Putting Off Justice : Forensics: Crippled by budget and staff cuts, Orange County crime lab has been forced to curtail some investigations.

SANTA ANA —  The tidy, brown paper sacks rarely give hint to their gruesome contents. A tattered dress and nylons. A bloodied nightgown. Soiled chunks of carpet.

The items are the remnants of unsolved Orange County sexual assaults and, in the cool and quiet of evidence freezers in police stations countywide, they wait, perhaps holding the clues that may identify the attackers. A hair or fiber, a speck of body fluid with telltale DNA.

But in many cases no one is looking. There is no time, there is no money, officials say.

While the besieged Los Angeles police crime lab wrestles with far larger caseloads and humiliating charges of shoddy work leveled during the O.J. Simpson murder trial, the Orange County sheriff’s crime lab has enjoyed years of glowing reviews and state-of-the-art facilities.

But now, faced with staff cutbacks and mounting backlogs, frustrated criminalists at the lab--which performs scientific detective work for every Orange County law enforcement agency--have reluctantly changed the way they do business. Cases with trial dates and known suspects must take priority, so the lab’s staff has curtailed what might be called its “enterprise investigations,” the hunt for clues in cases where police have no suspects and few leads.

The cases most often delayed or abandoned involve property theft and the time-consuming analysis of biological evidence from sex crimes with no suspect, said Frank Fitzpatrick, director of the sheriff’s crime lab in Santa Ana.

“It comes down to this: Burglars are left on the street longer and sexual predators are left on the street longer because we can’t do all the things we’re capable of,” Fitzpatrick said. “And that is hard to accept.”

Without that DNA work, there is no way to check those unsolved cases against the statewide database that logs the genetic “fingerprints” of sex criminals. The database is still small, but there is a chance it could link a suspect to an unsolved rape or assault with a few keystrokes.

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The evidence in cold-lead cases also is not analyzed to see if it matches other crimes, Fitzpatrick said. Establishing those connections could prove invaluable to law enforcement agencies that might unknowingly pursue the same criminal. Detectives who may have different pieces of the same puzzle might never know.

Investigators say the only exceptions are especially heinous or high-profile crimes, such as the rape last weekend of a 9-year-old girl at a wooded park in Lake Forest. Analysis of that evidence had begun by midweek.

Prioritizing tragic events presents sizable moral quandaries, sheriff’s officials say.

“In a case that is especially offensive to us all as a society, we are going to go the extra mile and we are going to do everything we can,” said sheriff’s spokesman Lt. Ron Wilkerson. “That doesn’t lessen the severity or cruelty or importance of other crimes. . . . If you have another victim who is equally traumatized--how do you explain the choices?”

The hard choices have been forced by the budgetary bottom line, sheriff’s officials said.

While the Sheriff’s Department weathered Orange County’s bankruptcy last December far better than many other county agencies--its $9 million in cuts pales next to the $19-million hit suffered by the Social Services Agency--law enforcement officials say the losses have hurt.

Sheriff Brad Gates made the cuts “surgically” throughout his 2,400-employee department, Fitzpatrick said, and the lab was not spared.

The lab budget is now $8.1 million, about $400,000 less than last year. The lab had 118 staff positions last year, but has fewer than 100 employees today. Five more employees are expected to quit soon seeking better jobs, and the recruitment and training of their replacements may take six months. The backlogs, Fitzpatrick said, will grow worse.

The cases facing the greatest delays have been crimes against property, which, along with drug analysis and blood-alcohol work, account for most of the lab’s workload.

Evidence from burglaries sits for months before it is examined, giving the thief time to escape, sell the stolen goods or commit other crimes, Fitzpatrick said. Checking latent fingerprints against those on file in the statewide CAL ID fingerprint database also must be postponed for weeks or months, he said. Because CAL ID routinely returns a match on 20% of the prints checked, that lag time might cost police their best shot at a quick resolution to a case.

“These are our bread and butter cases,” Fitzpatrick said. “If the system was working correctly, we collect these prints, run them through the computer the same day and, in one out of five cases, we could have a name the next morning by the time the detective gets to the office.”

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Indeed, detectives said lab work can provide them with a slam dunk solution to cases or a binding web of evidence to help secure convictions. But delays can compromise some of that effectiveness, and abandoned procedures might allow criminals to slip through the cracks.

“When you look at it overall, absent a confession, our best bet a lot of time is building a case with some of the answers we get from the lab,” said Sgt. Greg Mays, a Fullerton police investigator.

Right now, there is a six- to nine-month backlog on processing fingerprints from burglaries and auto thefts, the worst the lab has ever seen. “Some we may never get to,” Fitzpatrick said of the more than 300 cases waiting.

Some concerns about the lab’s effectiveness may be magnified by the standards the criminalists have set for it in the past. Unlike its far more famous counterpart in the LAPD, the Orange County lab is nationally accredited and has enjoyed a reputation as a flagship facility. In the 1980s, it became the site of the first major DNA crime lab on the West Coast and it began this decade by moving into a three-floor facility that is the envy of many criminalists throughout the region.

“The new Seventh Wonder of the World,” joked Michele Kestler, director of the LAPD lab, when asked about the sheriff’s lab. Kestler’s facility wrestles with a caseload many times greater than Orange County but with a staff only twice the size, she said.

But Kestler still sympathizes with her Orange County colleagues. “They were lucky enough to get this gigantic facility and nice new equipment before it all hit, but now this is marching them backward,” she said.

One area where officials fear losing headway is the lab’s use of the California Department of Justice’s year-old DNA database for tracking sexual criminals.

The database has the genetic “fingerprint” of 4,000 sexual offenders, and information on 30,000 more will be entered next year, according to Jan Bashinski, forensic services bureau chief for the Department of Justice. The new tool is a source of great excitement to criminalists because sexual offenders often are repeat criminals, so tracking offenders and linking crimes could pay huge dividends to law enforcement.

But time constraints have forced the Orange County lab to abandon its plan to run genetic evidence from every sexual assault through the database. That eliminates the chance of tying a unsolved crime to an offender.

In Room No. 749, a walk-in freezer, Fitzpatrick hefted a bin full of carefully labeled envelopes and packages, all containing some remnant of the violence and mayhem that play out every day across Orange County. This is the backlog up close, the evidence awaiting examination. The bins are always full.

Five hundred drug cases await processing, 230 toxicology reports, 320 sets of fingerprints, 170 firearms that need to be examined, and 60 gunshot residue cases. And new business comes in every day.