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30-Jun-2022
TrueAllele handles guns touched by many people
On April 8, 2018, in Mansfield, Ohio, Terrence Harris was shot while sitting in the passenger seat of a moving car. The fatal bullet entered his back, perforated his lung, and struck his heart.
The police recovered a Glock pistol. The county crime lab analyzed the gun. They found the DNA of six dierent people all mixed together on the Glock grip. Older manual interpretation methods can't handle DNA data that complex. Nor can most other probabilistic genotyping software. But TrueAllele readily solved the problem.
On May 17, 2019, Cybergenetics analyst Jennifer Hornyak Bracamontes drove out from Pennsylvania, through the cornfields of Ohio, to testify before the Richland County jury. She explained how she had used TrueAllele technology to interpret the DNA gun data.
She said, based on the computer's thorough and objective analysis of the DNA evidence, "a match between the Glock grip and defendant Deshawn Dowdell was 41.5 million times more probable than coincidence." TrueAllele had found useful information in handgun DNA data – results that no one could find before.
On May 21, the jury found Mr. Dowdell guilty of murder. On May 29, 2019, the judge sentenced him to 26 years to life in prison. On April 13, 2020, the Ohio appellate court affirmed his conviction.