 one minute to air, 20 seconds to air. Now. Thank you everyone for joining us today for this very important press conference to discuss some of the very significant arrests in the cold case sexual assault unit. Right now we're going to begin with a statement from our Chief of Police, C.J. Davis, followed by remarks from the Attorney General, Josh Stein, and then remarks from the Durham County District Attorney, Satana DeBerry, Durham Crisis Response Center Director, Kent Wallace-Megs, followed then from our unit leader, Lieutenant Stephen Vaughn. After his presentation, we will give the media a chance to ask some questions about the cold case unit, the SOC-I grant, and some of the cases that he is presenting to you, your video and their mics. And again, we'll begin right now with our Chief of Police, C.J. Davis. Greetings and thank you all for joining us today for this very important press conference. I think we could all use some good news right about now. And the good news is that several offenders who have committed some of the most egregious crimes for the past decade are now behind bars. Thanks to the hard work and dedication of our cold case sexual assault unit and our criminal justice partners, victims and their families can rest a little easier tonight knowing that the individuals who allegedly perpetrated these crimes against them are now behind bars and will soon have their day in court. The Durham Police Department's cold case unit is funded through a $1 million three-year sexual assault kit initiative, also known as the SOC-I project grant. The grant has supported investigations in the filing of charges against 11 people in connection with 15 sexual assault cases going back as far as 1984. The Durham Police Department and I are appreciative of our partners in the AG's office, Durham DA's office and the Durham Crisis Response Center who have worked alongside us on this journey. I'm also grateful for the dedication of the Durham Police Department investigators and supervisors who have worked tirelessly to put sexual assault predators and offenders away so they can't hurt anyone else. You will hear from them as well in just a few moments. Thank you again to our local media for joining us along with our city leaders and for the continued support of our community at large. I will now turn it over to our North Carolina Attorney General, Josh Stein, who is also one of our biggest supporters. He has been a strong advocate to leave no sexual assault kit untested and ensuring that statewide every victim of sexual assault gets justice. We are grateful for his hard work and continued support. AG Stein, thank you for taking time out of your busy schedule to be with us today. It is my absolute pleasure to be with you today, Chief Davis. Thank you and your department's leadership on this issue. You are really elevating Durham across the whole state and I think we can all stand to learn lessons from the great work that you and District Attorney DeBerry are engaged in. Good morning everyone. Thanks everyone for being here. I wanna thank Durham PD's Cold Case Sexual Assault Unit for staying busy and doing this important work. Also, thanks to the office of District Attorney Satana DeBerry for her partnership with the Durham PD and prioritizing this most important issue. It's my pleasure to join you all in making today's announcement. And I wanna start with three messages. First, to the victims and survivors of sexual assault. We take the crimes that occurred to you seriously and we will fight for you. To the perpetrators, we say very clearly that no matter how long ago you committed your crime, we will not stop coming for you. And finally to the public, we are committed to making our community safer by putting violent people behind bars. Chief Davis, Lieutenant Vaughn and everyone involved in investigating these cases, hearty congratulations and thank you for your persistence. Today underscores the value of the work that you do day in and day out, never giving up on a case and always fighting for justice. DNA is a powerful tool. It can tie a potentially dangerous suspect to a crime or it can exonerate the innocent. And today we owe a debt of gratitude to the determined law enforcement officers, hardworking forensic scientists and the brave survivors who reported the crimes and then submitted to hours of invasive examinations to deliver this evidence to the criminal justice system. Thanks to their collective efforts, we are able to announce that DNA has enabled the Durham Police Department to make 11 arrests in 15 cases. This is tremendous progress that deserves recognition and celebration. I wanna take just a moment to discuss this issue of untested sexual assault kits in North Carolina more broadly. As many of you know, in 2016, 2017, we conducted an inventory to better understand how many untested sexual assault kits are in local law enforcement custody in North Carolina. There were approximately 15,000 untested kits across our state in local law enforcement evidence rooms. Today's news serves as an important and encouraging reminder to the public and to other law enforcement agencies that DNA can breathe new life into cold cases. And it demonstrates that we are making progress on testing these