04/05/2026
This is Ridiculous…
On August 17, 2009, assistant prosecutor Robert Spada walked into a Detroit Police Department storage warehouse and stopped dead.
Shelf after shelf. Box after box. Stacked in rows, gathering dust in an abandoned building in a city already collapsing under financial ruin.
There were *11,431* of them.
Sexual assault kits collected from r**e survivors between 1984 and 2009 — sitting untested, never submitted for forensic analysis. Some had been there for thirty years. Some had outlasted the statute of limitations. Some belonged to survivors who were now middle-aged adults who had long since stopped waiting for justice.
Each white cardboard box, the size of a child’s shoebox, represented a person who had come forward. Who had endured a medical examination. Who had trusted the system to carry what they could no longer carry alone.
The system had set it on a shelf and walked away.
Spada brought the discovery to Wayne County Prosecutor Kym Worthy. She has said since that not much shocks her after decades in criminal law.
This shocked her.
“I immediately started thinking of all the women who reported r**es to law enforcement,” Worthy said, “and how their lives were sitting on shelves on hold.”
She could have issued a statement. Acknowledged the failure. Moved on.
Detroit in 2009 was on the verge of the largest municipal bankruptcy in American history — there was no money, no infrastructure, no political appetite for a project of this scale. R**e investigations had long been treated as “the stepchild of violent crime.” She had seen police reports from as recently as 2006 in which officers wrote derogatory, dismissive language about teenage r**e victims in official files.
*86.3%* of the survivors in those untested kits were women of color.
That number was not incidental. It was the explanation.
Kym Worthy forced the issue anyway.
No blueprint for addressing a backlog of this size had ever existed. She built one from scratch. She created a dedicated cold-case unit staffed with investigators, prosecutors, forensic analysts, and victim advocates trained in trauma-informed notification. She developed protocols for how to reach survivors decades later and say: We found your kit. We tested it. You were not forgotten.
She lobbied for funding. She approached private foundations. Soul singer Erykah Badu donated concert proceeds. Former Detroit Lions player DeAndre Levy launched his own fundraising campaign. Dollar by dollar, she scr**ed together what the system refused to provide.
She pushed the Michigan state legislature to pass a law requiring r**e kits to be tested within a defined timeline. She implemented a statewide tracking system (built with help from UPS) so survivors could follow their own kit’s progress in real time.
She turned Detroit — the city with the worst r**e kit backlog in the country — into a national model.
As testing began, the DNA evidence revealed something staggering. These weren’t just individual cases. They represented a network of predation that had operated freely for decades, protected by institutional indifference. Worthy noted that a ra**st attacks on average seven to eleven times before being caught — and that more than fifty of the serial offenders identified through the kits had between ten and fifteen DNA matches apiece.
By November 2022, when Worthy announced that every single kit had been tested, the effort had identified *853 suspected serial ra**sts* operating across *39 states* and produced *257 convictions* — with cases still under active review.
What Worthy brought to this work was not only professional determination.
She is herself a survivor of s*xual assault — attacked during her first year of law school while jogging near campus to relieve exam stress. She has never made that fact the centerpiece of her public statements. She has made it clear the work was never about her. But it means that every phone call her office made to a survivor — every conversation that began with “we found your kit, we tested it, you were not forgotten” — came from a woman who understood, from the inside, what it costs to report, and what it costs when the system fails to follow through.
One survivor, Laquetta Travis, a member of Voices of the Backlog, said it plainly: “No one knows how long we had to hold on to survive, to struggle and fight every day to even get a phone call to start our process toward getting justice. We did get the opportunity to get our lives back and to move forward.”
Kym Worthy didn’t walk away.
And 11,431 people — whose lives had been sitting on shelves, on hold, for decades — finally got a phone call.
