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february 23,2017 | Volume 107 | Issue 129

The Pitt News

BACKLOGGED

Thousands of sexual assault kits sit untested across the country. One lab in Allegheny County found a short-term solution.

The evidence taken after a reported rape can sit on the shelves of a medical examiner office for over a year before it is tested. Courtesy of Santa Monica Rape Treatment Center

Nikita Karulkar

“I like to say surviving is a chronic disease — it never really goes away,” the Long Island, Staff Writer New York, resident said.

Natasha Alexenko is an advocate.

Alexenko was 20 when she was assaulted.

Alexenko is an activist.

Although she wanted to just forget about the Alexenko is a former museum scientist. incident, her college roommate at the New And in 1993, after Alexenko was raped York Institute of Technology urged her to go and robbed at gunpoint, she became a surto a hospital that night. vivor.

“My first thought was that I wanted to Alexenko, 43, an advocate with the Joyful take a really hot shower. I was afraid for my Heart Foundation’s End the Backlog project life.

But I’m grateful for that moment,” she and the founder of her own nonprofit — Nasaid about deciding to go to the emergency tasha’s Justice Project — has been a sexual asroom. sault survivor for 23 years.

At the hospital, doctors examined Alexenko and gathered evidence of her assault in a rape kit, or a sexual assault evidence collection kit. Medical professionals use rape kits to store physical and biological evidence — including a collection of clothing from the survivor’s body, scrapings from under fingernails and swabs of bodily fluids, such as semen.

Along with the results of a physical examination of the survivor’s body, a medical specialist documents and photographs any visible injuries alongside a ruler for scale and

measures any indications of internal damage with a colposcope, a medical diagnostic tool.

Then, the hospitals send the kits to police departments or crime and forensics labs where they are evaluated and ultimately used to decipher more details about the crime.

Alexenko’s trip to the hospital, and the grueling process of documenting evidence of her assault just after it happened, helped catch the man who attacked her — but it took more than 10 years.

Although Alexenko was raped in 1993, See Rape Kits on page 2

Rape Kits, pg. 1 her kit was not processed until 2003. It was only in 2007 that the offender was finally apprehended, tried and found guilty.

For more than a decade, she carried an overwhelming feeling of apprehension.

“I went on healing, but I always had a sense of guilt that I couldn’t help put my perpetrator behind bars. He was still out there,” Alexenko said. “I didn’t blame the system, and I didn’t blame the lack of resources.”

She now knows she should have.

Tackling the backlog Alexenko’s case is one of many across the nation that was stalled at forensic labs due to a lack of funding and structure. Even today, this hinders authorities’ ability to report and process rape kits.

A forensic kit is considered “backlogged” if it sits for 12 months or more without being tested — a problem that’s plagued forensic labs across the country in recent years. Because there is no federal mandate for tracking untested kits, the number of backlogged kits in the United States can only be approximated. Nationally, there are more than 175,000 untested rape kits, according to End The Backlog — but this is only an estimate.

and policy The extent to make of the problem testing became clearer kits easier, after individual the prostates, including cess was Pe n n s y l v a n i a , even more began to seek disorgaoutside funding nized. Kits and mandate were unthat police demarked, partments reand it was port the number difficult to of untested kits tell what waiting in labs. stage of The most reprocessing cent statewide me asurements Natasha Alexenko is a sexual assault survivor they were report that there and founder of Natasha’s Justice Project. Cour- in.

Some were 3,044 rape tesy of Natasha Alexenko s t a t e s kits awaiting testing throughout Pennsylvania, 1,825 of didn’t even have a database to keep track of which qualified as backlogged, according kits moving through the system, which is to a September 2016 report from Auditor still common in rural areas.

“The reality was that before we started General Eugene DePasquale. In Allegheny County, there were 132 kits awaiting testing talking about it, there was no consistency at the time, 29 of which had been waiting for or way to track the kits,” Alexenko said.

“Now, advocates are fighting for legislation more than a year.

