Fourth Annual DNA Grantees' Workshop

Wednesday, June 25, 2003

AFTERNOON SESSION

Identifying No-Suspect DNA Grant Bottlenecks
Cecilia A. Crouse
Biography

MS. BASHINSKI: One last person needs no introduction. Cecelia Crouse, as I'm sure most of you know, comes to us from the Palm Beach Sheriff's Office Crime Lab. She is also a pioneer in DNA, has been involved in a whole variety of issues with regard to DNA, and was recently a member of the group that NIJ convened to talk about DNA backlogs.

DR. CROUSE: I specifically was asked to talk about our no-suspect grant and the bottlenecks associated with that. Every idea that I'm going to give to you today is based solely on grant money, so fairy tales do come true. It can happen to you if you only have a no-suspect DNA grant. Crouse: Slide 1

With regard to the case backlog reduction grant, I think our first-year grant was approved in August or September of last year [2002], but then it got caught up in Tallahassee because they wanted to approve it. Then it got caught up in our county system because the commissioners don't like our sheriff. They flat-out said that, so they held it up. We finally got it in November 2003. Our county got $582,000. Crouse: Slide 2

I'm going to divide this into three phases: Identify qualifying cases; conduct serological analysis and ship the samples to the Bode Technology Group; and review the Bode Technology data when it came back, enter the CODIS (Combined DNA Index System) profiles with search, and separate hits from no hits. Crouse: Slide 3

Although we didn't have grant money for generating a list of no-suspect cases, we started it anyway in August 2001. Since that time we decided that everything would be divided as "no suspect" or "no probable cause to arrest" within the statute of limitations. Crouse: Slide 4

In order to avoid bottlenecks with going back all those years to look at cases on our shelves, figuring out the status of the case was probably the most difficult thing to do. So what we did is we contracted a retired detective from the grant, who had his own consulting firm. He normally does investigations, but we asked him if he would be interested in researching cases for us. He said he would. His name was Wayne Robinson, so we call this the Wayne 's World part of the grant. Crouse: Slide 5

We provided him with secretarial help. We asked the detective bureau to give us 3 hours of secretarial help a week, because—and those of you who do cases probably understand this—when I make a call, I don't sit by the phone. Chances are good the detective or the law enforcement officer has been transferred or is dead. That's why it's very difficult to sit and wait for these responses, so we asked the secretaries to do that and they did.

We prepared a PowerPoint presentation for Wayne as he went to 34 agencies. It explains what a no-suspect case is and how you are supposed to store the stuff. If the agency wants help, he stays and helps them. He helps them get their cases organized and figure out what the evidence is. The grant pays him to do that.

We designed a case tracking log that is connected directly to our LIMS, and we decided that in phase two, we would use two newly hired people to conduct serological analysis on all the qualifying cases before we ship them off to Bode Technology. Crouse: Slide 6

So how did we avoid phase-two bottlenecks? First of all, we sent five nonprobative cases to Bode Technology. The purpose of that was to review how they organized the cases and to review their results. I have to tell you that Bode took these cases knowing that we may not go with them, but we kind of knew we were because we wanted to use the Hitachi FM Bioplatform. But as far as they knew, there was no assurance that we even had the grant, and they were kind enough to start processing them. Crouse: Slide 7

So before we even got the grant money, we knew how their system worked. We requested a copy of all the laboratory protocols. I went on an onsite visit. We verified that our barcoding system would work with their system. I did a mini-review of all of their recent audits—Lord knows they have a lot of those—and we determined a point of contact and had a walk-through. It was an excellent experience. By the time we got the grant, we were good to go as far as the organizational part of it.

Originally, we were going to send them the cases and have them send us the data, but we decided to forego that setup. Generating the data was not the issue. It was actually interpreting the data and writing the report. Crouse: Slide 8

So their responsibility is to get the evidence, analyze it, interpret it, and to actually report on the data. Typically we work on a 60-day turnaround time per batch. We were going to try for 30 cases a month but we only sent 15 cases in our first batch because we wanted to know how it affected our laboratory. It was a good thing that we did that because when it got back, even though I had done all the preliminary work, it took me almost a day to figure out the best way to take ownership of the profiles that were going into CODIS. There is absolutely no way around reviewing the data, period. You're going to have to do it, so the 15 cases was actually a good idea.

For every case that we get back, we verify any profile going into CODIS. We do all the positive and negative controls first and then we look for any qualifying CODIS sample. For instance, last week they called to tell us that they were sending back 28 cases on Thursday. Right now, we want both hardcopy and electronic data. Once we get used to the electronic way, we'll just go all electronic. Crouse: Slide 9

I notified the CODIS administrator. She set aside 2 hours for Thursday afternoon. Sure enough, we got the FedEx package in the morning, and it took us 90 minutes to read 27 cases. We've got it down pat. But we do it together. She takes the case report, she takes the data that came with the case report, I take the raw data, and we put it up on the screen. Anything we disagree with or anything we feel that we would have or would not have interpreted, we stamp it with a "reviewed," and we initial everything.

