Announcing the Launch of a New Fund to assist Law Enforcement with DNA Testing Costs

This Giving Tuesday we invite you to join us in our next evolutionary step for Intermountain Forensics. A major barrier to bringing resolution to many cold missing persons and homicide cases is a lack of accessible and affordable forensic DNA testing available to law enforcement. Many cold cases were originally investigated in a period where traditional DNA testing was not available or was not sophisticated enough at the time to get a usable result. As technology advances, DNA testing for state crime labs often must focus on active cases, leaving many cold cases DNA requests waiting in a queue or requiring those agencies to seek DNA testing with private forensic DNA labs. Seeking DNA testing with private forensic DNA labs is a costly endeavor, and many cold case units, especially those in rural areas, don’t have room in their budgets to cover these costs.

Many law enforcement investigators have that one unsolved case, the case that they metaphorically carry with them everywhere they go…. That one case where they need just that one extra piece of information to solve it…. That case where the families still contact them years later to see if anything new has happened with the investigation. We want to help alleviate that burden for our law enforcement partners. To that end, we are launching our Law Enforcement DNA testing fund! This fund is intended to assist Law Enforcement afford new forensic DNA testing for cold cases. As we begin the open donation process, we hope to create a pool of funding that law enforcement can apply for to help cover their DNA testing costs with our organization. For those cases where we do not have funding available to cover the cost of testing, we are also launching our case specific crowd funding option for those agencies to request as well.

Solving Cold Cases is a part of our foundation story. Help us create a new cornerstone in that foundation by donating to the Law Enforcement DNA Testing Fund today.

To donate to the fund, go to our funding page at https://givebutter.com/LEDNAFund