Alexenko said before advocates and fo- for states to take up auditing ... It’s really two rensic labs started pushing for more funding things. First, each state needs to have man-

dates on the auditing of kits, and second, they need to put [the kits] on timelines.”

In Pennsylvania, legislators passed Act 27 in 2015, which requires law enforcement agencies and crime labs to report untested and backlogged kits.

DePasquale’s 2016 report found that the legislation, while well-intentioned, failed to provide the Department of Health and local police departments with the resources necessary to test the rape kits. The report also claimed police departments were not adequately informed on how to report the number of backlogged kits to the state.

Though Act 27 is a step in the right direction, Jasmine B. Gonzales Rose, a former social worker and an assistant professor of law at the University of Pittsburgh School of Law, found fault with some of its more unrealistic requirements.

The act mandates that hospitals must notify policing agencies of collected rape kits as soon as is practical, but she said this is too subjective to stick.

“The ‘soon as practical’ definition is open to interpretation, and there’s not really anything enforced,” she said.

Overall, the number of criminal cases See Rape Kits on page 3

The Pitt News SuDoku 2/23/17 courtesy of dailysudoku.com

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February 23, 2017

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Rape Kits, pg. 2 requiring testing — including DNA testing, firearm examination and blood alcohol testing, among others — in the commonwealth increased fivefold over the last five years.

However, funding from the federal government dropped by $70,000, according to the September 2016 report.

Allegheny County Chief Medical Examiner Karl Williams has noticed the disparity in his own lab.

“The demands from the police side have gone up,” Williams said. “There is no forensic lab in the country that doesn’t have a backlog in all or many of its sections ... we are underfunded and undermanned.”

Although many of the results from the auditor general’s report were bleak, Kristen Houser, the chief public affairs officer for the Pennsylvania Coalition Against Rape, said it’s brought much-needed attention to the backlog issue.

“The report sends the message that this is a priority for the commonwealth, because we are identifying the scope of the problem and the resources that will be needed to solve the backlog,” she said.

How is Allegheny County responding?

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A little more than a year after the report, the number of backlogged kits in the Allegheny County Medical Examiner’s Office is now zero, according to Williams, and is dropping throughout the rest of the state as well.

A $38 million grant from the Manhattan District Attorney’s office in late 2015 gave funding to 32 jurisdictions nationwide to confront the backlog.

The Allegheny County Medical Examiner’s Office was awarded $254,437 to test 400 rape kits, with the help of private labs.

Williams credits the proactivity of his lab to the grant money.

Sgt. Joseph Gannon of the Pittsburgh police said both before and after the grant, the police have followed the standard “chain of evidence” procedures, submitting the kits they receive to the Allegheny County Crime Lab for processing.

He attributed a remaining backlog issue in the state to small town departments, but said Allegheny County benefits from good cooperation between departments.

Still, a more long-term solution to the problem — both in the state and nationwide — does not yet exist, even though the need

for sexual assault kit reporting is growing.

“If we don’t change our staffing [in Pennsylvania] to meet the volume, there will be a backlog,” Houser said.

Why do kits go untested?

Evidence processing is complex, and forensic labs — working meticulously — tend to move more slowly than law enforcement officials might like, according to Williams.

“Nothing happens immediately in a forensic lab,” he said.

When a rape kit comes to the lab, examiners look over the material — clothing, semen or fingernails, for example — for human DNA, using a completely automated system whenever they can, in order to reduce errors. A polymerase chain reaction machine allows DNA analysts to make multiple copies of DNA from just one sample, so examiners need only a very small amount of DNA in order to conduct accurate testing.

“There are 13 to 16 very specific points, or loci, on the chromosomes, and all DNA analysts look for those specific points,” he said. “We then see if we can compare those points with someone else’s DNA.” Once analysts have a DNA profile, they may upload it to the Combined DNA Index System, or CODIS, which is the FBI’s DNA

February 23, 2017

profile database, and look to see if any profiles match with the suspect’s DNA. But not all DNA profiles go into the database.

