Reply to MoCo Child Rape case--time to process rape kit

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[quote=Anonymous]The rape kit contains things like underwear, fingernail scrapings, swabs of fluids, etc.  All that has to be analyzed first to determine if there is any human DNA.   Then it has to screen out the victim's DNA.   Then it might have to screen out a relative's DNA (maybe mom was the one who folded the underwear the little girl was wearing and a strand of hair was in it).

Getting the DNA sequence takes a couple of days.

But there is pre-DNA preparation I just mentioned, case documentation for evidentiary purposes, and then if a suspect is not actually known, running it through CODIS.

Once there is a match, then the lab has to verify through other means that they are identical.

In some situations, the police department still has to get a search warrant to get a DNA sample from the potential suspect.  No idea if that had to happen in this case, but that can also take awhile.

Add to it the backlog.  And a lot of the backlog is due to insufficient staffing, both within police department crime labs and private labs that departments contract with.   Montgomery County police does both.

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