Many times over the course of the last couple of weeks, people have approached me regarding the passage of legislation expanding the New York State DNA Databank. Some have been congratulatory, some have been concerned, but, mostly, a great many have simply had more questions than anything else. To the ordinary person, DNA is something that you hear about on TV crime dramas or read about in biology class. Unfortunately, I didn’t come about my knowledge of DNA through either of those modes but, rather, through circumstances that I would give anything to change.

Eleven years ago, I was a stay-at-home mom, raising my children—two sons and two daughters—and living a rather ordinary life. That all changed in the blink of an eye. Early one morning, after my husband had left for work, a man carrying a knife broke into my home. The very first—and last—room that he came across was that of my 12-year-old daughter, asleep in her bed. He raped her, cut her and then robbed her. Before leaving our home, he told her that if she told anyone, he would return to our home and kill not only her, but our entire family.

After going through the difficult but necessary procedures that follow a rape—the hospital exam, the police sketches, the detective interviews—we returned to our home and our lives, and we began to wait. And wait we did. When the months began to turn into years, we did a DNA grand jury indictment, meaning the DNA evidence from the crime was indicted as a “John Doe” defendant, thereby lifting the burden—and fear—that the statute of limitations might come around before an arrest did. Then, we went home to wait. Again.

Despite a detective who never gave up hope, it was hard for us to remain optimistic. Keep in mind that my daughter and all of my children, were very much aware that the perpetrator was still out there—free—and in their minds, very capable of returning, as he had promised he would. Due to “hits” in the DNA Databank with evidence from other crime scenes, we knew the perpetrator was still in the area and had been linked to other rapes, but we did not know his identity. When you spend your life looking over your shoulder, everyone becomes a suspect and the concept of being safe at home doesn’t exist. This was how we lived our lives for ten years.

Miraculously, the day came that we never thought we would see—an arrest was made in my daughter’s case. The perpetrator wasn’t caught in the act of raping one of his subsequent victims. He was caught because he stole money from his employer—a petit larceny. For a decade, he wreaked havoc on countless lives and what finally put him behind bars was the theft of a few dollars.

As odd as it may sound, my family got lucky, if it’s even imaginable to use such a term. Our luck came from the fact that the misdemeanor for which he was convicted was, at the time, one of the few  convictions in New York State that required him to give a DNA sample. Had New York not expanded its DNA Databank in 2006 to include some misdemeanors, the man who raped my daughter might not have been found. Yet despite our relief, we knew that more needed to be done. New Yorkers shouldn’t have to get lucky to get justice and the law should require DNA samples be given upon conviction for all crimes.

To that end, countless people fought for years for the DNA Databank to include samples for all convictions. I am proud to say that Governor Cuomo signed the expansion into law last month. It was a huge victory for all families in New York State. Not only does it ensure violent criminals are held accountable, but it will also go a long way towards preventing crime in the first place.

The arrest of my daughter’s attacker came with the guarantee that he can no longer devastate other families. It’s hard to say how many would-be victims would have been saved by this one arrest from the life of fear and “not knowing” our family experienced. The passage of this legislation has the potential to save thousands the heartache my family has endured. It also offers protection and hope to the wrongfully accused. Its passage was long overdue.

While nothing can ever undo the hurt my family has suffered, this new law does guarantee that the residents of New York will be safer. It offers hope that fewer parents will ever know such sorrow, that fewer little girls will live their lives looking over their shoulders and that families are safer both on the streets and in their homes. As New Yorkers, we should settle for nothing less.

“How do you pick up the threads of an old life? How do you go on, when in your heart you begin to understand: there is no going back? There are some things that time cannot mend; some hurts that go too deep, that have taken hold.”
–Lord of the Rings: Return of the King

J. R. R. Tolkien has a knack for putting thoughts into words that I, alas, do not. How could I possibly put into words my journey and all the events that brought me to where I am today?

In 1993 I was violently raped, sodomized and robbed at gunpoint by an unknown assailant. When I escaped and thankfully found myself in my apartment, my roommate insisted that I go to the hospital. I agreed to wait for an ambulance, even though my first instinct was to take a shower. I am so very grateful today that I made that choice.

