From months to minutes: King County Sheriff’s Office first in WA to use new DNA technology
Crime scene DNA test results in minutes rather than weeks or months. It’s a new technology now in the hands of investigators at the King County Sheriff’s Office. It’s called the Rapid DNA machine.
“It allows officers to place DNA into a machine and instead of waiting weeks or months, you get results on whether that DNA is a single source of human DNA in 90 minutes,” King County Sheriff’s Captain Chris Leyba said. “Right now, every sample we collect at a scene, let’s say we collect 14 blood samples at a scene, we have to send 14 samples off to the WSP Crime Lab. Whereas, with this machine, we can run 14 samples at 90 minutes each and determine, say, eight of them belong to the victim. So now instead of sending 14 to the Crime Lab, we’re only sending six because we don’t need all 14 analyzed anymore.” Read more.

