‘Many predators’: 30,000 rape kits tested in Washington since 2015

VANCOUVER, Wash. (KOIN) — Eryn Hastay waited nearly 300 days for the results of her rape kit, and 2.5 years to see her abuser behind bars. But she’s not the only one who’s delayed justice.

Eryn Hastay Was a Victim of Sexual Abuse in Washington State and Now She Is Speaking Out, September 23, 2024 (KOIN)

“Those things have to be done and processed very quickly because that person, like in my case, could have been less than two miles away from me the entire time,” Hastay said Monday. “It’s a great feeling that it’s done and that person is in jail, but it shouldn’t have taken 290 days to get it done.”

Just 10 years ago there were about 10,000 Sexual assault kits are on shelves in Washington statesome of which go back decades. Now the process is being accelerated for survivors and the backlog is almost cleared.

On Monday, a group of activists, state and local lawmakers, advocates, and victim support groups provided an update on the Crime Lab Rape Kit Backlog Report and the progress made over the past year.

Thanks to a partnership between the Washington State Patrol Crime Lab, victim advocacy groups like the National Women’s Coalition Against Violence and Exploitation (NWCAVE), and legislative leaders who took up the cause after noticing dozens of untested kits.

“These ladies are walking around not knowing if the passerby is the one who raped them because their equipment has not been tested,” said Monica Alexander, executive director of the Washington State Criminal Justice Training Commission.

Washington State Rep. Tina Orwall (D-Des Moines), September 23, 2024 (KOIN)

“After discovering thousands of kits, I was just devastated,” Rep. Tina Orwall (D-Des Moines) said Monday. “To know that we have a system in place where this will never happen again, that those kits will never sit on a shelf, that the survivor will have a voice, that they can check the status of the kits in the process, I’m really proud. I’m really proud that we made it right for survivors.”

Orwall helped pass a law in 2015 requiring all sexual assault kits to be processed for DNA, prompting the WSP Vancouver Crime Lab to build a high-throughput facility in 2019 to outsource and nearly eliminate the state’s backlog.

In 2018, Washington created a new system that victims of sexual abuse given the opportunity to track their own test kits using a barcodeOfficials previously told KOIN 6 that the state sends out 200-300 kits for testing each month.

In May 2022, the lab began processing kits with a 45-day turnaround time. Currently, the forensic lab processes 87% of the state’s sexual assault kits within that time frame.

The Washington State Patrol Crime Lab in Vancouver, September 23, 2024 (KOIN)

Since 2015, over 30,000 kits have been tested to date, both internally and by third parties.

“Each of those kittens is a survivor whose voice was never heard, who had no path to justice,” Orwall said. “And it also left a lot of predators in our community who went on to do the same thing again.”

Washington state has also introduced trauma-informed training for law enforcement and prosecutors to better enable them to work with survivors like Eryn Hastay.

“You don’t just sit there for 13 hours and go through a rape kit,” Hastay said. “So if you believe them and make them feel like their story matters, they matter and their case will be done.”

Oregon completed testing of their backlogged rape kits in 2018 by sending about 3,000 untested kits from more than a dozen counties to a Salt Lake City lab for testing — providing some relief to the Oregon State Police forensics lab.