kits. We have secured money. We need to test these kits through grants like the Saki Grant and legislative appropriations. We developed a tracking system. So going forward, we know exactly how many kits there are and where they are in the process. The state crime lab stands ready to work with all local law enforcement agencies to get these kits tested quickly so that agencies can reopen cases, conduct investigations, make arrests and make their communities safer. But it all starts with testing these kits. Doing so will put more criminals behind bars where they will not be able to hurt anyone else. As I prepare to turn the microphone over to my friend, District Attorney Satana DeBerry, I wanna highlight two things that I see that Durham is being successful with in addressing these cold cases. And those are leadership and partnership. The people of Durham should know that this success is not happening uniformly in every jurisdiction around the state. That's why I wanna commend Chief Davis, her team and District Attorney DeBerry and her team for tackling this problem head on. Thanks to your leadership, you are putting serial rapists behind bars and making people in Durham safer. And by creating this cold case unit that includes investigators, an assistant district attorney and an effective assistant, you are bringing together the key players necessary to solve these crimes and secure convictions. Of course, my team at the state crime lab, which is also doing great work, is proud to work alongside you as well. Thanks to their scientific DNA analysis, the financial commitment from state lawmakers and the elimination of local law, I'm sorry, the partnership with local law enforcement officers, we are eliminating our state's backlog of untested sexual assault kits. Today's announcement demonstrates that when we work together and we test kits, we solve crimes and by doing so, we deliver justice for victims, hold rapists accountable and make our community safer. Thank you, District Attorney DeBerry, the floor is yours. Good morning. I wanna thank the Durham Police Department and Attorney General Stein for your commitment to testing sexual assault evidence kits. My office is dedicated to focusing on serious offenses like sexual assault and working with our partners at DPD to secure justice for survivors of these horrific crimes. Since early 2019, prosecutors in my office have been meeting regularly with DPD, victim advocates and medical experts to review cases as sexual assault evidence kits are submitted for testing. Together, they consider the nature of the case and how to move forward with the best interest of the victims at the forefront. We work closely with DPD to discuss what we need to do to build cases, to file charges, to ensure the safety of survivors in our community and to successfully prosecute these cases. With the federal grant awarded to DPD last year, we now have a full-time prosecutor dedicated to these cases. This is very important. ADA Blake Norman, our Saki prosecutor, works directly with DPD to review sexual assault cases and consult on charges. While DNA evidence, like Attorney General said, is a powerful and crucial piece to prosecuting these cases, often there are other pieces of the puzzle that also need to be pulled together to prove that an assault has occurred. ADA Norman is dedicated to doing exactly that. We're thrilled to have him in our office and assigned to the Cold Case Sexual Assault Unit. Through this collaboration, we have made tremendous progress in addressing these violent crimes that have occurred in our community. In some cases, these survivors have waited years, even decades, to see us here making these announcements today. Through this collaboration between DPD, the Durham DA's Office and Durham Crisis Response Center, we will give survivors the priority and care they deserve. We will ensure that their cases are handled in a way that is trauma-informed from start to finish. I hope that we have already been able to accomplish together. I hope that what we have already been able to accomplish together sends a strong and clear message. I hope this gives survivors in our community hope and confidence that they will see accountability and justice. And speaking directly to those survivors, know that we know and now have the resources and demonstrated the dedication to prosecute these cases. And know that every agency represented here today will be here to support you in every way that we can. Now, we'll introduce Kent Wallace-Megs, who is Executive Director of the Durham Crisis Response Center. Kent? Thank you. Good morning, everyone. Durham Crisis Response Center is Durham's only agency for finding comprehensive services for survivors of sexual assault, domestic violence, human trafficking, and family violence. We serve all survivors who come to us. Those who report their assault to law enforcement and those who choose not to. Those who go to the hospital for forensic exams and those who, for many reasons, do not. Survivors who were assaulted last night and survivors who were victimized years ago. We assist survivors with whatever they need to navigate the path to healing. Testing these kits is paramount in healing survivors and the community moving