Will probe bring justice in town's rape scandal? [View all]

[Omaha Steve]

Source: AP-Excite

By SHARON COHEN ROBBINS, Ill. (AP) - The rape evidence was stored in the police department's musty basement: Brown paper shopping bags, stuffed with sneakers, bras and underpants, jammed on metal shelves. Scattered blood vials and swabs covered with dust and mold - an inventory amassed over more than 25 years.

Cara Smith, a Cook County sheriff's aide, knew something was terribly wrong the moment she saw the jumble, which included 176 rape kits dating back to 1986. Many of these crimes had long been forgotten by everyone except the victims.

Smith began digging into the cases and ultimately came to a disturbing conclusion: In most of the reported rapes, Robbins police had seemingly conducted little or no follow-up despite having crime lab results. And in nearly a third of the cases, police hadn't even submitted physical evidence for analysis.

Those findings posed one daunting question: Is there any way to right the wrongs that, in some cases, go back a generation?

FULL story at link.



Read more: http://apnews.excite.com/article/20131123/DAA8H02O1.html

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Cara Smith, the chief of policy and communications for the Cook County, Ill., Sheriff's department, leans on her car on Thursday, Sept. 26, 2013 in Robbins, Ill., at the site of an alleged rape. DNA collected in that 1991 case recently matched a convicted felon, but he could not be arrested because Robbins police hadn't submitted the evidence in a timely fashion to the state crime lab. The rape kit in that case is one of nearly 200 in Robbins that Sheriff's investigators found that were never tested or, if they were, were never investigated. (AP Photo/Martha Irvine)