NEW ORLEANS -- Ecoee Rooney works in a special suite at University Hospital. It's an exam room connected to a living room-like lobby: The place where all rape and sexual assault victims go in Orleans Parish.
‘We're looking at them holistically as a person, not just as a crime scene,” Rooney said.
Rooney is one of eight "sane" nurses – those specially trained to examine and treat victims, helping victims after what could be the worst experience of their life and collecting evidence that could catch their rapist.
“We package each swab and piece of evidence separately and we seal, there's a very detailed process of how we seal each piece individually,” Rooney said.
That evidence is sealed in a sexual-assault kit, and it's either supposed to be held for 30 days while victims decide whether to press charges, or it's given to New Orleans police.
But is it ever tested?
“I know the kit goes to the New Orleans Police Department, but at that point, I can't speak to their process,” Rooney said.
An Eyewitness News public records request back in May asked the NOPD for information and invoices for all of the cases they requested outsourced forensic testing on since 2006. The NOPD’s DNA lab hasn't been rebuilt since Hurricane Katrina.
A letter from the city attorney responded to our request in late July, saying, "The NOPD Bureau of Investigations reported that sex crimes and child abuse purchase forms did not yield any requests for outsourced forensic testing."
That means no requests for DNA tests from sex crimes or child-abuse units.
“That would be one of the most basic steps in investigating any sex crime,” said Raphael Goyeneche of the New Orleans Metropolitan Crime Commission. “I don't know what to say other than that is unacceptable.”
The city attorney went on to say that the NOPD overall has requested a total of 41 DNA tests since 2006. All but four were done by the state police, where DNA tests are done for free.
Some of those tests could be rape kits, but because the NOPD repeatedly refused our requests for an interview, we don't know how many are.
NOPD Major Juan Quinton did say in an e-mail that the "DNA costs were low largely due to our screening of sexual-assault kits. Only those with a preliminary positive are worked."
“What they are doing is they are taking this exam and only doing it when the police come up with a suspect,” said Dr. Frank Minyard, a coroner and gynecologist. “And so it's taking a little longer. It's like it was before we had DNA.
Minyard brought the sane program to Orleans Parish in the 1990s.
“The problem with that is that DNA should be examined immediately. It should be entered into a database to see if you can come up with someone who did this immediately,” Minyard said.
Remember, the NOPD has only requested a total of 41 DNA tests since 2006. In that same time period, the NOPD reported 348 rapes to the FBI – and more than 10,000 total violent crimes.
“It tells me that this is the exception rather than the rule,” Goyeneche said. “That the Police Department has not embraced this technology and it makes it harder to a) solve crimes, and b) obtain convictions as a result of it. Particularly in crimes of violence.”
Since 2006 the Orleans Parish district attorney has requested 25 additional DNA tests, but that's after police have arrested a suspect and the district attorney has the case. Other law enforcement agencies around the country are even using DNA to solve property crimes, like burglaries.
“The suspect maybe cut themselves on a window breaking in and left some blood at the scene," said Milton Dureau with the JPSO Crime Lab. "We've been doing a lot of cases like that and having a lot of really good results.”
Jefferson Parish didn't lose their DNA lab in the storm, and right now, they're building a new, $17 million crime lab in Gretna.
“The greatest success both locally and nationally is with sexual assaults and property crimes," said Col. Tim Scanlan, director of the JPSO Crime Lab. "But it does play an active role in murder investigations when there is contact between the suspect and the victim.”
Since 2006 the Jefferson Parish Sheriff's Office has conducted 588 DNA tests. They haven't given us a breakdown of what kinds of cases those are for.
“This is not the wave of the future, it's the now,” Goyeneche said. “And it has been embraced in law enforcement agencies and in criminal justice systems throughout the country."
Goyeneche said the numbers suggest the NOPD isn't embracing the technology.
Rooney said she thinks the tests are getting done.
“It gets tested. Yeah. Because it has to get tested in order for us to go to court,” Rooney said. “So, when it's tested, they're reporting the findings. We don't hear what the conclusions were, we come in to just testify to our facts. We are usually not privy to what the findings were because we want to testify to what we saw on that occasion. “
One of eight nurses, she said she's personally been called to testify in six cases since joining the sane program nine years ago.