“We can’t just put up any profile, because there’s a very specific criteria. We have to know that it comes from a scene of a crime,” Williams said. “If we know it’s an assault case, we submit it to CODIS and try to see if there’s a match.”

Rape kits can be stored essentially anywhere, for any amount of time.

“DNA is extraordinarily stable ... as long as it’s dry, clean and kept at a constant temperature, it’s very durable,” Williams said.

“All labs keep sexual assault kits for as long as possible. The ultimate goal is for a 75-year retention time.”

In theory, scientific advancements allow the process to work smoothly and quickly.

But there are other issues at play.

Processing rape kits is expensive — on average it costs between $1,000 and $1,500 to test one kit. Some states have considered making sexual assault perpetrators pay for the kits as part of their restitution, but enforcement is difficult.

Regardless, money should not stand in the way of processing kits, Alexenko said.

See Rape Kits on page 9

3

Opinions

column

from the editorial board

Republicans ignore protests at own risk As the Donald Trump presidency continues along its rocky path, more and more Republicans in Congress seem to be fighting losing battles on their home field.

Town hall meetings between Congressional Republicans and constituents in their districts over the past few weeks have been the stage for increasingly dramatic confrontations. And for Republicans who came into power on the back of the Tea Party movement, the last several days must feel eerily familiar.

In the wake of former-President Barack Obama’s first election at the end of 2008, Conservatives used the town hall format to resist Democratic control of the executive and legislative branches to much success. Rowdy protesters rattled Democrats like former-Sen. Arlen Specter, D-Pa., who dared host town halls during the Affordable Care Act ratification process in August 2009. In the other party, Republicans like Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, took advantage of the town hall format to spread misleading information about the death panels that Obamacare would allegedly put in place.

The protests later came to be associated with the nascent Tea Party and were a key element to massive Republican electoral victories in 2010 and 2014. So if the GOP has learned anything from its own rise to power, it should be that ignoring upset voters is a recipe for disaster. But so far, that hasn’t seemed to be the case.

Sen. Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., uncomfortably grinned through an angry denunciation Monday from a woman in his district criticizing his support for repealing the ACA. Rep. Jason Chaffetz, RUtah, complained yesterday that the constituents he met at a town hall in his district were trying to “bully and intimidate” him by asking him to investigate potential ethics violations committed by the Trump administration.

It’s gotten to the point where Republican members of Congress have begun to avoid meeting with

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constituents altogether, and southwestern Pennsylvania Republicans are no exception. Despite massive popular demand for one, Sen. Pat Toomey, R-Pa., has yet to host a town hall for his constituents to voice their concerns about the Trump administration’s actions. An abrupt no-show from Rep. Tim Murphy, R-Pa., at an event scheduled for Monday at Duquesne University to discuss mental health legislation left constituents who had been hoping to discuss health policy disappointed.

Defending his decision to KDKA, Murphy claimed he was expecting paid organizers to “crash” the event. He suggested, contrary to statements from a Duquesne spokeswoman, that protesters would present a security issue.

Murphy’s rationalizing avoiding his constituents in this way fits in perfectly with reactions from the rest of his party — on Twitter, Trump dismissed the avalanche of opponents at Republicanhosted town halls as “so-called angry crowds” that had been “planned out by liberal activists.”

It’s unclear whether Trump and other Republicans actually believe the opposition is planting angry citizens at town halls from coast to coast.

A more likely explanation is that Republicans in Congress who are using this as an excuse to skip out on town halls simply want to avoid being forced to answer uncomfortable questions or being held accountable for their political positions.

Either way, taking this line doesn’t seem to be helping make these people disappear. And the approach almost exactly mirrors the approach the Obama administration took in 2009 toward the nascent Tea Party — Obama press secretary Robert Gibbs memorably dismissed the movement’s protesters as reflecting “manufactured anger.”

