For Kansas rape survivors, DNA evidence has failed to deliver

Lisa Nuñez-Najera saw the business card tucked near the screen door of her Kansas home. She grabbed it and read the name. It was from a lieutenant with the sex crimes unit of the Wichita Police Department.

Questions flooded her mind, a new one before she could process the last. Was she in trouble? Had something terrible happened to a family member? Or maybe they were calling about one of the sexual assaults she had reported over the years. But why now?

Nuñez-Najera was wary of the police, from too many times when she had called for help and felt, instead, judged. Yet she picked up the phone.

The lieutenant said he wanted to speak with her about a rape she had reported in 2006. For a split second, she had to search to find the memory. When she did, she struggled to breathe.

It had been 12 years.

The agency had just now processed her sexual assault evidence kit, the lieutenant explained. They had found a man’s DNA.

Nuñez-Najera was confused. She thought the kit had been tested years ago.

A rape kit backlog

Kansas discovered its rape kit backlog almost by accident.

At a conference in 2014, Kansas Bureau of Investigation Director Kirk Thompson heard about stockpiles of untested sexual assault evidence kits discovered in several major U.S. cities. Thompson thought Kansas police officials had been routinely sending their rape kits for testing. But he asked a staffer at the agency to run a basic analysis comparing the number of reported rapes in the state to the number of sexual assault kits submitted for testing.

There was a gap, a big one.

A statewide inventory later uncovered 2,200 untested kits at 86 Kansas law enforcement agencies. The oldest had sat since 1994.

In 2015, the Kansas Bureau of Investigation received a $2 million grant through the National Sexual Assault Kit Initiative, a U.S. Department of Justice program that has since provided nearly $350 million to state and local agencies across the country to test rape evidence, reinvestigate cases, bring answers to victims and institute reforms so that another backlog never develops.

Katie Whisman oversaw the initiative for the state. A Kansas native who knew she wanted to work in law enforcement in second grade, Whisman had started at the Kansas Bureau of Investigation as an intern and worked her way up over more than a decade, including eight years as an agent assigned to narcotics and violent felony crimes. Serving as the executive officer in the director’s office, she became entrenched in every step of the program’s rollout, from convening a steering committee to encouraging law enforcement agencies to count their kits to developing a strategy for getting the evidence tested.

But once the state lab began processing the first kits, what happened to those cases was out of her control. The decisions fell to local police and prosecutors.

Whisman knew those agencies are often strapped for resources. She asked her team to complete a full background check on every suspect identified through DNA testing, hoping to “take as much of the load off of them as we possibly could.”

In Wichita, those suspect packets were reviewed by Lt. Jason Stephens, a veteran of the department who oversaw the unit that investigates domestic violence and sex crimes.

Stephens had hand counted the agency’s untested kits – a wall of boxes in a temperature-controlled storage room. There were roughly 1,100, half of the state’s total. He and others on his team had taken turns driving them to Topeka for testing, in batches of about 200 at a time.

As results came in, Stephens read the lab reports and flagged about 300 cases for further review, mostly those where testing had turned up a DNA profile and a suspect’s name. Next, a team of local law enforcement officials and prosecutors met to discuss whether the investigations could be reopened.

Just 16 cases made it through that step.

Nuñez-Najera’s case was one of them.

'Finally, maybe somebody listens'

After a brief phone call with Stephens on the day she found his business card at her front door, Nuñez-Najera hesitated – then agreed to come to police headquarters for a meeting.

“At that point, I was just like, what? Why now?” she said. “Why are we bringing this back? But another part of me was like, yes, finally. Finally, maybe there's some answers. Finally, maybe somebody listens.”

Nuñez-Najera had not known the name of the man who she said raped her. But she recognized him as someone who lived in her trailer park, who had been following her around.

At the time, she was a 22-year-old mother with two young boys. When the stranger showed up at her front door, he had a friend with him who grabbed her sons and led them into the yard and toward a van. The man pushed into her home, then cornered Nuñez-Najera in the bedroom. She begged him to stop, but that made him more determined. An instinct to protect her children took over. She said she stopped fighting as he raped her.

“I just remember thinking in my head, ‘Don’t make this hard, because I need to get out there to my kids,’” she said.

When the man left, she found her boys outside, alone. At the hospital, an advocate from the local sexual assault center offered her fresh sheets for her bed back home, to replace the ones taken by police. A nurse swabbed her body for evidence and bagged up her clothes. An officer asked her questions and took notes for a report.

But when a detective later called Nuñez-Najera and asked if she wanted to pursue the case, she wasn’t sure. She believed the man was connected to a local gang, and her maternal instincts kicked in again: She was worried for her family’s safety. She told the detective that it was probably better to drop it. He asked, she recalls, for her to think on it and said that he would call back.

Twelve years passed before she heard from the police about the case again.

Few survivors contacted

Across the state of Kansas, very few people whose kits were tested were ever contacted by police.

