Seattle Police this week arrested a 52-year-old man after DNA evidence indicated that he had raped a teenage girl whose rape kit had gone untested for more than a decade.
Local news station KOMO reports that police arrested Darin Bolar on charges of kidnapping and repeatedly raping a girl 11 years ago when she was just 14 years old.
The reason it took so long to discover Bolar’s alleged link to the victim’s sexual assault, reports KOMO, is that her rape kit went unexamined for years — and was one of more than 1,000 rape kits that have been languishing in a backlog that has only just recently been addressed.
As KOMO explains, former Seattle Police Chief Kathleen O’Toole in 2015 started an initiative to start going through all of the backlogged rape kits.
“Cases had to meet certain criteria to be sent to the state crime lab for testing, but O’Toole’s announcement prompted Seattle police to send each kit along for examination,” KOMO explains.
Bolar’s alleged rape of a 14-year-old 11 years ago was not the first time he had been arrested for sex crimes, as he was convicted in 1993 of third-degree child rape for assaulting a teenage girl while she was at an amusement park.