With a suspect in the Hannah Graham case now in custody, police are still waiting for results from evidence sent to the state’s crime lab on Saturday.
Jeff Ban is Director of the Virginia Department of Forensic Science’s Central Lab in Richmond – a place that processes tens of thousands of samples each year, and he never knows how long any one analysis will take.
"I think television shows like CSI, we call it the CSI effect, definitely have expectations on the public of how quickly we can do things, but in the real world it does take longer to do cases. We can't do them in five hours, 24 hours, every item is different."
A large blood stain could be straightforward, but small samples or fabrics that contain traces of more than one person are complex.
“Say you’re talking about a sweat shirt for instance. The person who wears that sweat shirt, they’re going to perspire and leave DNA. And then maybe there's a spatter of blood left on the assailant in a particular crime here. You get a mixture of the person who wore that piece of clothing as well as the person who deposited the blood sample. That takes a little longer.”
Ban said he hoped to have results for Charlottesville soon – although he could not be specific.
“The laboratory is aware that the case needs to be expedited just by the fact that there have been other incidents of missing females in the Charlottesville area, so I have had staff since Saturday working on the evidence in that particular case.”
Charlottesville police have submitted about 30 samples for analysis, and ban says the lab is taking its cues from police in deciding which of them to process first.