When Whisman and her team sent their packets of suspect information to law enforcement officials, most cases went nowhere. Whisman found it disheartening. She recalled her staff near tears because they had worked diligently to get to the point of handing over suspect names to police – and then “nothing’s happening.”

“We had one case where the law enforcement agency was totally bought in. They wanted to do the right thing. They wanted to reinvestigate. And their prosecutor said, ‘They’re wasting their time. I looked at these cases once, I will not look at them again,’” she recalled.

Whisman reallocated more of her grant budget toward training police and prosecutors, hoping to address misconceptions about sexual violence. If she could not control the outcome of cases from the backlog, she said, she would try to make things better for victims in the future. She made the same calculation after a case from a previously untested kit made it to trial only to end in acquittal.

“We’ve invested in making the criminal justice response better, and now the hangup is the public. It’s the people that are sitting on the jury,” she recalled thinking. “So what can we do to influence change there?”

Whisman used grant money to pay for a public awareness campaign with a message she hoped would resonate across the state: Rape is real, and it has happened to someone you know.

Reliving the moment

When Nuñez-Najera arrived at the Wichita Police Department, she was greeted by a detective she had never met. That churned up a well of anxiety inside her that she had been trying to settle all day. She had only just grown comfortable with talking to Stephens and now had to start fresh with someone new.

She answered the detective’s questions, recounting the assault in as much detail as she could remember. When he handed her a set of photos, she flipped through them, looking for her perpetrator.

In the years that had passed, his features had faded in her mind but never disappeared. As she turned to the last page, there he was.

“All the same feelings just went right back inside of me in that moment,” she said. “It was just as if I was right there, being raped again.”

The detective asked her to sign near his photo. It bothered her to see her name beside his picture, linking them together.

After, Nuñez-Najera walked from the police headquarters a few blocks to the Wichita Area Sexual Assault Center. Mary Stolz, an advocate, was with her. The two had known each other for a few months, and though an advocate who worked for the police department also attended the meeting, Nuñez-Najera had insisted that Stolz be there as well.

The daughter of a wheat farmer who grew up on the outskirts of Wichita, Stolz has worked at the center for most of her career except for about two years she spent traveling around the state to train police on domestic violence and sexual assault. Some agencies were receptive. In other places she found officers’ attitudes steeped in rape myths and assumptions that most victims were lying.

“At the time, there was a police department in the state that was putting victims on polygraphs,” Stolz recalled.

It felt nearly impossible to combat that culture in a three-hour training.

Stolz was hopeful when she first heard that Kansas was awarded a federal grant to test old rape kits. She wondered if law enforcement officials would be able to connect seemingly disparate assault reports through DNA, as was happening in other parts of the country, and put serial predators behind bars. Eager to be involved, she attended a training in Topeka where law enforcement, prosecutors and advocates discussed how they would work together as results from the backlogged kits came in.

After the training, however, Stolz said she was included in just one meeting at the Wichita Police Department where they discussed a handful of cases.

“I was very outnumbered,” she said. “And those were their cases that they knew way more about than I did. So, I didn't have a huge opinion in those meetings other than to say, ‘Let us help. We'll help with notification.’”

Few victims contacted

Wichita police chose to contact the victims in only the cases officials believed had the potential to be prosecuted − 16 cases with 17 victims total. Officials said they were unable to locate several of those people. Another eight said they did not want to move forward with their cases. Three people, including Nuñez-Najera, wanted the investigations reopened.

Stephens, who is now a captain with the department, said officials chose to contact so few people because they did not want to traumatize victims by bringing up their rape if their case was not being reopened.

Stolz, now the center's executive director, wondered if support from her organization would have resulted in more women agreeing to have their cases move forward. Stolz was included in just two cases, Nuñez-Najera’s and one other. The second woman was living with a friend at the time, and after the interview with police Stolz helped her get into a shelter and then find permanent housing. Her perpetrator was ultimately convicted.

As for the hundreds of victims who still have no idea their kits were tested, Stolz said she understands the police department’s desire to not cause additional harm but that sexual assault survivors are more resilient than most people give them credit for. She said it feels paternalistic for the police to withhold information about a crime that is so personal.

She was concerned that authorities could even know the identity of a suspected rapist but not tell the victim.

“I hope with all my heart they considered long-term victim safety and not just criminal prosecution in their decisions on notification,” she said. “Because prosecute or not, victims deserve to have information.”

Asked whether Stolz’s fear is valid, Stephens acknowledged to USA TODAY that there are indeed Wichita cases where DNA testing identified a suspect for the first time, but the victim has not been notified because police do not plan to reopen the case.

Hearing that news the following day, Stolz took a deep breath to calm a wave of anger.

“That is such an egregious violation of human rights,” she said.

A struggle to deliver change

When Kansas officially wrapped up its backlog clearing effort in 2019, the results were underwhelming: 10 victims notified, four cases charged, two people convicted. In a final report, state officials said that the outcomes underscored “the ongoing need for increased training, awareness, and resources.”

While acknowledging shortcomings, Whisman said that may be an undercount. It was difficult to keep tabs on work by local departments. Some continued to work cases after the grant initiative ended, including in Wichita, where officials secured their first conviction in 2019 and one other this year.