In the early 1990s, DNA profiling was in its infancy. Still, my medical examiners were aware of the fact that my body was a crime scene. Great care was taken into collecting the evidence necessary to find my perpetrator. If we only knew back then that 16 years later we would find him, perhaps it would have been easier for us all. It was clear to me that the “evidence collection” was a difficult process for them as well as for me. Medical professionals are there to heal–-how do they process a sexual assault?

Following the sexual assault and after all leads were exhausted by the New York City Police Department, life for me went on, as it has a habit of doing. We didn’t find him. Did I find me and go on? Yes, I did. I healed, as did my family and friends who embraced and loved me when I struggled with the events that nearly took my life.

Ten years later, in 2003, I received a call from the New York City District Attorney’s office. My rape kit, which had been sitting on a shelf, had at last been processed. I was asked to testify before a Grand Jury in an attempt to “stop the clock” on the 10 year statute of limitations (New York has since overturned its statute of limitations in 2007 but many states continue to have a statute). I had long since reconciled with the fact that my perpetrator would never be held accountable for his actions. But now there was hope.

The Grand Jury indicted the DNA from my kit in 2003. What that meant was that despite the fact that at the time the statute of limitations was 10 years, we could charge my rapist with the crime even if we found him 50 years into the future. For the first time in many years, I felt hopeful. Although I had healed (as much as one can heal) from my assault, the fact that a person who could commit such violent crimes was walking around the streets potentially harming others plagued me.

In 2007 they found my rapist through his DNA profile. After a cathartic trial, Victor Rondon was tried before a jury of his peers and in 2008, was found guilty on all 8 counts of his violent assault against me. He is in jail now, and for a very long time. The best part for me is that he can never hurt anyone ever again.

My rape kit sat on a shelf for many years. My rape kit was not just a number in a police department. My rape kit was me-–a human being. Every rape kit that sits on the shelf is a human being. Every rape kit that sits on a shelf has the potential to solve a crime. The Combined DNA Index System (CODIS) found my perpetrator through DNA profiling and I am living, breathing proof of the fact that we can find these criminals. I am not, and should not be, an anomaly.

Natasha has recently started a non-profit foundation, Natasha’s Justice Project, with the aim of resolving the rape kit backlog. You can be in touch with her and her new organization at info@advocatesforhope.org.

Human Rights Watch Report: “I Used to Think the Law Would Protect Me” Illinois’s Failure to Test Rape Kits

A young woman, Stephanie (not her real name), came to see me in my New York office. She had been raped in Chicago two years earlier, and had heard from an advocate there for rape victims that I was writing a report on untested DNA evidence from rape cases in Illinois. I took her for coffee so we could get to know each other before I interviewed her, and we talked about her teaching job, her move to New York City and my new son.

Then, in the middle of our introduction to one another, Stephanie said: “After this experience, I don’t feel safe anymore. I am a tough girl, but it made me feel like if something happened, the law isn’t there for me. It doesn’t really work.”

Stephanie was talking about the fact that the DNA evidence, known as a “rape kit”—collected over a period of hours in the emergency room with medical personnel examining her entire body—had never been tested. Her rapist had never been interviewed by the police or arrested. And now, two years later, she was trying to come to terms with the way her case was handled.

I spoke to Stephanie at the early stages of research that I did for Human Rights Watch into the rape kit backlog in Illinois. What I suspected, but had not yet confirmed, was that there were many survivors like her who had seen very little investigation happen with their rape case. What I found is that the vast majority of DNA evidence collected from rape victims in Illinois is never tested and that the arrest rate for rape is just 11 percent compared to 24 percent nationally.

Just as Stephanie’s story is more common in Illinois than she or I realized, I hear similar accounts from rape victims across the country. Investigations by non-profit organizations and national and local media outlets have uncovered rape kit backlogs in numerous cities, which demonstrates we have a national problem on our hands. In the past year alone, rape kit backlogs have been discovered in Los Angeles, Houston, Detroit, Nashville, Baltimore, San Diego, and Oakland.

The national arrest rate for rape is at 24 percent—the lowest rate for all violent crimes—a strong indication that justice is not working as well as it should for rape victims. One simple step to address the issue would be to send rape kits for testing.

National studies have shown that cases in which rape kit evidence was tested were more likely to proceed through the criminal justice system and lead to arrests. Once New York City adopted the Giuliani-era policy to test every booked rape kit, its arrest rate for rape rose from 40 percent to 70 percent. In Los Angeles, a recent decision to test every booked rape kit uncovered DNA evidence from suspects in other rape cases.

