The unavailability of local DNA testing continues to handicap the police force’s crime solving efforts and while the new forensic lab is due to be completed later this year, there has been no move to train persons, particularly the staff at the police crime lab, in this field.
In the meantime, the government has been spending a lot of money to send ranks to foreign labs with samples for analysis, since concerns about maintaining the integrity of evidence has seemly ruled out the use of two local laboratories that facilitate testing overseas.
Two labs—the Eureka Medical Laboratory and the Multi Tech Reference Lab—take samples locally and then send them to labs overseas for analysis using a courier service.
Supervisor at the Eureka Medical Laboratory Vanessa Semple told Stabroek News that the facility caters for two types of DNA testing: paternity/family relations and legal DNA. She said that the Florida based lab that does the actual analysis sends the local lab the packages with envelopes along with sterilized swabs. After the samples are taken, they are placed in the envelopes, which are sealed, and then sent to the US by a local courier service.
Semple said that persons come every week for DNA testing to be done and the lab even does testing for the local embassies, and in such cases one of its representatives would go to the embassy to take the sample, while an embassy representative would witness the process.
Semple was unable to say if the police have ever approached the lab but Crime Chief Seelall Persaud told Stabroek News that the process includes a risk the police force does not want to take, since it has to be concerned with the integrity of the samples and there must be certainty that there is no tampering with the evidence.
In DNA testing, he added, “things must be proven beyond a reasonable doubt.” The whole forensic science discipline “is very important to crime solving as it tests lots of trace evidence, body fluids and fibres,” he said, while noting that a lot of the support for this will be gotten from the new lab.
He noted that there were instances in local cases where DNA testing has been successful. One example, he said, is the case of a Buxton woman who was robbed and then her home set on fire in 2008. He said that all that was left of the woman were burnt remains and it was through DNA samples which were sent abroad that she was positively identified.
Persaud, however, said that DNA testing is very expensive and it is a project that the government might have to do in phases.
While the police force has been relying on labs in the Caribbean—in Barbados and Jamaica—issues have cropped up, including the long delay in getting results. Samples taken of miners burnt to death at Lindo Creek in 2008 were sent to Jamaica for analysis, but results were not released until four years later.
When asked whether DNA testing was on the cards, Home Affairs Minister Clement Rohee said that in time “we will probably look at that being done at the new lab.”
He demurred when asked why the force was not utilising the local labs. “You gotta ask him [the Crime Chief] that,” he said.
Asked if he was not the person with overall responsibility for the force, he said “no, this overall thing sometimes gets you in trouble. It was because of ‘overall’ that we had Linden inquiring, because I am the overall in change of everything. That is not necessarily so,” he explained.
Training needed
The police force’s lab, Persaud said, can prove the existence of human blood. “We can’t go beyond the blood group,” he explained, while adding that it can also conduct chemical testing as it regards the presence of gun powder residue and also poison testing.
But with the importance of DNA in crime solving, particularly in sex crimes and in the identification of dead bodies, former Police Commissioner Winston Felix said that there is need for persons to be trained in this field and those persons also need to gain experience.
“…The DNA component, which I anticipate might be a part of the lab which government is now establishing, has been needed for years but yet again the skills which are needed for the lab need to be supported,” he said, while adding that one can build skills through training and education.
Felix, who is now the Shadow Home Affairs Minister for the main opposition APNU, said that he anticipated that developments in this area “would enable us to deal with cases which are doubtful more definitively as well as support the evidence of victims.”
Asked for his opinion on why the training of persons in DNA testing is yet to begin, he said that it was his understanding that the unavailability of equipment to train the persons was the hurdle. “…If you don’t have the equipment it would be of little use to you,” he said.
However, Felix added that he now understands that through the Citizens Security Programme, “some items of equipment that are necessary to aid investigations in criminal matter” would be available.
