The Hudson County Prosecutor’s Office spends weeks, maybe even months, on criminal investigations.

A plan four years in the making became a reality Friday when the county’s top law enforcement agency opened its own DNA lab, only the second county in the state to do so.

“This is a game changer for us,” said District Attorney Esther Suarez, who envisioned the lab when she learned the county would build a new prosecutor’s facility in Secaucus.

Instead of sending DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid) samples — biological material from items taken from the crime scene — to the New Jersey State Police lab in Hamilton, a three-person team from the DA will test and analyze them.

“It would take months, even in most flagrant and violent cases,” said Suarez, who was quick to note that this was not a criticism of the lab that had handled DNA testing for 20 counties. “Even though we asked to put one in as an emergency and tried to do it quickly, it still took a very long time.”

The new HCPO office opened in late 2022. The DNA lab took a bit longer.

It wasn’t because DNA Lab Director Jonathan Kui watched every episode of the TV series CSI. Actually, he’s not a fan – “Of the few CSI shows I’ve watched… they’re a bit absurd,” he said.

Rather, the lab was built from the ground up, with much assistance and advice from the New Jersey State Police and the Union County Prosecutor’s Office, the first in the state to create its own DNA testing center.

“None of us had experience building a DNA lab,” said Suarez, who was first appointed to the Hudson County post in 2015. “The state police were very helpful. The Union County Prosecutor’s Office…has been outstanding…letting us know what we need to do. And we started hiring people who were extremely well known.”

The DNA lab is the third item on Suarez’s expansion checklist when the new facility was built, along with the children’s advocacy center and a cybercrime unit.

Kui is joined in the lab by senior DNA analysts Kaylee Klose and Meredith Napor. They worked together at the coroner’s office in New York, where Kui worked for 14 years.

Suarez and Kui both emphasized the improved speed with which the prosecution will achieve results and the positive spillover effects. While it could take months to hear back from the state, it will now only take a few days.

“It’s extraordinary when you think about some of the violent crimes we deal with, that you could identify a suspect within days as opposed to having to wait months to get DNA back,” Suarez said. “It doesn’t always lead you to a suspect, but it leads you to a lot of clues, and that’s very, very helpful and pushes any investigation forward.”

Kui noted that it is also extremely important in ruling out people as suspects.

“The public perception is that DNA labs are there to find someone who has committed a crime, but the lab uses DNA to help eliminate people as being responsible for a crime,” said Kui, who testified about the results DNA in more than 130 processes. throughout his career. “Being able to rule out people’s profiles as not attributable to crime is so important to helping us find profiles that can be attributed to crime.”

For Kui, this is a job he’s been working on since he was in college. A few years at Weil Cornell Medical College as a licensed molecular clinical technologist testing for blood-borne cancers was a way to gain experience for his ultimate goal.

“I went to a talk about forensic DNA analysis and its use in solving crimes when I was an undergraduate at Cornell, and I was totally blown away,” he said. “… I thought this is what I wanted to do. I want to be able to take DNA and say “here’s a problem, here’s a mystery.” Let’s use DNA to solve this mystery and move on to the next mystery.”

Kui says the process begins at the crime scene, where investigators take biological stains (blood, semen or saliva) as well as objects an attacker may have come into contact with by touching — for example, a weapon or an article of clothing. clothing.

Each person’s DNA (molecules found inside cells that hold genetic information) is unique, except for identical twins.

The lab takes small samples and runs them through a series of tests that release the DNA into a liquid. The end result is a graph and then analysts create a DNA profile that can be compared to other individuals and databases, with the national CODIS (Combined DNA Index System), also run at the state and national levels.