She pointed to successes beyond convictions, saying the program created new partnerships within the criminal justice system, trained more than 1,300 people and kickstarted reforms.

In 2022, the state Legislature passed a law mandating that all sexual assault kits from crimes reported to police be submitted for testing within 30 days. That legislation was supported by the Kansas Sexual Assault Response Advisory Council, a committee formed as the backlog effort wound down that includes many of the same partners.

Wichita police officials, too, said the process ignited deeper change within the department. The agency announced a policy of testing all kits in 2018, nearly four years before the rest of the state. All recruits now receive two days of training on responding to sexual and domestic violence, and the unit that investigates those cases has grown from eight detectives to 12. Victims are now interviewed in a room with comfortable seating and art hanging on the walls, not at a metal table outfitted with handcuffs meant for suspects.

Andrew Ford, the agency’s public information officer, said the department is committed to providing compassionate support to victims and a sex crimes investigator would never leave a business card in the open at a victim’s home today, as happened with Nuñez-Najera.

“We know better now, and so we have to do better moving forward,” Ford said. “And we are doing better moving forward.”

In other ways, though, the Kansas Sexual Assault Kit Initiative failed to deliver change.

The Joyful Heart Foundation, a national nonprofit that advocates for rape kit reform, says Kansas has only completed three of six key pillars of reform.

In 2022, just 15% of rapes reported to Kansas law enforcement agencies led to an arrest, according to the most recent data from the Kansas Bureau of Investigation. That is less than when Kansas started its backlog initiative in 2014. The number of rapes reported to authorities – a statistic public officials often hope will go up to indicate victims are more willing to seek police help – has fluctuated but remained relatively stagnant.

It also often takes months – or even years – for rape kits to be processed. Wichita Police Department officials said they wait nine months or longer for the county crime lab to process a sexual assault kit, unless they request expedited testing for a high-priority case.

The wait was even longer after the agency moved to a policy of testing all kits. In the nearly four years since the city had counted its previous backlog, more than 700 additional untested kits had piled up. Officials sent them to the state lab in 2019.

The last wasn’t processed until 2023.

Whisman, who left the Kansas Bureau of Investigation in 2020, was taken aback when she heard that some of the progress she hoped for has not materialized. She said she remains proud of what the effort accomplished but also proposed several things Kansas officials should undertake today to make additional progress: allocate more money for training, modernize the state’s sexual assault laws and implement a rape kit tracking system. Officials from the Kansas Bureau of Investigation declined interview requests but in a statement said the agency has taken the first steps toward launching a tracking system.

“We had incredible momentum. And I really felt that things were getting better, and things would continue to be better for victims,” Whisman said. “So, hearing it was a flash in the pan and we’re back to the way things were, … it’s really disappointing.”

Changing her view

There have been stretches of Nuñez-Najera’s life marked by fear so crippling that she rarely left her home and startled at the sound of her own dog barking.

“My life was disappearing,” she said. “And I was disappearing.”

With time, that fear has waned. Attending support groups at the sexual assault center has helped. So has making art – vibrant paintings, pottery and dreamcatchers that hang from the walls of her home in Wichita.

And so has getting answers about her rape.

She said police have told her the name of the suspect in her case: Jorge Martell-Silva.

The year after a lieutenant first left a business card on Nuñez-Najera’s door, Martell-Silva’s mug shot was added to a list of suspects on the Sedgwick County Sheriff’s Office website, according to an internet archive. Also on the site was a poster that read, “JORGE is wanted by the Sedgwick County Sheriff’s Office for RAPE CHARGES.”

Sheriff’s Lt. Nathan Gibbs told USA TODAY that a 2018 rape warrant for Martell-Silva is still outstanding today.

Wichita police declined to confirm Martell-Silva's name, but told USA TODAY that the warrant in Nuñez-Najera’s case remains active and that they believe the wanted man is out of the country. Martell-Silva did not respond when contacted for comment through social media messages from a reporter. He has not been convicted of any crime in the case.

Nuñez-Najera said it is a relief to know that if he ever returns to the country, he can be arrested. And even if that day never comes, she is glad that her kit was tested and that police called her with the results.

It hasn’t changed how she sees the Wichita police: If she needed their help today, she is not sure she would call.

But it did change how she sees herself.

As much as she had tried over the years to bury what had happened, the rape was always waiting to resurface. She could be standing at her kitchen sink, her hands soapy with dishwater, and suddenly, reliving it. When police asked to meet about her case after her kit had been tested, she nearly said no because she wasn’t sure she was strong enough to finally face it.

Now, she knows she was.

“It feels,” she said, “like I get a little bit of my power back.”

Contributing: Savannah Kuchar and Dian Zhang, USA TODAY

Tricia L. Nadolny is a reporter on the USA TODAY investigations team. Contact her at tnadolny@usatoday.com or on X @TriciaNadolny. 

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: DNA ID’d a Kansas rape suspect; justice still elusive