PBPD, state partner to complete evidence testing

Whether it is a burglary or a homicide, it is Poplar Bluff Police Detective Dan Mustain’s job to process that scene for evidence.

“On a crime scene, we are looking for things like trace evidence, which could consist of bodily fluids, fingerprints, tool marks,” explained Mustain, the department’s evidence technician.

DNA evidence can be both bodily fluids and “touch DNA, so we collect those samples, then they will be packaged so they can be preserved,” he said. “Then, they are placed into evidence and eventually sent to the Missouri State Highway Patrol Crime Lab in Cape Girardeau” for testing.

Mustain said the patrol’s lab at Cape Girardeau does fingerprints, DNA and drug analysis.

For ballistics, such as comparing shell casings to firearms, that evidence is sent to the patrol’s lab in Springfield for testing, Mustain said.

“The turn around on drugs is usually like a month,” Mustain said. “On DNA, typically it’s a bit longer, like three months.”

The turn around on testing sexual assault kits, Mustain said, is “usually pretty long, closer to six months or so.”

Mustain said it is departmental policy that every sexual assault kit is sent for testing at the patrol crime lab.

The sexual assault kits take longer to test because there is a “whole list of things (medical personnel) collect in a sexual assault,” Mustain said.

Any testing done at the crime lab is not charged to the department, Mustain said.

The police department, according to Capt. J.R. Keirsey, pays an annual, one-time fee to the state to cover testing.

Like a gym membership, Keirsey said, it doesn’t matter whether the department sends one piece of evidence to be tested or 100,000, it’s covered by that fee,

To clear out the back-log of untested sexual assault kits, the state of Missouri received $2.8 million in federal grant funding.

The grant covered the process of completing an inventory of untested kits statewide and the initial shipping and testing of about 1,500 kits. The testing is being done at a private lab in Virginia.

The Missouri Attorney General’s Office “sent us a letter with the criteria,” Mustain said. “First, they did an inventory of all our kits.”

The inventory showed the police department had 48 untested sexual assault kits. None of those tests have been included in the initial round of testing.

“Based on their criteria, they gave us a list of kits to have tested, to be retested for new DNA,” Mustain explained.

Thirty-six of the kits held by the police department previously were tested, but need to be tested again, under advanced DNA testing.

As officers investigate cases, “we try to limit the amount of (evidence) that we send” to the lab, Mustain said. “There are only specific instances where they will take a DNA sample and put it into CODIS (Combined DNA Index System).”

The reasoning, Mustain said, is “they don’t want innocent people’s DNA in CODIS, so for us to send a sample, we have to be certain it is the offender’s DNA.”

The crime lab, Mustain said, recently changed its policies and will no longer accept bodily fluids, such as saliva found on a soda can, for “touch DNA” in property crimes to verify a suspect’s identity.

“I’ve got a case that comes to mind where I worked a burglary at a business that the suspect drank from a can, and I lifted prints from a display case that he got into,” Mustain said. “So, I got DNA; I sent it to the crime lab … I got a match on both the fingerprints and the DNA.”

With the DNA evidence and a video of the suspect, “there’s no saying it wasn’t me,” Mustain said.