After a man held a knife to her throat, forced her into her car and repeatedly raped her, Helena Lazaro underwent a painful and humiliating medical forensic examination. The 17-year-old wanted her attacker caught.
She never imagined the evidence collected in what is known as a rape kit would sit untouched for years by the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department. And by the time she discovered the identity of her attacker, prosecutors couldn’t charge him with the rape because the statute of limitations had expired in California.
“I think about that 17-year-old girl, the 25-year-old girl, the 30-year-old woman – all the versions of myself who have suffered,” Lazaro says. “That suffering could have ended much sooner.”
Victims’ rights groups estimate that hundreds of thousands of rape kits remain untested at police departments and crime lab storage facilities nationwide—thus far a partial inventory of California by the End the Backlog Initiative has identified some 9,000 untested kits. But the precise number remains a mystery because most states, including California, don’t inventory rape kits, and rape survivors sometimes struggle to get information about their own cases.
To continue reading this article by Samantha Young, go to: https://ww2.kqed.org/news/2017...e-tested-or-tallied/
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