My research in Illinois, the first state-wide analysis of the rape kit backlog, appeared in a Human Rights Watch report, “‘I Used to Think the Law Would Protect Me’: Illinois’s Failure to Test Rape Kits.” With comprehensive testing data from 127 of 267 jurisdictions in Illinois, we found that only 1,474 of the 7,494 rape kits booked into evidence since 1995 could be confirmed as tested. That suggests 80 percent of rape kits may never have been examined.

Yet there is good news for Illinois. A new law, the 2010 Sexual Assault Evidence Submission Act, championed by Illinois Attorney General Lisa Madigan, has the potential to remedy the state’s rape kit backlog. The law, enacted September 1, 2010, makes Illinois the first state to require law enforcement officials to send track rape kit data, and send every rape kit in police custody to the crime lab for DNA testing within 10 days. You can read more about the efforts in Illinois in this recent Huffington Post article by Lisa Madigan.

In my experience, rape kit backlogs seem to be found im many places one decides to investigate. Which means laws alone are not enough. We have to give law enforcement the support they need to do their jobs. State and federal governments have to allocate the resources, training, technical support and funding to make sure every kit is tested.

A few months ago, I spoke again with Stephanie. She recalled for me how she pursued her case in the months after the rape. The detective assigned to her case worked the night shift. So every night she would set her alarm for 3 a.m., wake up, and call the station, hoping to reach him and get the case moving. “How stupid of me,” she said, “to have expected anything to come of those calls.”

In the words of a police officer I spoke with in Illinois said, “We need to do everything we can to encourage rape victims to come forward. One way we do that here is to make sure that we do everything in our power to solve their case.”

We all agree–rape victims like Stephanie should never feel “stupid” for expecting perpetrators to be brought to justice and prevented from raping again. With Illinois’s new law, the state is turning the page on its rape kit backlog and giving survivors like Stephanie a better shot at justice.

I wanted to share my story, to help add a sense of reality of the impact of the backlog on rape victims.

I was raped in 1984 by two men during a home invasion in Boston. They had a knife; I was blindfolded, raped repeatedly by both of them, tied up with a phone cord, gagged, and eventually left alive, much to my surprise. Perhaps it was the blindfold that saved my life. As I begged the men not to kill me, one of them said, “We don’t kill people. We just need the money. We’ve been doing this for seven years.” They were unafraid and unapologetic. They told me their first names; they did not wear gloves.

They left fingerprints all over the apartment, and I submitted to a rape kit thinking that this would help catch the men who did this.

The police interviewed me once. I called about a month after the attack and was asked by the detective why I was calling. I had been told they would call me if they knew anything. Honestly, the officer seemed annoyed; they said they would be in touch if they had a break in the case. I never heard from them again, no touching base, no effort to see how I was doing, no communication whatsoever.

Over the next seven years, there were a series of similar home invasion rapes in and around my neighborhood, and I have wondered if it was the same men who raped me.

Twenty years went by and I eventually went on with my life, periodically so impacted by the terror that I had experienced that I felt like I would never truly move past it – the nightmares, the startling, the constant feeling like my life was in danger. I now have a great life, but I will never forget this experience.

I knew that my rape kit was taken at a time, the 1980s, when DNA testing was not a routine part of a criminal case. But, in 2007, I read that the Boston Crime Lab had 6,000 untested rape kits, dating back to the mid 1980s that had never been tested. I began to hope that my kit might still be around, and could be tested to identify my attackers. I decided to find out more. Was my kit sitting in a refrigerator untested for 20 years? Might they have caught these men if they had bothered to test these kits? How many other women’s kits matched my own?

I called various offices—the police department that handled my case, the crime laboratory, and the prosecutor’s office. The answers were very hard to hear. Not because told me my kit was tested, or that it was untested, or that it was destroyed. They were hard to hear because no one was able to tell me what had happened to my kit. I was told:

• It’s probably not there. We doubt your kit is one of the untested ones but we’d never be able to find it anyway
• What’s the point in looking; the statute of limitations has passed.
• This was so long ago, they didn’t have a CODIS system then so they couldn’t have put your kit into a database.
• This is ancient history. Why bring up old wounds?

