From
The Columbus Dispatch:
A thief broke into a West Side lumber company and paused for a snack.
He walked off with more than $18,000 in tools, but he left behind a soda can and a fork. Those items contained all the evidence investigators needed to link him to the crime.
Police collected
DNA from a Diet Mountain Dew can and the fork, which the burglar apparently used to eat Jell-O while lingering at Jones Lumber & Millwork on N. Sylvan Avenue during a June break-in. A statewide database matched the DNA to James W. Cheadle Jr., 42, a West Side resident with previous convictions for breaking and entering, receiving stolen property and drug possession.
Cheadle is in the Franklin County jail awaiting a February trial on more than 30 counts related to multiple business break-ins this year in central Ohio. In three of the burglaries, investigators say they found his DNA at the scene.
"That's what broke the case," Columbus police burglary detective Kevin Morris said. "It's pretty cool."
The DNA database, known as CODIS, searches DNA profiles collected from crime scenes for matches with DNA profiles collected from convicts.
DNA gets most of its attention for helping to convict or exonerate suspects in violent crimes such as murder and rape. But investigators increasingly are using the technology in property-crime cases. Burglars who break windows sometimes leave blood. Those who leave behind a soda can or a cigarette butt are inadvertently providing investigators with saliva samples.
The number of property-crime DNA samples that law-enforcement agencies submitted for analysis to the state Bureau of Criminal Identification & Investigation more than doubled between 2005 and 2007 -- from 444 to 1,088. More than 900 samples were submitted in the first 11 months of this year.
Investigators usually want additional evidence to support the DNA hits. In the Cheadle case, police say they also have fingerprints and surveillance video from some of the crime scenes.
A study released this year by the National Institute of Justice found that when DNA testing was added to traditional property-crime investigations, "more than twice as many suspects were identified … and more than twice as many cases were accepted for prosecution."
But Nancy Ritter, editor of the NIJ Journal, cautioned in an article last month that "the demands to use this highly effective tool could overwhelm our criminal justice system."
Crime labs across the country already face backlogs in processing DNA from violent crimes, she wrote.
Officials at the state and Columbus crime labs concede that they give priority to violent-crime DNA but said they also find time to process DNA from property crimes.
In the first 11 months of this year, the state crime lab took an average of 87 days to process a violent-crime DNA sample and 151 days to process a property-crime DNA sample, said Steve Greene, deputy superintendent of laboratory operations.
"There is no such thing as a 'lesser crime,' " he said. "Unfortunately, we have to prioritize these cases."