Trump and his party in Congress could take heed of the rising sentiment against the extreme elements of their platform. But if the GOP wants to blithely dismiss the sincere feelings of voting Americans across the country, they should look ahead to 2018 with more anxiety than hope.

Grammys need to improve diversity

Beyoncé performs during the Grammy Awards Feb. 12.. Courtesy of Robert Gauthier | Los Angeles Times | TNS

Christian Snyder Columnist

Who is “Becky with the good hair?”

If you’ve been on the internet at any point in the past year, you’ve probably encountered her at one time or another in Instagram posts, music videos or selfie captions. Becky is a fictional character, one among many of countless elements in Beyoncé’s 2016 album “Lemonade,” to capture the imagination of American popular culture at large.

Across the country, the album’s themes of infidelity, faithfulness, forgiveness and, above all, blackness took strong hold, selling more than 1 million copies. Yet none of this support seemed to register with the Recording Academy — the Grammys, for short.

Instead, they chose Adele’s “25” as

February 23, 2017

winner of the award for Album of The Year, which sold a comparable 1.3 million copies in 2016.

The Academy’s passing over Beyoncé’s album for the prestigious award isn’t just an isolated incident — it’s part of a long tradition of racial problems at the Grammys. This year’s awards show was the fourth in a row where a black crowd favorite lost out to a surprise white winner, and a black artist has won Album of the Year only 12 times since the award’s origin in 1959. Black artists are consistently passed over for all-important, non-genre awards, like Album of the Year, while relatively new categories, like Best Urban Contemporary Album, are created out of thin air in an effort to hide the problem.

Of course, there was backlash over See Snyder on page 5

4

Snyder, pg. 4 Adele’s success at the Grammys. Even Adele herself questioned whether she was more deserving than Beyoncé to win the award. “I can’t possibly accept this award,” she said during her acceptance speech.

“I’m very grateful and gracious, but my artist of my life is Beyoncé, and this album for me, the ‘Lemonade’ album, was just so monumental.” Going even further than words, Adele broke the golden gramophone in half while still on-stage.

“The way you make my black friends feel — is empowering,” the British singer emphasized in an acknowledgement of the racial issues behind the award choice.

Grammy President Neil Portnow defended the decision, saying in a phone interview with Marc Hogan of Pitchfork, “I don’t think there’s a race problem at all.”

To support this claim, he cited Chance the Rapper’s win for Best New Artist.

But the claim that the Grammys couldn’t possibly have a race problem because a black artist won the Best New Artist award is akin to the ludicrous belief that anyone with a black friend can’t be a racist. Correcting racism is not about gestures superficially supporting diversity or token awards, but something far more basic than that — equal consideration regardless of race.

The Grammys are awarded on a simple majority, democratic voting process. To those dissatisfied with the results of the vote, Portnow says they should “just become members [of the Academy], join and vote. Then you have the say if you want it.”

A potential voting member of the Grammys needs to have released either six physical tracks, 12 digital tracks or been nominated for an award within the last five years. In short, the average music listener and Grammys viewer is disenfranchised from the process and left to trust that eligible voters will represent them.

And, while the voters included in the Grammys’ award process might not be overtly racist themselves, they remain incredibly out of touch with most of the music they’re meant to evaluate. The voting body as a whole skews considerably older than the average listener for predominantly black categories like hip-hop and rhythm and blues. And the effect is to make some black artists despair of ever being good enough to merit equal consid-

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eration for an award.

Artists like Frank Ocean have boycotted the Grammys for race-related issues.

In an interview last November with the New York Times, Ocean said the institution of the Grammys as a whole “doesn’t seem to be representing very well for people who come from where I come from and hold down what I hold down.”

Ocean’s decision to remove himself from the Academy comes at the price of a vote for black music, for people like him and for those who speak to the black experience in America. But given the Grammys’ historical pattern of ignoring black artists, it’s understandable that Ocean and others choose not to participate in the awards.