forward. As part of the project, a DCRC advocate works with the DPD to support the survivor. We are grateful for this partnership because it provides for better all-around support for the survivor. DCRC advocates are able to assist, be a voice for, and provide comprehensive services for a survivor in ways others cannot. We hope through this continued collaboration we're able to help more survivors heal. We will continue to support and advocate for survivors in any way we can. And we are committed to working with the DPD and the DA's office to minimize additional trauma and center the needs of survivors as this process continues. And we are here for anyone who is a survivor. I now turn it over to Lieutenant Vaughn with the DPD. Good morning, everyone. As you know, I'd like to first highlight the unit we have formed to get through the grant in the sexual assault that was actually awarded to us through the Department of Justice with the United States and also the Bureau of Justice Assistance. As you know, back in October of last year we announced the grant that we received of $1 million over three years to be able to build our cold case unit. When we started to build our cold case unit we looked at the fact that we need to build something that's very victim centered. So with that, I'd like to introduce our unit as we work through it. Investigator Winston Hunt and also investigator Ann Crystallity are the main investigators that have been assigned to our unit to investigate the criminal side of these cases. As you heard from Madam D. Berry, ADA Blake Norman is our prosecutor for our unit. He will be handling these cases from beginning to end for us to prosecution so our victims will have one prosecutor to speak with. Also our investigators will have one prosecutor to work with. So therefore our lines of communications are strong when it comes to prosecuting our cases. We also saw the need to have a victim advocate and assistance. That is unfortunately, Ms. Tammy Tereves cannot be here today. She is handling a required training that she must attempt for the state of North Carolina. But with her position, she's gonna work very closely with the victims of sexual assault in these cases, not just through them, but from the very beginning. She will assist investigators with the initial contact. She will work with the victims through the investigation to answer any questions, write support or any referrals. Then as we continue into prosecution, she's gonna be there with ADA Blake Norman to assist the victims to understanding what is going on through the prosecution in the court system and provide assistance there. So once you can stay very victim centered and assisting our victims through these cases, which have been many decades old and are working through this. I also like to highlight an individual who is not directly assigned, but has been assisting our unit for a great deal of time. Let's investigate her Jasmine Lyons. She's been doing very important work for our unit and also for the department. As in her job right now is to review each of these cases related to the sexual assault evidence kit. After her review, she completes all our submissions to the state lab for outsourcing approval. She attracts all these through our spreadsheets making sure that where they are, where they're going. She also conducts the completion of all the shipments of these kits and the returns of reports. And then also lets us know when they're back in the evidence. Without her work, there's not much that could be done. It's time I just really wanna give her a big thanks for a lot of her hard work and making it able for our investigators and our prosecution be able to move forward with this outsourcing project. I'd like to give a spend of time just to let the public know where we are at this point far as the number of kits. When we start us off as AJ Josh Steins talked about was we have a very large inventory. Our department was about 1700 cases or kits, excuse me, at that time. As of June of this year, we've been moving forward with we have made over 456 case submissions to forensic advantage, which means we have submitted those to the state laboratory for approval. With that, we've had 102 cases that have been kits that have been completed with reports and have been uploaded into combined DNA indexing system also known as CODIS. With those 102, we've had 60 CODIS hit notifications. So that means we have been able to receive 60 notifications of a match for a kit to individuals in the CODIS system. As Chief Davis highlighted, we've been able to work our cases and link through DNA 11 individuals to 15 cases those 11 injured men has been charged and arrested on proceeding to trial. Like take a moment to highlight some notable arrests and also some recent arrests. And part of this is to allow us to work through and let people, the public knows some of the individuals that we see of concern. And if they felt they've been in contact with these individuals or have been affected in any way that we're not quite aware of at this time to let us know. As it will take a moment to pull up a slide to let you know what's going on. First, I'll let you talk about Mr. Michael Brooks here. Mr. Brooks has been charged and arrested with at