We did all 27 cases in less than 90 minutes. Once that's done, we have LIMS spit out a report that says, "Please see the attached. Your case has been worked by a private company." The secretaries put that on Bode's report, which gets shipped off. So now we have communication with the agencies. All the profiles are classified as either a CODIS hit or a John or Jane Doe profile.

First we decide if we have a hit or not. Crouse: Slide 10

If it is a hit and to avoid the bottlenecks associated with CODIS, we automatically call the detectives who are notified by the CODIS administrator. The retired detective [Wayne] also helps research the case, so he's still on the grant. He finds out what the cases are and figures out if there's more evidence and whether it's probative. They really like that. Crouse: Slide 11

Now, by contract through the grant, we've also hired an ex-prosecutor that was approved by our State attorney's office. If it's a CODIS hit, she looks at all the work and submits a packet to the State attorney's office. It's ready to go for them, detailing the evidence, the person, and the charge, if applicable. Crouse: Slide 12

If it's a Jane Doe and if it's not a homicide or a sexual assault that has been reported within 72 hours, then she submits a packet for a John Doe warrant or a Jane Doe warrant against that. So all the hits are taken care of in one form or the other.

We're just starting off on this venture. She absolutely loves it. She misses the prosecutor's office, and she has signed an agreement that if she ever goes into criminal defense work that she'll never defend anyone who has ever been associated with this project, including myself. So we're very excited about this particular part of it. This kind of provides an answer to the question of how we're keeping track of hits.

So meanwhile back at the farm—that would be our lab—we took money from the grant and got the Mideo system digital camera for microscopes, which has been tremendous. We're eventually going to have all of these pictures captured and put into our LIMS. We're working on that right now. Crouse: Slide 13

But the most important thing we did was we kept track of what Jeff [Ban] was doing. This is Edward Pipettehands. We call him Eddy. Unfortunately, our sheriff's name is Edward Bielek, and he thinks that we named our robot after him.

Last year I spent some time with Susan Greenspoon and was very impressed with her talk at Promega. We ordered the Biomek. They trained Julie Conover, who was responsible for getting the system up online. She's unbelievably incredible. It took 6 months to get up and we were trained on it 2 weeks ago and we started doing casework last week. We only have seven analysts. Two of them are still in training, and only one of them was recalcitrant to going online. She said that she kind of liked the way that we were doing it before, that she felt very comfortable with the organics. So, you just pat them on the shoulder and say it's okay, honey; but you're going to change.

It was mandatory that everybody become proficient in the DNA IQ first manually, in case Eddy decides to go on a vacation for some reason. They literally had to watch Eddy work for an entire round.

In our first case, we extracted 48 samples in a little under 50 minutes, so we were very impressed with that. We don't end up in the 96-well plate. We have Eddy put them in our own 1.5 tubes so that we can go over and get those at any point in time. We are very, very excited about Eddy.

Here are the results to date with regard to our grant. For the 15 cases in the first batch, I subtracted one because we send a blind case every time. So as you can see, 9 DNA profiles out of 14 cases were generated for CODIS in the first batch, 16 out of 29 in the second batch, and so on. For April, there are 22 CODIS-qualifying profiles that can go in. There were two immediate CODIS hits in the January batch, three in February, and nine in March. Crouse: Slide 14

To date, we've actually sent out 144 cases, and 71 have been reviewed. Of those 71, we have 41 foreign profiles and 14 hits. In other words, about 58 percent of our cases submitted have foreign profiles, but as of last week that's up to 64 percent. Based on those 71 cases and 41 foreign profiles, we were getting a hit on 34 percent of the DNA profiles in our grant DNA. Crouse: Slide 15

We did get a hit on one from last month. It was the rape of a deaf mute young lady. We called the detective to tell him, but she committed suicide a couple days prior to that. We were actually very upset about that one. Part of it made us feel that we should have gotten this case out sooner so that maybe we could have helped her. Apparently there were some other issues, but the sexual assault took place in February of this year [2003], I believe, and we got it out immediately, being a no-suspect case as far as we were concerned. So we're kind of coming to grips with that.

But we also had one in which we called the detective for 6 solid weeks but he never got back with us. We ended up missing the statute of limitations by 2 days. So that part is frustrating, but I'm sure we're going to have really good successes on the ones that we already have.

Essentially, this is what we have. Of the 41 cases, this is how many profiles have come out for sexual assault, robbery, murder, burglary, and others. The red indicates those that we have hits. We're a little surprised because we thought we'd get more hits on the sexual assault cases, but we'll just have to wait to process more. Crouse: Slide 16

I would definitely like to thank NIJ. We would never ever be here without grant money. And of course I want to thank Virginia for the help with the Biomek 2000, specifically Susan Greenspoon and Jeff Ban, and the staff at the Palm Beach County Sheriff's Office. Crouse: Slide 17