While some of the black artists who do decide to remain in attendance at the awards are rewarded with relatively new subgenre awards, such as Best Urban Contemporary Album — which was first awarded in 2013 and Beyoncé’s “Lemonade” won this year — this approach does little to solve the problem. The subgenre awards are “where the white man puts the incomparable pregnant black woman, because he is so threatened by her talent, power, persuasion and potential,” white artist Sufjan Stevens said in an interview following Beyoncé’s snub.

Ask nearly any millennial and they’ll tell you that Beyoncé is one of the most important artists worth listening to, who has the power to inspire change. But, as big an injustice as this year’s Grammys might have been, the issue of race in the awards stretches back much further than Beyoncé and will continue on after her, unless the process becomes more open. Whether it’s Taylor Swift’s controversial win over Kendrick Lamar at last year’s ceremony, Beck’s surprise victory over Beyoncé in 2015 or Frank Ocean’s loss to Mumford and Sons in 2013, it’s clear there’s a pattern in how the Academy bestows the award.

Maybe instead of relying on out-oftouch members of the Academy, Portnow should begin to listen more — listen to what the artists of one of the most important genres in music right now are saying.

The Grammys have a race problem, and merely awarding the title of Best New Artist to a black man doesn’t solve it.

Christian primarily writes on social justice and campus issues for The Pitt News.

Write to him at cjs197@pitt.edu.

February 23, 2017

5

Culture

Finals and folk music: Pitt professors jam out Caroline Bourque Staff Writer

The acoustic sound of Patsy Cline’s slowburner ballad, “She’s Got You,” filtered back from the stage to the brick walls of Biddle’s Escape in Wilkinsburg.

An older couple slow danced in the only open space in the packed coffeehouse, while the rest of the 50-person audience cradled steaming cups in their hands and listened, attentively bobbing to the rhythm.

In a crowd that was mostly middle-aged, it was easy to spot the groups of college students who had come from Pitt to support their professors, several of whom were onstage performing in the band Smokestack Lightning.

Though the seven-person band is made up of a variety of personalities and instruments, Smokestack Lightning is united over their commitment to advocate for social justice through music. The band began in 2003 as an unofficial department project between Bernard Hagerty and Scott Smith — both history professors at Pitt. Their name comes from a blues song of the same name that Howlin’ Wolf, a blues singer, first recorded in 1956.

Though Smith and Hagerty are no longer in the band, the current musicians continue their legacy of playing music about the labor class and related issues, including unionization and the rights of LGBTQ+ students.

When the Patsy Cline song finished, one band member, Tom Hoffman, stepped up to the microphone to announce the next — “The Mountain” by Steve Earle — and his words prompted a roar of applause from the approving crowd members.

“This next song is about love of place, dedicated to all those folks in Standing Rock, protecting your place,” Hoffman said.

That night, Smokestack Lightning performed their 2nd Annual Smokey Valentine’s concert on Feb. 11. As band member Nicholas Coles described it, they played songs about “love, heartache, lost love, bad love [and] antilove, in the Americana style.”

Smokestack Lightning’s gigs are usually fundraisers and free venues, such as Biddle’s

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Smokestack Lightning plays blues, bluegrass and folk music, primarily at fundraisers and benefits. Courtesy of Smokestack Lightning Escape, Wigle Whiskey and the Friends Meeting House. The band isn’t part of the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers, an organization which collects licensing fees from musicians, then redistributes them back to members as royalties, essentially regulating copyright for musicians and composers. Because of this, they aren’t permitted to perform covers for profit — but this matters very little to any of the band members, who care more about the cohesion of the band and the issues they sing about.

Band members Coles and Steve Weber are both Pitt professors — Coles in the English department and Weber in the chemistry department. They’re joined by guitar player Phil Smith, who retired from Pitt’s English department in 2014, and CMU professor of computer science William Cohen, who’s on a six-month sabbatical to work for Google in Pittsburgh.

