Ground broken for new crime lab

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(Andrew Harnik/Examiner)
Gov. Tim Kaine speaks to the media at the groundbreaking for the Department of Forensic Science facility in Manassas. The facility will feature a state of the art forensic science laboratory and also will house a DNA database.

Manassas (Map, News) - State officials broke ground Tuesday on a new $65 million forensic science laboratory for the Northern Virginia area that will boost the commonwealth’s crime-fighting ability.

Built to reflect 21st-century threats, the new facility in Manassas will be Virginia’s first lab to have an area where autopsies can be performed on people who have been exposed to anthrax and other toxic agents.

“You can have great prosecutors and great police, but without great forensic scientists, you cannot convict criminals,” Gov. Tim Kaine told the gathered officials at the groundbreaking.

The facility is expected to open in 2009 near a new FBI laboratory. It will replace the existing 20-year-old lab in Fairfax that is too small to meet the region’s caseload, which is growing as the population increases.

Peter Marone, Virginia’s director of forensic science, said the 103,000-square-foot complex will reduce the existing six- to eight-month period most forensic evidence must wait before being processed. The larger laboratory will have additional space to house new equipment that can conduct advanced DNA tests on evidence, giving Virginia authorities more ways to catch criminals.

Besides analyzing evidence for current investigations, the state’s four forensic laboratories compare DNA evidence from recently arrested violent criminals with evidence in unsolved crimes nationwide. Virginia is considered a national leader among states in using biological evidence to solve crimes; the Department of Forensic Science was the first state laboratory to analyze DNA evidence for local authorities in 1989. A year later, the General Assembly approved legislation to start the first state-run database of DNA evidence in the country.

The first “cold case” solved using the database, a rape in Dale City, was cracked in 1993. Last month, the database was used to solve its 4,000th crime, a 2002 rape in California.

“This new facility will help process cold cases faster, and it will help us with active investigations, especially drug cases and anything involving DNA evidence,” Prince William County police Chief Charlie Deane said. “I worked investigations for 12 years. DNA is just like a fingerprint. It’s amazing what we can do with it. This … will definitely make the community safer.”

jrogalsky@dcexaminer.com

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