Evidence from the gun allegedly used to kill Baltimore police Detective Troy Chesley was contaminated by an employee of the city crime lab, the Police Department revealed Wednesday.
Rana Santos, the lab’s DNA technical leader, made the revelation during testimony in the murder trial of Brandon Grimes in Baltimore City Circuit Court.
Santos said she discovered the DNA evidence of staff member Victor Meinhardt on the 9 mm Sig Sauer handgun police say Grimes, 23, used to gun down Chesley on Jan. 9, 2007.
But Santos said the contamination did not compromise the evidence taken from the gun — and that Grimes “could not be excluded” as the originator of some of the DNA evidence found on the weapon.
“If two people are mixed in a mixture, it doesn’t equal someone else,” she testified.
Judge Timothy Doory denied defense attorney Roland Walker’s motion to suppress the DNA evidence from the crime scene, thereby allowing jurors to view it.
Grimes’ trial is the first time DNA evidence from the city’s crime lab has been questioned in court since Police Commissioner Frederick Bealefeld on Aug. 19 fired Edgar Koch, the crime lab director since 1997.
Bealefeld’s spokesman, Sterling Clifford, has said Koch was fired due to “a number of operational issues,” including allowing DNA evidence from staff to be classified as unknown crime scene evidence.
Lawyers from the Public Defender’s Office have said they are planning their own investigation into contaminated evidence at the lab.
Santos testified that on Aug. 8, before Koch’s firing, she began running Police Department employees’ names through a new database and found 12 cases of staff contamination out of more than 2,500 unknown crime scene DNA samples.
“We did not have a staff database to compare evidence,” she testified. “… That should not have been.”
Walker called the contamination a “dramatic mistake” and a “serious problem.”
“It’s not a serious problem,” Santos replied. “It happens all the time.”
Santos said staff DNA can get into evidence though hair, eyelashes, coughing, sneezing — even breathing.
“This isn’t scary to me,” she testified. “It’s not something I didn’t expect. It’s not something that doesn’t happen in other labs. … It’s not surprising to me at all.”
She added that the crime lab has since ordered serology workers to wear two gloves when processing possible evidence and use disposable lab gear.
Grimes is facing life in prison if he is convicted of first-degree murder in Chesley’s death, which prosecutors say was a botched robbery attempt on the 4500 block of Fairfax Road.
Walker has argued that prosecutors have no direct evidence against Grimes and are relying solely on circumstantial evidence. He has theorized two other men shot both Grimes and Chesley as they happened to be on the street together.
Prosecutors rested their case Wednesday; the defense’s case should start today.
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