this time three investigations. But we do know through our work that we have linked them to eight cases with the Durham City Police Department through the years of 2003 to 2017 along with a case with the Durham County Sheriff's Office. We're continuing to work with those. You may, so we definitely have recognized him as a serial offender through our work. Next is Mr. Michael McNeil. Mr. McNeil has been charged and arrested on three cases from 1996, 1998, and also in 2003. Following him, as these top two individuals we have seen right now are notable that we see them as serial offenders having committed three or more cases or actually assaults throughout the years. And we're still continuing to look into them. If you'll go back one more slide, I apologize. The following individuals are most recent arrests. Mr. Vincent Sound was charged with a 2003 case. Next slide, please. Antoine Lloyd was charged with a 2000 and arrested and charged with a 2005 case. Jonathan Bridget was charged and arrested on a 2013 case. Robert Burnett has been our oldest one that went back to a 1984 case, which is a little different, but our cold case, how this was a notification to the attorney, the district attorney's office. So we clearly picked it up and worked it through our cold case and we're following through, but this has been our oldest case at this time. One individual who is not on here, but we'll make sure he's on the press release is a James R. Harris. He was charged and arrested on a 2010 case and also for failure to register address with the Durham County Sheriff's Office to their sex offender. At this time, I'd like to thank everyone for their time and also some of the great work that's been done by our unit and also letting you know about our noble arrest and some of the great work that's going on. I turn it back over to Amanda Fitzpatrick for a question. Thank you so much, Lieutenant Vaughn. At this time, we'd like to open up more to the media for any questions that you may have about the cold case, the sake grant or any of those notable arrests. And you will be able to unmute yourselves if you have a question. All right, Gloria Rodriguez. Yes, hi, I'm Gloria Rodriguez with ABC 11. My question is for Attorney General Stein. You mentioned that there were 15,000 untested rape kits across the state. Where are we now? And do you feel that we're moving fast enough in terms of being able to test those kits? We are making excellent progress. We have entered all of those kits into our tracking system. We've secured both grant funds and a $6 million appropriation from the General Assembly to outsource those kits. The state has contracts with two labs where we can send those kits for testing. The only unfortunate situation is that there's a capacity issue. North Carolina is not the only state with old cases. Therefore, these labs have only so much capacity that they can handle at any given time. We have negotiated that they expand their capacity to accelerate the testing in North Carolina. So we're proud of where we are. We're pleased with the progress, but we have more work to do. Do you know how many are still untested at this point? I don't know the precise number. I'm sure we can get you to the figures. Okay, and then my other question is, have any of you been able to speak to any of the victims of any of these crimes and how are they feeling with these arrests? I'll leave that for the Durham PD folks. As far as our contact with the victims, they've been very positive. Some have asked some questions of time, but once we explain to them what's been going on, they've been very much on board and also very appreciative of the investigators and the time that they are spending and working with them. Also with the addition of Ms. Tavarez onto our unit, that's also been a very beneficial help. So as far as providing assistance and working through, so questions are asked, but far as what we've experienced has been very positive and understanding and very grateful that we have have not forgotten. Thank you. And are there any other questions? We also wanna note that we did send the press release, which will include images that you've just seen in the press conference, as well as descriptions of their crimes and their arrests. It looks like we have a question. Go ahead a shot. So could you tell me about any difficulties in prosecuting these kinds of cases? Any difficulties you've had in the past or is it generally a little bit more smooth? These cases are just at the beginning process, but one of the things that we have made sure that we do when we're working with DPD is that even before we charge these cases, we try to make them as strong as possible, so that we have an easier time as we get through the court process. All right, do you have any other questions, Ashad? That's all for me. Okay, thank you. Does anyone else have any other questions before we wrap up? This is a crystal price with the CBS 17. I don't know if you guys could talk a little bit more about why there is a backlog and why so many of these kits go untested? Probably the best way to explain that there are some changes. I would say I could speak just a little bit for DPD and I'll let the attorney general kind of step in with some of his remarks. There