Other members include David McLaughlin, who often plays fiddle, Heidi Wettlaufer, a talented vocalist, as well as Hoffman, a guitar player and a lifelong labor organizer who also

works part-time for the Sierra Club. The Sierra Club is an international grassroots environmental organization which works locally to solve the problem of sewage in rivers.

The acoustic band plays primarily, but not exclusively, blues, bluegrass and folk and uses a variety of instruments including guitar, upright bass, ukulele, banjo, mandolin, fiddle, harmonica and dobro — a type of acoustic guitar with embedded steel disks. Their set list includes not only covers, but a number of original songs as well.

Coles, an Oxford graduate with a slight accent, finds music inspiration in Woody Guthrie. He’s been a professor at Pitt since 1980, in that time redesigning the Working Class Literature course to cover everything from sorrow songs of slavery times to Guthrie to Tracy Chapman.

Guthrie’s a favorite among several members of the band, who admire his politically charged folk music, which speaks to both the band’s general sound and their efforts to advocate for social justice movements.

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“Woody Guthrie said that he didn’t want any of his songs to be copyrighted because he wanted them to belong to the American people,” Coles said.

Coles is a Quaker, and organizes an annual benefit in early December at the Friends Meeting House in Shadyside, which usually brings a crowd of about 100 people. Last year the benefit raised $1,550 for both the Greater Pittsburgh Literacy Council and the Pittsburgh Student Action Coalition, which works toward reproductive rights and transgender rights for sexually nonconforming kids in schools.

“I’m not a party member for this or that, but for me, it all comes under the heading of justice. Struggles of justice of one kind or another.

I think workers’ rights are humans’ rights, as are women’s rights,” Coles said.

Smokestack Lightning also played the Roots Cellar venue at The Pittsburgh Center for the Arts for free on Jan. 13, in support of the push for a union for Pitt faculty, which does not yet exist at the University. Fittingly, the band played mostly traditional union songs, such as one called “Which Side Are You On,” written in 1931 about a miners’ union.

When the band is constructing their setlist for a gig, they include both covers and original songs, though their criteria is far from strict.

“The only defining characteristic is that someone in the band likes it and can convince the other people in the band to play it,” Hoffman said.

The band chooses which social issues to sing about and raise funds for in the same way — one of the band members suggests a topic, usually one that they are personally tied to, and the other members are typically supportive of the idea.

Hoffman, who has also played with Coles at rallies for the Fight for Fifteen movement, has written original music on the topic of adjunct professors, Pitt janitors trying to organize a union and people working at UPMC who can’t pay for their kids’ health care.

One of his songs is titled “We Don’t Frack in Pittsburgh Town,” written about former CounSee Professors jam on page 9

8

Professors jam, pg. 8

Rape Kits, pg. 3

cilman Doug Shields, the man responsible for the drilling ban in Pittsburgh, and based off of a Guthrie song called “Pittsburgh is a Great Old Town.”

Cohen has also written a number of songs, including one called “We’ll Just Complain,” which is about the Republican Party’s response to climate change, and “Billionaires on our Side,” a sardonic take on President Donald Trump’s Cabinet.

“I usually come up with the idea for the song first, whatever the key insight or the joke is going to be, then I try and work it out from there, so the melody usually comes later in the game,” Cohen said.

In addition to the type of music that they’re playing, Weber finds both importance and satisfaction in the synchronicity among the band members.

“It’s like we’re typing on a keyboard, you’re using your left hand, and I’m using my right hand, we’re typing together and out comes a poem,” Weber said. “That feeling of working together to create something, it’s really nice.”

he kits as part of their restitution, but enforcement is difficult.

Regardless, money should not stand in the way of processing kits, Alexenko said.

“Think about what it costs to test, and then what the crime cost me and my family,” Alexenko said. “What is the cost of a rapist on a nationwide crime spree who’s a burden on our community? You can’t put a dollar value on that.”

The mentality of law enforcement officials in investigating incidents of sexual assault has been changing only in recent years, as American society comes to understand that rapists can be anyone — acquaintances, friends or partners. About 85 to 90 percent of sexual assaults are committed by someone the victim knows, according to the National Institute of Justice.

