| UNFAIR PARK | Lavinia Masters fights for survivors of sexual assault. The Lavinia Masters Act helped clear much of the state’s huge backlog of untested rape kits, but the fight is far from over. BY TYLER HICKS A few years ago, a woman, her hus- band and their grandson were stopped by police outside of San Antonio. It was the middle of the night, and the reason for the stop, according to the two officers, was safety: The family was approaching a high crime area. To the married couple taking their grandchild to SeaWorld, that reasoning felt flimsy. The woman could sense something was off about the stop. After a minute, she says, she turned to the officer standing at her window. “How many untested rape kits do you have here?” she asked him. The officer was clearly taken aback. So, the woman elaborated. “Well, I’m Lavinia Masters,” she said, “and I ain’t all that and a bag of chips, but I fight for survivors of sexual assault. Have you heard of the Lavinia Masters Act?” “No, ma’am,” the officer replied. JUSTICE SHELVED I “Do you process rape kits?” “I don’t know how that works.” The way Masters recalls the encounter, the stumped officer returned to his car with his partner in tow to Google the name of the inquisitive woman they had just pulled over. Then they let the trio drive off with a warn- ing to be careful. “He was clueless,” she says of the officer, but she doesn’t blame him. His lack of awareness was part of a larger problem that still pervades Texas more than three years after the 2019 passage of the Texas law com- monly known as the Lavinia Masters Act. “‘How many other counties are thinking this way?’” Masters asked herself. “‘How many more don’t know?’” A rape kit (also known in Texas as a sex- ual assault kit or “SAK”) is a package of evi- dence collected after a rape occurs, and it typically contains shreds of DNA in the form of skin cells, semen, blood or saliva. Ideally, these kits are used to catch and jail perpetra- tors. But as is the case in Texas, they some- times sit on a shelf, unprocessed for years. Three years since that traffic stop outside San Antonio, thousands of rape kits remain untested in Texas. Since 231 law enforcement agencies did not respond to a recent state- wide audit, the true number of kits is impos- sible to tell. Even still, the Texas Department of Public Safety (DPS) says there are cur- rently 3,510 kits being tested across the state. That list does not include two separate back- logs in Dallas County, which is not part of the DPS system. The first Dallas backlog includes 1,000 kits collected from 1996 through 2011, while the second, which includes around 900 kits, ranges from 2011 to 2019. Meanwhile, many states, including Flor- ida, have cleared their backlogs entirely without implementing the same level of rape kit reform as Texas. “One kit on the shelf is too many,” Mas- ters says. “That’s somebody’s life hanging in the balance. That’s a rapist on the streets who is free and thinking they can violate someone else.” n 2011, a statewide backlog of more than 18,000 untested rape kits gained national headlines and prompted action from law- makers like former Sen. Wendy Davis. Davis’ work helped significantly decrease that back- log (by 2019, for instance, the DPS backlog had about 3,000 untested rape kits) but the num- ber of rapes far outpaced the speed at which labs could process new and existing kits. The Lavinia Masters Act was passed to solve this problem. Among other things, the law, which went into effect in September 2019, requires labs to process a kit within 90 days of receipt. The bill came with a $50 million investment from the state, with the bulk of that money in- tended for more staff and equipment. Fur- ther, as Masters puts it, the bill “stops the clock.” Now the countdown to the end of the statute of limitations for a rape charge doesn’t even begin until the kit is tested. This provi- sion was especially important to Masters, who, in 1985, was raped by knifepoint in her Dallas home. She was 13 years old, and >> p6 Mike Brooks 55 dallasobserver.com dallasobserver.com | CONTENTS | UNFAIR PARK | SCHUTZE | FEATURE | NIGHT+DAY | CULTURE | MOVIES | DISH | MUSIC | CLASSIFIED | CLASSIFIED | MUSIC | DISH | CULTURE | UNFAIR PARK | CONTENTS DALLAS OBSERVER DALLAS OBSERVER MONTH XX–MONTH XX, 2014 AUGUST 11–17, 2022
