The big break in the investigation of a string of brutal home invasion attacks this year came Aug. 14, when ex-convict Delmer Smith III was arrested after a bar fight in Venice.
Investigators searching his belongings found items apparently stolen during some of the attacks, and that led to multiple home invasion, sexual battery and other charges filed against Smith last week.
But that big break might have come six months earlier, if not for the immense backlog in a system designed to apply a wonder of science, the DNA unique to each human being, to solving crime.
The FBI had Smith’s DNA since March 2008, taken while he was still in federal prison on a bank robbery conviction. The identifying information was added to a backlog of thousands of other samples, and not entered into the FBI’s database. Smith was released from prison in September 2008.
So when Sarasota County sheriff’s investigators submitted DNA recovered Feb. 22, found at the scene of the first of four Sarasota attacks in which Smith has been charged, the FBI’s database came back without a match. One victim was beaten, another sexually assaulted.
No result came back after DNA evidence was found after a March 7 attack.
Or after an attack on March 14.
Or after an attack on May 26.
From February to May, there were at least seven other home invasion attacks in Sarasota and Manatee counties for which Smith is considered the prime suspect, even though DNA was not found in those cases. Women were brutalized in each case; in one, on April 5, a 37-year-old was slain.
Not until after the Aug. 14 fight, at the Tavern on the Island bar on East Tampa Avenue in Venice, did investigators have the name of a possible suspect after finding two computers and other items taken during the four Sarasota attacks.
And not until local officials asked the FBI to take another look to see if they might have Smith’s DNA, did investigators get the biggest break of all:
Smith’s DNA, unlike anyone else’s in the world, matched that found at those four Sarasota crime scenes.
Sarasota Sheriff Tom Knight on Friday refused to speculate on whether Smith might have come to the attention of investigators sooner if not for the backlog in the FBI’s DNA database.
“We don’t speculate on things like that because that is an unknown that wasn’t available to us,” he said.
But a noted DNA expert says the backlog puts the public at risk.
“Any one of us could be the next victim,” said Lawrence Kobilinsky, chairman of the sciences department at the John Jay School of Criminal Justice in New York. “I think we are all in jeopardy when you have these kinds of people running around, and they are not stopped when they should have been.”
A bar fight in Venice
On Aug. 14, Smith was at the Tavern on the Island bar, accompanying his girlfriend who was working as a deejay.
He pulled out a video camera and began taping a female dancer, but the woman’s boyfriend objected. Smith pummeled him with several blows to the face, and punched another man during the fight, according to police reports.
Smith was arrested, but the victims later refused to press charges.
But Smith was a parolee on probation and that gave authorities enough cause to search his belongings.
That’s when they found a gun — enough for officials to charge Smith with violating his probation — and the items stolen during the Sarasota attacks.
Since the DNA of all federal prisoners is supposed to be obtained before they are released, investigators again asked the FBI if its database might help determine whether Smith was the masked man who had brutalized women in the four Sarasota attacks.
The results came back 4-for-4, according to reports. The DNA from each of the four scenes belonged to Smith.
But up to that moment, the investigation of the Sarasota home invasions had fallen victim to a combination of factors — including state and federal laws requiring DNA from more and more categories of criminals be recorded and preserved — that contributed to a backlog of some 295,000 DNA profiles waiting to be entered into the FBI database.
U.S. Rep. Vern Buchanan met with FBI officials last week about the backlog. He wants the bureau to adjust its procedures to make sure the DNA from the most violent offenders gets top priority when entering profiles into the database.
“I am not looking to blame anyone — the only bad guy here is the person who committed these crimes,” said Buchanan, R-Sarasota. “I am looking for ways to help the FBI expedite the entry of DNA into the database so we can identify and catch these criminals sooner.”
The FBI does not currently consider an offender’s criminal background as part of its sample submission process.
The oldest samples are typically processed first, said bureau spokeswoman Ann Todd.
But Kobilinsky said it would make sense to place an emphasis on identifying the most violent criminals when they break the law again.
“The efficiency with which people are put into that database makes the difference between success and failure,” Kobilinsky said. “The larger the database, the more effective it is.”
DNA not a factor in Manatee
Smith is in the Pinellas County jail awaiting transfer to Sarasota. Manatee Sheriff Brad Steube said that, based on similarities with the Sarasota cases, he thinks Smith is responsible for two attacks his agency is investigating: on March 13 in northwest Bradenton, and on March 31 in East Manatee.
But a big difference is that Manatee detectives have not recovered any DNA that would help make a case against Smith — or any other possible perpetrator.
“The problem with ours is that in our two home invasions, we have no fingerprints, no DNA,” Steube said. “He was dressed in all black clothing from head to toe with a mask on.”
That outfit, however, matches the description in cases in which Smith is charged.
“So our only hope right now is to go back and review the property that was seized from him at a storage facility,” the sheriff said, “and let our victims look at that because there were some things stolen out of our home invasions.”
If that doesn’t give Manatee detectives the break they are looking for, said Steube, “these may go unsolved.”
