab.