Even with this increasing awareness, Alexenko said there is still a societal problem behind the majority’s perspective of sexual assault cases and survivors.

“It’s a symptom of a bigger disease: rape culture. One reason we have unprocessed rape kits is that sometimes it’s not even treat-

Read the rest online at Pittnews.com.

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ed as a crime,” Alexenko said.

Why it’s important It’s called the “CSI effect”: TV shows based on criminal investigators have made modern juries demand hard, scientific evidence that a crime has been committed — even when science or reality doesn’t allow for that level of precision.

The effect is just a theory, but in the most straightforward sense, this is what a processed rape kit can offer, according to Marissa Bluestine, the legal director for the Innocence Project.

“Rape kits are important because they’re your clearest shot of identifying the perpetrator,” Bluestine said.

The Innocence Project is a nonprofit that works to exonerate wrongly convicted people in criminal cases. In some cases, a single rapist may be responsible for multiple assaults.

Because of this, and because some individuals may have been wrongly convicted without evidence from a kit, Bluestine said even testing a kit from a closed or cold case could lead to information in new, unsolved cases.

“If the rape kits are from closed cases, then we believe that the evidence should be tested,” Bluestine said. “I understand that they want to move onto the cases that are un-

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solved, but if those cases aren’t included, how do you know?”

Ultimately, however, it’s the broader message from a backlog of thousands of unsolved cases — and untested rape kits — that bothers Bluestine and others. “[The backlog] destroys all confidence in the criminal justice system and belittles the victims of sexual assault crimes,” said Tony Gaskew, associate professor of criminal justice and director of the criminal justice program at the Pitt Bradford campus.

Testing kits is an important part of prosecution and sentencing, but wading through the backlog also shows survivors that someone still cares about what happened to them.

Gonzales Rose remembers sitting with survivors in the emergency room, shuddering to think that they would go through the grueling process of examination and then never see their rapist prosecuted — or, like Alexenko, spend years waiting for justice.

“What makes me so upset is that survivors have to endure [the rape kit collection process] and to never even have it tested. It means that it had basically been for nothing,” Gonzales Rose said. “If nothing else, we should test these kits out of respect for the victims.”

9

Sports Panthers blow 19-point lead in 63-59 defeat at Demon Deacons Ryan Zimba Staff Writer

The Pitt men’s basketball team had its fourth win in five games all but secured late in the first half Wednesday night in Winston-Salem, North Carolina.

Instead, the Panthers blew a 19-point lead to the Wake Forest Demon Deacons in what might be the team’s most excruciating loss in a season filled with them.

With a chance to climb further back into the NCAA Tournament conversation with a win, Pitt (15-13 overall, 4-11 ACC) dominated Wake Forest (16-12 overall, 7-9 ACC) for much of the game. The Demon Deacons didn’t take their first lead until less than two minutes remained, but that was all the time they needed to pull out a 63-59 comeback victory.

Trailing by two with 11 seconds left, the Panthers failed to convert on a 3-pointer in the final seconds for the third time in a little more than a month. They also missed a potential game-tying three in a 79-74 loss at North Carolina State Jan. 17, then missed three game-tying threes in the final 15 seconds of a 66-63 loss versus Virginia Tech Feb. 14.

This time, the need for a last-gasp 3-point attempt seemed almost out of the question, as Pitt led by double digits for the majority of the game.

The senior duo of Michael Young and Jamel Artis got the game off to a strong start for the Panthers, but Wake Forest’s star power forward John Collins took control later in the game.

Pitt’s two ACC Player of the Year contenders scored the game’s first eight points in twoand-a-half minutes before the Demon Deacons responded with an 8-0 run of their own. An emphatic dunk by Collins got Wake Forest on the board, and another powerful slam by Collins tied the game at eight.

Both offenses stalled in the next few minutes, but the Panthers retook a 13-11 lead with 14:08 left in the half. Artis made a 3-pointer with 12:46 left, and Pitt held a five-point lead at the second media timeout.

