Local experts weigh in on “I am Evidence” documentary

Published 8:44 am Tuesday, April 30, 2019

A panel of local experts answered questions about sexual assault Monday night after the East Texas Crisis Center held a public viewing of the documentary film “I am Evidence.” 

The 2017 documentary film told the story of how hundreds of thousands of untested rape kits have sat on shelves throughout the country, some for decades without being tested. The film showed how authorities became aware of thousands of those untested kits in three major cities, Detroit, Cleveland and Los Angeles and how that backlog is being treated to bring justice to the survivors and get serial rapists off the streets.  

In Detroit, Wayne County prosecutor, Kym Worthy, became aware of thousands of untested rape kits being stored in an abandoned warehouse where the Detroit Police Department stored them as evidence for decades. 

“The victims are overwhelmingly women,” she said in the film. “They were violated and nobody cared.” 

The film showed how Worthy and a team of experts found the kits in 2009 and are still working to get the kits tested in order to identify an unknown perpetrator, connect suspects to other crimes and even exhonorate the innocent if needed.  

The untested kits in Detroit were blamed on an overwhelmed and underfunded police department that made more decisions to not test rape kits than it did to test them.  

A University of Michigan professor who researched the Detroit backlog said she discovered about 80 percent of the untested rape kits in Detroit were from poor black women who police did not believe were raped and determined their case didn’t warrant attention.