When quizzed about whether he thought that the local deficiencies in forensic science have cost the police, in terms of investigating very serious crimes, he responded in the affirmative. “Well, of course we have had deficiencies in the past, which, I hope, the conceptualisation of this lab would have addressed to the point that we would now cover our deficiencies,” he said. “Apart from rape and sexual assaults, you have blood and fluid examination. These are areas, which, in my view, we were deficient in, ’cause where blood is concerned, the most we were able to do in the past was to say that this is the blood of a human being or this is the blood of an animal… I imagine that in the conceptualisation of the work of this lab that these areas will be looked at. You have blood and fluid, you have rape and sexual offences, you have poison, you have identification of dead bodies, all these are areas were forensic sciences ought to help,” he stressed.
Persaud was not sure who will oversee the new lab, while Felix hoped to see it being run by “somebody with a scientific base.”
No DNA testing
Meanwhile, a security source told Stabroek News that from all appearances there will be no facilities for DNA testing at the new lab. “It appears that there will be no DNA testing there. They will just do routine testing… that is the purpose,” he said, while adding that “I don’t understand what they are planning to do… If we are building a state-of-the-art lab, we must do DNA testing.”
Stabroek News was told that when the plan to build the lab came up, there were a number of internal discussions within the Guyana Police Force, during which DNA testing was one of the primary concerns raised.
The source said that DNA testing required state-of-the-art equipment and personnel, which Guyana does not have. There are persons who have been recruited to work in this area and yet they have not been exposed to training, he noted, while adding that this is a stark contrast to the situation in other countries. He cited Barbados as an example, noting that persons from the lab there were sent to England to do Masters Programmes. “They have people right here who could do forensics and specialise in DNA. We have to get state-of-the art equipment and state-of-the-art training,” he added, while pointing out that the country cannot wait until the lab has been built before it starts thinking about training people.
The source also noted that in constructing the facility for the new forensic lab, the local contractors had to make a number of internal changes, which had affected the layout of the building. “They made mistakes in constructing the lab in the first place… They give it to someone who only knows about constructing houses. Certain mistakes were made and adjustments had to be made to the internal components of the lab,” he said, while adding that officials here bypassed persons who have constructed labs in the region.
Overseas testing
Persaud had told this newspaper that DNA samples taken from the body of Millicent Prince-Cummings, the 91-year-old woman who was found raped and murdered, had to be sent overseas for testing. He said too that the force is looking at a lab in the US but has to look for funding to get the samples there.
The source said that sending the samples abroad is every expensive and it makes much more sense to invest in the training of local persons so that the DNA testing that eventually be done right here in Guyana.
The cost attached to overseas DNA testing is driven up because when a sample is taken in a police case, a rank has to accompany it to the overseas lab. In other countries, it was noted, there are laws that permit for samples to be mailed. “Our laws do not permit it. We have to go in person and deliver it and pick it (the results) up back,” the source said, while emphasising that “it is more expensive to be sending it there that doing it here.”
Stabroek News was told that the expenses include the return airfare for the rank, meals, accommodation and the actual cost to get the testing done.
The source said that later, the force will have to find money to pay the analyst to come and testify if the matter comes before the courts. “It is an extremely expensive exercise,” he said.
He added that so far, there is one known case in which DNA evidence was used—the preliminary inquiry into the charge against the accused in the murder of Neesa Gopaul, where an expert from Barbados testified.
According to the source, with the establishment of DNA testing here the number of unsolved cases would more than likely decrease as DNA provides a link that would be very difficult for any defence lawyer to dispute or argue against.
Sheema Mangar
Meanwhile, Radika Thakoor, the mother of Sheema Mangar, who was fatally injured after she was dragged by a car while trying to chase after the person who robbed her, told Stabroek News that had there been a lab in Guyana to do DNA testing, the case could have already been solved. The massacres that occurred in 2008, she said, were reason enough for police to build a forensic lab here with DNA testing capabilities. She said that had this been the case she would have gotten back the results sooner.
Now, more than two years after her child’s death, she is still awaiting an answer on a sample of hair that was sent to the lab in Barbados.
Stabroek News had been reliably informed that the hair that was sent there did not match Mangar’s but her family was never officially told anything.
Thakoor said that recently she spoke with the police and they said they have not received any results from Barbados as yet and that the sample was still with lab. “Over two years they saying that the sample is still in Barbados,” she said, while adding that all this time her child’s killers are walking around, still free.
