Queens DA’s new cold case unit will probe borough’s unsolved murders
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Queens District Attorney’s offices on Queens Boulevard. Eagle file photo by David Brand
By David Brand
A new division of the Queens District Attorney’s Office will probe the borough’s 2,200 unsolved murders to deliver justice for victims and closure for loved ones.
Queens DA Melinda Katz described the two-month-old division, known as the Cold Case Unit, in a press statement Tuesday. The unit works closely with the NYPD’s Cold Case Squad to unearth suspects and solve years-old murders, Katz said. So far, the unit has reopened investigations into 35 unsolved murders.
Many of the unsolved murders in Queens date back to the 1970s, when the borough’s annual homicide rate first reached triple digits, where it lingered for three decades. At least 341 people were murdered in Queens in 1992, the borough’s highest one-year total.
Unsolved murders mean killers remain in the community. For victims’ families, Katz said, “not knowing who committed the crime and having justice elude them for years and in some instances decades is an additional heartache.”
The new unit will utilize several techniques to identify suspects, including the controversial method of familial DNA testing, which enables investigators to search for relatives of suspects using crime scene DNA.
The tool was championed by Queens’ previous DA Richard Brown, who called on the state to authorize familial testing as part of the effort to identify a suspect in the 2016 murder of Howard Beach resident Karina Vetrano. A suspect was later identified based on a police lieutenant’s hunch.
Veteran Assistant District Attorney Karen Ross serves as chief of the Cold Case Unit, which is part of the office’s Homicide Bureau, led by Bureau Chief Brad Leventhal.
The Cold Case Unit is the Queens DA’s latest effort to re-examine cases from the past.
In January, Katz created the office’s first Conviction Integrity Unit to investigate potential wrongful convictions and claims of prosecutorial misconduct, at times levied against officials still working in the Queens DA’s office.
