More than 900 rape kits are sitting untested at the Fort Worth Police Department.
In 2019, Texas passed HB 8, a law that set strict policies around how long police and crime labs have to process the kits. Police departments are required to submit the kits to a lab within 30 days of receiving them, and labs must complete the test within 90 days. The goal of HB 8 was to reduce the high amount of untested kits.
However, as of October 4, Fort Worth police have 901 sexual assault test kits that need to be tested and have already passed the 90-day deadline, according to Texas Department of Public Safety records obtained by NBC 5 Investigates.
Test kits have gone untested months or even years past the deadline.
One Fort Worth resident, Latrice Godfrey, has been waiting nearly a year to get her test kit processed.
Godfrey was raped in a parking lot by someone who was offering her a ride home after a night out, she told NBC 5. Her family took her to a Fort Worth hospital for a sexual assault examination.
As she went about her legal case against the man who assaulted her, she would frequently check Texas’ “Track It” system, a website where victims can check the status of the rape kit. However, eleven months later, her kit has still not been tested.
Within the past five years, Fort Worth has collected more than 1,700 rape kits. Of those, 767 were sent to the lab late, 412 were submitted more than 100 days late, and 28 were submitted more than a year late, per NBC 5.
While Fort Worth police are the only department in the state to own its forensic biology lab, officials told NBC 5 that they have to outsource lab work due to short staffing.
While the lab can employ a total of eight people, only three spots are filled, and only two are able to process the sexual assault test kits.
The training to test kits can take two years.
The lab was reportedly so short-staffed that it could not test any rape kit for seven months in 2021.
“The funding is there. There is no excuse for a rape kit to not be timely submitted and tested,” State Representative Victoria Neave Criado (D-Dallas) told NBC 5.
“A department that delays is helping a rapist,” she said. “A department that delays is impacting a rape survivor.”