Wounds cannot truly heal if no effort is made to salve them. We expect our law enforcement personnel to protect us. Certainly one of the ways to do this is to get rapists off the street and prevent them from harming again. We know that money has been funneled to police departments by the Debbie Smith Act, but still, police departments have used the money for other purposes, rather than addressing the backlog, denying key evidence that could match rapists to their crimes.

A story a few months ago in the Boston Globe said that very little progress has been made on the backlog in Massachusetts. Who is being held accountable for this? Where is the outrage? These are major crimes. In my case, the rapists would have served a life sentence if caught and convicted. DNA evidence is the best evidence we can have to help catch criminals, leading up to prosecution. There are untested rape kits that could tie individuals to repeat crimes, and that evidence is sitting as if it is completely unimportant.

Perhaps it is too late for me to see justice in my case, but the rape kit backlog only adds to my sense of loss and trauma. How can there be one category of crimes that the police seem to disregard. Once cities have successfully addressed their backlog, serial rapists have been caught and convicted – as in New York City.

Please help ensure that this issue will be remedied. I urge you to advocate for legislation that will hold public officials accountable for this terrible set of circumstances.

For my 17th birthday, in 1996, my mom gave me a vintage VW Rabbit. Days later, at a self-service car wash practically in view of my home, a stranger approached me and forced me into the car at knife point, instructed me to drive to several locations, and repeatedly assaulted me.

After being held captive for hours, I convinced him to let me free. He threatened to kill my family if he heard a report of the crime on his police scanner, or saw his picture in the paper. He took my license so he’d know where I lived and promised that, one day, he would come back and make me “his girlfriend.”

After I flagged down a police cruiser and was taken to the hospital, I sat on a metal table for hours, where I endured the harrowing evidence collection process and disclosed every last humiliating detail of my assault to indifferent detectives.

Several days later, my VW was returned to me covered in handprints, the shape of my body imprinted in the dusty hood, where I had been pressed face down and assaulted in a truck yard.

No further contact was initiated by the Los Angeles sheriff’s department, and they did not return my calls for over 13 years.

For those 13 years, I lived in fear each day of my life. Every stranger was a potential rapist. Every trip to the store was an invitation for assault. Worst of all, every night in my home was the night of his return. I had every appearance of functionality, but my existence was ruled by terror. I couldn’t process the assault. Without any chance for resolution, the pain seemed bottomless. There was no justice. No peace. No hope.

I was led to believe that the kit was either lost or destroyed, and could not determine whether the evidence collected from me had even been analyzed.

In 2009, looking for closure, I began researching unprocessed rape kits in Los Angeles. I discovered that thousands of women in my city suffered the same devastating injustice I had. Women had been raped, even murdered, by criminals who could have been in jail if the evidence we suffered to provide had been processed. It was incomprehensible.

Then I met a rape victim’s advocate, Abigail Sims. When I shared my story with her, Abby’s reaction was antithetical to everything I had experienced before. I felt real caring, real compassion. I enlisted her help in finding out the fate of my kit. Within one week a sergeant contacted me and informed me that my kit had been processed, and told me that they had a match. My rapist was serving a sentence of 25 years in Ohio.

I was elated. Here was my justice! But victory became defeat, when I learned that the sentence he was serving was for a nearly identical assault that could have been prevented if my rape kit had been processed. My rapist was imprisoned for sexual battery a year after my assault. But because the evidence had not been processed and there was no evidence to link him to my rape, he was released. Seven weeks later, he abducted and repeatedly raped another woman leaving a grocery store in Ohio, the crime he is currently serving for.

We have completed extradition and are in the pre-trial preparation phase. Charles Courtney may face 15 years to life for my assault, in addition to the 25 he is currently serving.

I think of him sitting just a few miles away—the mysterious monster a real person, with a name—someone I’ll meet again soon. I want to feel relief. But I don’t know how yet. How do I come to terms with the lost years of my life, the lost parts of myself? I spent nearly half of my life waiting for this to matter. Now that it does, there are new challenges to face—ones that require much more strength than forgetting ever did.

Opposite this grief, I feel an immensity of gratitude. I am grateful that there are people out there like Abby Sims. I am grateful that through her, I became engaged in advocating for the elimination of the rape kit backlog in LA and across the country. I am grateful for every advocate, every survivor, every friend and relative who stands up for what is right and just, who stands up for compassion and healing. As someone who has been locked in the isolation of fear for so long, to meet such hearts rekindles my belief in what the future can bring.