DNA backlog thwarts solving old crimes

Stephen Curran

Wednesday, March 23, 2005 | 8:39 a.m.

The man Metro Police say killed one woman and sexually assaulted another walked free for almost two years while the DNA that ultimately linked him to the crimes sat on a shelf waiting to be analyzed, the head of the department's crime lab said Tuesday.

Jerry B. Johnson, 27, was arrested Saturday in connection with the January 1997 murder of 40-year-old Diane Vitt and the October 1999 sexual assault of a Las Vegas teenage girl.

Evidence at the scenes of the crimes matched a DNA sample Johnson provided in 2003 as a condition on his release from prison on an unrelated battery charge, police said.

A backlog of roughly 500 samples prevented Johnson's DNA from being analyzed as criminalists devoted the bulk of the forensic lab's resources on investigating samples provided by those already in police custody, Capt. Thomas Hawkins, who heads Metro's criminalistics bureau, said.

"We have a priority list, and the priority is if I have someone in custody who's accused of a crime," he said. "Many times we find the person they have in custody is not the one who did it. We don't want someone in custody who didn't do it."

Once the samples are sent to a private lab it can take another two months for technicians and criminalists to process, Hawkins said.

According to Metro, department criminalists using analysis performed in April 2003 helped tie Johnson to the two crimes, although the second sample that led to an arrest warrant was not taken until February.

The victim of the 1999 sexual assault, who was 16 at the time, also identified Johnson, the department said.

Johnson was arrested March 19 by the Criminal Apprehension Team, a joint local and federal task force, more than two weeks after a warrant was issued for his arrest. He remained in police custody facing murder with a weapon, sexual assault with a weapon and kidnapping, according to Metro.

A bill passed in the 2001 state Legislature required felons convicted of up to 198 crimes to submit DNA samples, usually a swab of inner cheek cells, upon their release from prison. That mandate has led to a spike in the number of samples waiting to be analyzed, Hawkins said.

"The problem is the state mandates these things but they don't fund it," he said. "When the Legislature mandates these things, what they don't think about is how they're going to be taken care of."

Metro in September landed a $758,440 grant to sort through its backlog from 197 active cases and 3,800 DNA samples of convicted felons. That money, part of the Bush administration's $95 million DNA initiative, was used to buy new software and equipment and to send the backlogged samples for outside analysis.

The grant money has helped reduce the backlog, which once reached more than 6,000 samples, but has done little to reduce the wait time, Hawkins said.

Johnson's arrest was considered the first to stem from a sample obtained from a former prisoner.

Dushon Green, the man accused of being the East Flamingo rapist, was arrested in September after a DNA specimen provided while he was on parole in 2002 tied him to a string of sexual assaults in the late 1990s.

Like Johnson, Green was arrested more than two years after Metro obtained his sample, a delay Hawkins told the Sun in September was likely to occur "from time to time" until the department hires more people.

The lab currently has four criminalists on staff and is in the process of hiring another, Hawkins said.

It's a situation that could lead to more crimes occurring while accused criminals stay free as their samples are being processed, Hawkins said.

"It's always the concern that you have somebody on the shelf who's guilty of something and they're out perpetrating other crimes," he said.

"The problem we have with our workload is that I have known crimes in front of me and a known suspect. Those things take the priority."