10,000 untested rape kits found in Detroit

>> my pleasure. mroo meanwhile, in detroit prosecutor there is on a crusade to help rape victims whose cases she believes were forgotten for decades because of evidence that was warehoused by police. thousands of rape kits that were never examined.

>> we are potentially looking at at that time over 2,000 rape kits representing over 10,000 cases where women had reported, whose lives are sitting on the shelf. nobody cares . i was shocked.

>> "rock center's" kate snow joins me now. kate, this is an astounding case. you have been investigating. this is based on this prosecutor and her belief. take us through the story.

>> so basically it comes down to, andrea, a warehouse in the middle of downtown detroit , musty, dirty, hot warehouse and in 2009 one of the prosecutors discovers in this warehouse row after afro of rape kits. it's what a victim of rape does at the hospital in order to give dna evidence that the hopes that that dna evidence is tested and used to find the assailant, but in this case these kits, 11,303 of them, as it turned out, were sitting on a shelf.

>> so is it possible for her to now try to reopen cases where there may not have been convictions or maybe there weren't any prosecutions?

>> that's exactly what they're doing. they're looking at all these rape kits trying to reconcile them. they've already reconciled them with the police reports, and now looking to see if they test the dna , can they find the bad guy, and already in two cases they have had kwixzs of men sent to prison, but it is slow going. it takes a long time to do this. so far they've only tested 600 of the 11,000 kits.

>> to say nothing of the victims who never had any kind of redress, but you don't know whether any of these men victimized other women.

>> well, here's the startling -- yeah. sorry. the startling thing, andrea, is that when they looked at those 600 that i just mentioned, they've already found in those 600 21 repeat offenders, so people who were serial rapists. one man, for example, his dna was snigt one of those kits. he went on to murder several women, and they believe if they had tested the dna way back when, he might have been stopped.

>> this is simply incredible. kate snow , of course, we look forward to your reporting tonight on "rock center." thank you very much, and you can see more of kate snow 's report on "rock center" with brian williams on nbc tonight, friday night, 10:00 . its final resting place. that's exactly where you can find "rock center" from now on. up next,