Coalition To Pursue Funding For Detroit Rape Kit Testing

DETROIT (WWJ/AP) - A collaboration that includes prosecutors and a women's advocacy foundation will seek public and private money to test about 2,400 remaining sexual assault kits from a batch recovered from a police storage facility.

Enough SAID — which stands for Sexual Assault in Detroit — hopes to raise $10 million. The money also will be used to investigate and prosecute rape cases.

At a news conference Tuesday, Wayne County Prosecutor Kym Worthy stressed the important of this issue.

"Rapists when they rape break into your house and rape, they carjack you and they rape, they rape you and then they kill you," Worthy said. "This is about all violent crime in southeastern Michigan."

Of the 11,000 abandoned rape kits discovered in a Detroit Police warehouse in 2009, only two-thousand have been examined, allowing the identification of 188 serial rapists and 15 convictions.

About $750,000 already has been raised.

After taking over Detroit's crime lab in 2008, state police discovered more than 11,000 untested rape-evidence boxes dating back 25 years.

Worthy's office has identified 188 serial rapists and received 15 convictions after 2,000 kits were tested.

The state also is pitching in $4 million to test thousands of the rape kits, and Attorney General Bill Schuette said he'll continue to work to secure additional state money to prosecute the rapists once they're identified.

"When rape kits aren't examined it means that women are violated twice: once by a horrific attack, and the second that there's  no investigation of any crime," Schuette told WWJ's Ron Dewey and other reporters.

"And crime doesn't stop at 8 Mile," he added. "It impacts the region, it impacts Southeastern Michigan."

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