Crime lab hopes to relocate in year

Only money -- $150,000 -- stands in the way of starting construction to relocate the Southeast Missouri Regional Crime Lab to more spacious quarters.

A fund-raising foundation, Friends of the SEMO Crime Lab, has been set up to raise private money to wrap up final funding for the $1.5 million project.

The private dollars will be used to pay the local match for the $750,000 in federal money that has been obtained for the project, said Stephen Sokoloff, Dunklin County prosecuting attorney and the head of the new not-for-profit, fund-raising corporation.

Southeast Missouri State University and the state of Missouri have contributed $350,000 to the project. Cities and counties in an 18-county area of Southeast Missouri served by the crime lab have pledged a combined $250,000 to be paid over five years.

Foundation and crime lab officials hope to raise the $150,000 within the next 90 days so construction can start in January and a new crime lab opened in Cape Girardeau next fall.

"We've got to be going forward with construction and renovation right after the first of the year," Sokoloff said. The project needs to be done next year or risk losing the federal money, he said.

Donations could have been collected through the university's foundation, but Sokoloff said setting up a separate entity increases visibility for the project and avoids competition for funding for Southeast's other projects.

Renovated warehouse

The university plans to renovate a warehouse at Ellis and Merriwether that had been used by the school's facilities management department. New equipment also will be installed as part of the project.

Much of the renovation work will be done by Southeast's facilities management crews, a move that should keep costs down, crime lab officials say.

Sokoloff and others say the relocation is long overdue.

The crime lab has operated from cramped quarters in a two-story house on the Southeast campus since 1976. During that period, the annual caseload has increased from 1,200 to around 3,000, said Dr. Robert Briner, lab director.

Like everywhere else in the lab, there's little elbow room in Briner's basement office.

The lab has about 2,000 square feet of space. The new lab will have 8,000 square feet to begin with, and future renovations could bring it to 14,000 square feet on a single level.

No price tag has been given for the second phase, which could include space for forensic science classrooms and a regional morgue.

The existing lab has little space for anything. The lab has a staff of six, including Briner.

Briner said he has enough work to justify a larger staff but has no room for them. Relocating the lab could lead to an expanded staff.

The new lab also will mean new equipment such as automated analysis of DNA, a growing part of forensic science.

Sokoloff said prosecutors in Southeast Missouri could face longer turn-around times for analyzing evidence if a new lab isn't opened soon.

"We are rapidly getting to the point where they can't keep up," he said.

There's also a growing likelihood that defense lawyers will challenge evidence simply because the evidence was analyzed in a cramped crime lab, the prosecutor said.

mbliss@semissourian.com

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