Lisa Nuñez-Najera saw the business card tucked near the screen door of her Kansas home. She grabbed it and read the name. It was from a lieutenant with the sex crimes unit of the Wichita Police Department.
Questions flooded her mind, a new one before she could process the last. Was she in trouble? Had something terrible happened to a family member? Or maybe they were calling about one of the sexual assaults she had reported over the years. But why now?
Nuñez-Najera was wary of the police, from too many times when she had called for help and felt, instead, judged. Yet she picked up the phone.
The lieutenant said he wanted to speak with her about a rape she had reported in 2006. For a split second, she had to search to find the memory. When she did, she struggled to breathe.
The agency had just now processed her sexual assault evidence kit, the lieutenant explained. They had found a man's DNA.
Nuñez-Najera was confused. She thought the kit had been tested years ago.
Kansas discovered its rape kit backlog almost by accident.
At a conference in 2014, Kansas Bureau of Investigation Director Kirk Thompson heard about stockpiles of untested sexual assault evidence kits discovered in several major U.S. cities. Thompson thought Kansas police officials had been routinely sending their rape kits for testing. But he asked a staffer at the agency to run a basic analysis comparing the number of reported rapes in the state to the number of sexual assault kits submitted for testing.
There was a gap - a big one.
A statewide inventory later uncovered 2,200 untested kits at 86 Kansas law enforcement agencies. The oldest had sat since 1994.
In 2015, the Kansas Bureau of Investigation received a $2 million grant through the National Sexual Assault Kit Initiative, a U.S. Department of Justice program that has since provided nearly $350 million to state and local agencies across the country to test rape evidence, reinvestigate cases, bring answers to victims and institute reforms so that another backlog never develops.
Katie Whisman oversaw the initiative for the state. A Kansas native who in second grade knew she wanted to work in law enforcement, Whisman had started at the Kansas Bureau of Investigation as an intern and worked her way up over more than a decade, including eight years as an agent assigned to narcotics and violent felony crimes. Serving as the executive officer in the director's office, she became entrenched in every step of the program's rollout, from convening a steering committee to encouraging law enforcement agencies to count their kits to developing a strategy for getting the evidence tested.
But once the state lab began processing the first kits, what happened to those cases was out of her control. The decisions fell to local police and prosecutors.
Whisman knew those agencies are often strapped for resources. She asked her team to complete a full background check on every suspect identified through DNA testing, hoping to "take as much of the load off of them as we possibly could."
In Wichita, those suspect packets were reviewed by Lt. Jason Stephens, a veteran of the department who oversaw the unit that investigates domestic violence and sex crimes.
Stephens had hand counted the agency's untested kits - a wall of boxes in a temperature-controlled storage room. There were roughly 1,100, half of the state's total. He and others on his team had taken turns driving them to Topeka for testing, in batches of about 200 at a time.
As results came in, Stephens read the lab reports and flagged about 300 cases for further review, mostly those where testing had turned up a DNA profile and a suspect's name. Next, a team of local law enforcement officials and prosecutors met to discuss whether the investigations could be reopened.
Just 16 cases made it through that step.
Nuñez-Najera's case was one of them.
After a brief phone call with Stephens on the day she found his business card at her front door, Nuñez-Najera hesitated - then agreed to come to police headquarters for a meeting.
"At that point, I was just like, what? Why now?" she said. "Why are we bringing this back? But another part of me was like, yes, finally. Finally, maybe there's some answers. Finally, maybe somebody listens."
Nuñez-Najera had not known the name of the man who she said raped her. But she recognized him as someone who lived in her trailer park, who had been following her around.
At the time, she was a 22-year-old mother with two young boys. When the stranger showed up at her front door, he had a friend with him who grabbed her sons and led them into the yard and toward a van. The man pushed into her home and then cornered Nuñez-Najera in the bedroom. She begged him to stop, but that made him more determined. An instinct to protect her children took over. She said she stopped fighting as he raped her.
"I just remember thinking in my head, 'Don't make this hard, because I need to get out there to my kids,'" she said.
When the man left, she found her boys outside, alone. At the hospital, an advocate from the local sexual assault center offered her fresh sheets for her bed back home, to replace the ones taken by police. A nurse swabbed her body for evidence and bagged up her clothes. An officer asked her questions and took notes for a report.
But when a detective later called Nuñez-Najera and asked if she wanted to pursue the case, she wasn't sure. She believed the man was connected to a local gang, and her maternal instincts kicked in again: She was worried for her family's safety. She told the detective that it was probably better to drop it. He asked for her to think on it and said that he would call back, she recalled.
Twelve years passed before she heard from the police about the case again.
Across the state of Kansas, very few people whose kits were tested were ever contacted by police.
When Whisman and her team sent their packets of suspect information to law enforcement officials, most cases went nowhere. Whisman found it disheartening. She recalled her staff near tears because they had worked diligently to get to the point of handing over suspect names to police - and then "nothing's happening."
"We had one case where the law enforcement agency was totally bought in. They wanted to do the right thing. They wanted to reinvestigate. And their prosecutor said, 'They're wasting their time. I looked at these cases once, I will not look at them again,'" she recalled.
Whisman reallocated more of her grant budget toward training police and prosecutors, hoping to address misconceptions about sexual violence. If she could not control the outcome of cases from the backlog, she said, she would try to make things better for victims in the future. She made the same calculation after a case from a previously untested kit made it to trial only to end in acquittal.
"We've invested in making the criminal justice response better, and now the hangup is the public. It's the people that are sitting on the jury," she recalled thinking. "So what can we do to influence change there?"
Whisman used grant money to pay for a public awareness campaign with a message she hoped would resonate across the state: Rape is real, and it has happened to someone you know.
When Nuñez-Najera arrived at the Wichita Police Department, she was greeted by a detective she had never met. That churned up a well of anxiety inside her that she had been trying to settle all day. She had only just grown comfortable with talking to Stephens and now had to start fresh with someone new.
She answered the detective's questions, recounting the assault in as much detail as she could remember.