Panthers substitute guard Jonathan Milligan hit a 3-pointer on the first possession after the

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timeout to put Pitt up 19-11. The basket, which came with 11:45 left in the first half, marked the Panthers’ first points scored by anyone other than Young and Artis.

The defense picked up on both sides, as both teams went nearly three minutes without making a basket. With 7:37 to go in the first half, the Panthers maintained a 24-15 lead.

Pitt then went on its second 8-0 run of the game, stretching its lead to 30-15 on a fast break alley-oop layup by Young, at which point Young had as many points as the Demon Deacons’ entire team. A long 3-pointer by sophomore guard Cameron Johnson then gave the Panthers a 3517 lead, and a free throw by Johnson made it a 19-point game with 2:51 left in the half.

Wake Forest surged to close the half though, finishing on a 7-0 run to cut Pitt’s lead to 36-24 at the break. Young was a force in the first half with 17 points, while Collins led the Demon Deacons with 10 points and six rebounds in the opening 20 minutes.

As has been the case all season, the Panthers’ double-digit lead as far from safe.

Pitt scored first in the second half, but Wake Forest continued to chip into the deficit, scoring the next six points to make it an eight-point game at 38-30. The teams played evenly for the next few minutes, with Pitt holding on to a 47-37 lead six minutes into the half.

But Young picked up his fourth foul with 14:02 left to play, forcing Pitt head coach Kevin Stallings to send him to the bench because his next foul would disqualify him from the game.

Young’s absence severely impacted the Panthers on the offensive end of the floor, as they went six minutes without scoring a point. Senior forward Sheldon Jeter ended Pitt’s drought with a 3-point play, but Collins made a layup on the next possession to make it a 50-45 game with about eight minutes left to play.

By the time Stallings reinserted Young into the game with 5:53 left, Wake Forest had whittled the Panthers’ lead down to three. The teams went back and forth over the next few minutes, and Pitt still clung to a 55-51 lead at the final media timeout.

The Panthers lost the lead with 2:37 to go, as

Demon n Deacons first-year ear guard Brandon Childress ress tied the score at 577 with a

free throw. Wake Forest took its ts first lead of the game next time down the floor on a layup by Collins with 1:36 :36 remaining.

Jeter er tied the game with a pair of free throws on the ensuing ng possession. Then Collins went ent to the line on the other end but missed issed both free throws, giving the Panthers ers the ball with 49 seconds left.

Artis tis turned the ball over, and another Collins layup yup gave the Demon Deacons a 61-59 lead with 188 seconds to go. Young then missed a potential go-ahead 3-point basket with 11 seconds left, but ut the ball went out of bounds to Pitt.

Senior then away i guard d Chris Ch i Jones J h threw h the inbounds pass with five seconds to go, giving the Panthers no chance to tie the game or take the lead, and Childress made a pair of free throws to seal Wake Forest’s 63-59 victory.

Pitt went the final 8:36 of game time without making a shot and missed 17 of its final 18 field goal attempts in the loss.

This loss has to be infuriating for Stallings, who has often been critical of his team’s effort in the second half of games. The Panthers have blown several big leads throughout the season, and it has cost them two out of their last three games — including an equally devastating loss to Virginia Tech last week.

“I can’t really explain how you go from one half to another like that,” Stallings said after the

February 23, 2017

Virginia Tech loss.

“And that’s hapMichael Young scored 24 points but had to sit for much of the second half with four fouls. The Pitt News file photo pened on several occasions this year, and it just doesn’t make any sense.”

Wednesday night’s loss might have been even harder to explain, as the Demon Deacons’ 19-point comeback was Pitt’s largest blown lead of the season.

The Panthers will return home for Senior Day to take on the ACC-leading No. 8 North Carolina Tar Heels. Tipoff is at noon on Saturday, Feb. 25, in the last game of the year at the Petersen Events Center.

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