Natasha Alexenko, who became a powerful advocate for ending the national backlog of rape-kit testing after suffering dual traumas — being sexually assaulted and then discovering that her own rape kit with forensic evidence from her attacker had gone untested for 10 years — died on Oct. 31 in West Islip, N.Y. She was 51.
Her husband, Scott Sessa, said that her death, in a hospital, was caused by complications of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis and multiple sclerosis.
Ms. Alexenko was a 20-year-old filmmaking student at the New York Institute of Technology when she was violently attacked by a man shortly after midnight on Aug. 6, 1993, as she was entering her apartment in Manhattan. Armed with a 9-millimeter handgun, he forced her into an empty stairwell, robbed, sodomized and raped her. Then, with a warning — “Don’t come after me or I’ll kill you!” — he fled.
Although she wanted to take a shower, she went to a hospital for a forensic medical examination. DNA evidence from hair, fibers, blood, semen and saliva that the assailant might have left behind were saved in a box of evidence known as a rape kit.
“As I lay trembling on the cold examination table, with my feet up in stirrups while the medical examiner poked, prodded, combed, snipped, and scrutinized my genitalia for clues to my abductor, I assumed my rape kit would be tested immediately,” she wrote in her book, “A Survivor’s Journey: From Victim to Advocate” (2018). “Why else would I endure such a painful, invasive, and embarrassing exam?”
But the kit was not tested until 2003, just as the 10-year statute of limitations for prosecuting her case was nearly up. (New York State abolished the statute for first-degree rape in 2006.) Ms. Alexenko discovered that she was not alone in losing the precious time available to have her attacker identified, arrested and tried. In the late 1990s, the Manhattan district attorney’s office estimated that 17,000 rape kits sat untested in a police warehouse in New York City. Thousands more had been left untested in crime laboratories nationwide, the result of tight budgets, overburdened crime labs and, some advocates said, a gender bias discounting sexual assaults against women.
“My rape kit was not just a number in a police department,” Ms. Alexenko said on End the Backlog, a website run by Joyful Heart Foundation, an advocacy group for survivors of sexual assault, domestic violence and child abuse founded by Mariska Hargitay, a star of “Law & Order: Special Victims Unit.”
She added: “My rape kit was me — a human being.”
Eventually, her attacker’s DNA was used to create a so-called John Doe indictment, which allows prosecutors to indict an unknown person. Four years later, Ms. Alexenko’s assailant, Victor Rondon, a career criminal, was arrested in Las Vegas for jaywalking and extradited to New York City for violating his parole. When the police swabbed his cheek for DNA, it matched the DNA in Ms. Alexenko’s rape kit.
“On Aug. 6, 2007, exactly 14 years to the day after I was raped, Victor Rondon’s name replaced the name ‘John Doe’ on my rape kit,” she wrote in her book.
In 2008, he was found guilty on eight charges, including sodomy, rape, burglary and sexual abuse, and sentenced to 44 to 107 years in prison.
Natasha Simone Alexenko was born on Feb. 28, 1973, in West Islip, N.Y., on Long Island, and raised in St. Catharines, Ontario, Canada. Her mother, Nevart Mnatzaganian-Alexenko, was a dietitian. Her father, Victor, was a drug counselor with a substance abuse problem who died of an overdose when she was 9.
In addition to her husband, her mother survives her, as does a sister, Kathryn Ansley.
A week after her sexual assault, Ms. Alexenko returned to St. Catharines, having completed a year at the New York Institute of Technology. Over the next two decades, she held various jobs, including serving as director of the Long Island Maritime Museum, in West Sayville, N.Y.
She left that position in 2011 to create Natasha’s Justice Project, a foundation to draw attention to the importance of reducing the backlog of rape-kit testing. As part of her work on the issue, she formed an alliance with Joyful Heart Foundation and testified before Congress and state legislatures, including those in California and Nevada.
“She was very open and honest about her own experience, and it came from a place of vulnerability,” said Nancy O’Malley, the former Alameda County, Calif., district attorney, who credited Ms. Alexenko with helping to pass a 2019 California law that requires police departments to turn over rape kits for testing within 20 days and for testing to be completed within 120 days.
Ms. Alexenko’s story was featured in “Sex Crimes Unit,” a 2011 HBO documentary about the Manhattan district attorney’s office. She also spoke at a 2015 news conference when Joe Biden, then the vice president, and Cyrus Vance Jr., then the Manhattan district attorney, announced $79 million in grants to help local and state agencies test some 70,000 rape kits. (The Justice Department has since provided nearly $300 million more through its National Sexual Assault Kit Initiative.)
In Virginia, where she wrote sample language for a bill, she found an unlikely ally in Richard Black, a conservative Republican state senator. He had read a brochure about her foundation and called her, saying he wanted to pass legislation to end his state’s rape-kit backlog. She was initially wary because his record on women’s rights “wasn’t good,” she wrote. But she found their conversations productive, and the bill passed in 2016.
“I never knew there was such a thing as an untested rape test kit,” Mr. Black said at the ceremony when Gov. Terry McAuliffe, a Democrat, signed the bill. If it weren’t for Ms. Alexenko, he told the legislators, “we wouldn’t have known about it.”
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