Hennepin County to get $500K grant to solve cold cases

Officials said the $500,000 in federal money will help the county with a backlog of unsolved cases.

Star Tribune

Last update: September 30, 2008 - 11:21 PM

A $500,000 federal grant to the Hennepin County Sheriff's Office for DNA testing will help with the backlog of "thousands" of cold cases, county officials said Tuesday.

The money will pay for additional staffing in the Hennepin County lab to test reliable samples from countless homicide cases, as well as rape cases, dating to 1991.

The case of Alfred Lee Moen, charged Monday with first-degree murder in the 1989 stabbing death of Brenda Pikala of Minneapolis, is a prime example of how such grants can help in cold cases. After the same grant was awarded to the Minneapolis Police Department in January, evidence from the case was retested and was found to match Moen's profile.

Hennepin County will use the Department of Justice grant to start a cold case team that will include a full-time detective, a forensic scientist, a prosecutor, a paralegal and the use of the county's sheriff's crime lab, one of three DNA testing labs in the state.

Evidence from many cases remains well-preserved, said Hennepin County Attorney Mike Freeman. What has been lacking is the means to analyze the DNA. That ever-expanding technology, along with the resources to pay for additional staffing to conduct the testing, is expected to help clear cold cases in Hennepin County.

Analysts are hitting new DNA matches every day, Freeman said. While ideally they hope to bring more criminals to justice, he said, there may be a twofold purpose.

"It helps us not only to lead to the suspect, but it eliminates innocent people," he said. "We have made mistakes. We have convicted people we shouldn't have."

ABBY SIMONS

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