was many decisions as far as how things were handled, policies and things so as years go by, things change. We all know policies change, procedures could change. And of course, when you look back into stuff that was from the 90s as they move on, DNA has changed and the testing has changed throughout the years, things get better. So as we start looking forward with it. So the question I look at is not so much what happened back then, but what can we do now? And as we move forward, so we do take on those challenges because our questions will be asked in prosecution, but we're gonna move forward, test our case, test our kits and work on our investigations. I'll turn it over to the attorney general now for further remark. Yeah, thank you, Lieutenant Vaughn. I agree with what you said wholeheartedly. It's much more important that we focus on we have this situation now, how can we fix it and how can we ensure that it never develops in North Carolina again? This backlog of untested sexual assault kits. I think how we got here was both a cultural and scientific reason on the cultural side and a lot of folks who've worked these cases for many years will admit that as law enforcement, there wasn't as much sensitivity to the crime victim. And Lieutenant Summerndyke who headed the Fayetteville PD sexual assault unit said that back in the 90s and early 2000s when he would have an interview with a victim, if there was any deviation in that victim's story throughout the tellings of it, he would then dismiss the statement. But he now, we all know collectively what the impact of trauma is on the human brain and that there isn't just a movie version of a story. It's choppy in terms of the way the brain processes that kind of crime. And so I think there's greater scientific knowledge about the impact of trauma. There's more understanding about victims' rights. But on the science side, the technology at getting DNA from a sample is much better than it used to be. And the database at which those DNA samples are compared, the CODIS database is much bigger, much richer source of data than it used to be. So the odds of making a hit today are greater than they've ever been. And so what we wanna do is use this moment with all that we've learned and with the new technology and resources we have to bring justice to more people. Just because a person was assaulted 10 or 15 years ago does not make that crime any less real or impactful on that human. And that person deserves to have their kit tested and to get justice and have the perpetrator held accountable. And frankly, the public does because as Lieutenant Vaughn highlighted, many offenders are serial offenders. And the one person who was assaulted 10 years ago may not have been the only victim. There may be others, there may be future if we don't arrest them. And that's why I'm so proud of the partnership and leadership demonstrated by folks in Durham today. Hi, Crystal, any other questions? No, I'm good. All right, thank you, Crystal. Does anyone else have any other questions before we conclude? Hi, I have a question. Okay. I'm Celeste Gracia with WUNC. I'm wondering, so if I'm remembering the numbers correctly, it's 11 arrests tied to 15 cases. But within Durham PD, there's about 1,700 total cold cases if I'm remembering that correctly. So are those 11 arrests still considered a lot even though there's still all those other cases that you guys are still working on? Yes, actually, as we are starting, this has been very good progress through. I will let you know, too, there are times when we have open up cases through DNA profile where, like I said, our approach is very victim-centered. And if they do not choose to want to move forward a case, we respect their decision. But we do also lead them with the message of we're always here just because you do not choose today to move forward, doesn't mean a month, a year, 10 years from now, you give us a call, we're not ready to move forward. So, but yes, this is very good progress. It shows that we've had a lot of successful cases and we're working through it and a lot of very positive interaction with our victims and understanding that we're here for them to give them their voice. And no matter when they choose, we're there to support them. Thank you, Lieutenant Vaughn. Any other questions, Celeste? No, thank you. All right, any other questions from any of the reporters? All right, and are any of the participants have any final comments? Okay, well, thank you all so much for joining us here today for this very important press conference. And you can definitely watch this on our YouTube page, The Durham Police Department. We also have updates constantly on our Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram at The Durham Police. And we thank Chief Davis for leading this and for everyone participating in Attorney General Josh Stein, District Attorney DeBerry, Keith from DCRC. We appreciate all of you for speaking, Lieutenant Vaughn and the cold case. And we are grateful for the Saki Grant and all it is able to do. All right, thank you everyone. And the press release has been sent out to the media to have the full names, pictures, and information regarding these specific cases. Thank you all, have a great day.