Two roads, one path. Claflin University wants to offer its students the best. The Orangeburg Department of Public Safety wants to make the community safer. Together, the two unlikely partners, an educational institution and a law enforcement agency, have teamed up to achieve that goal together.

“We are really approaching the culmination of what was really started years ago,” Orangeburg Department of Public Safety Chief Wendell Davis said. “We are six months from that now, because we are ready to complement the molecular science building with a free-standing forensic lab.”

Funding for that forensic lab comes from a grant obtained jointly through the Department of Justice. Plans call for the lab to be completed by July.

The path to the lab, which will be built on Claflin’s campus, took two very different roads but each had the same destination in mind.

One road to the forensic lab began a decade ago when Claflin officials recognized the need for such a facility in the Southeast.

A delegation from Claflin went to conferences in New York to learn more about the possibilities and benefits of such a facility.

After those meetings, Dr. Rebecca Bullard-Dillard and Dr. Verlie Tisdale recommended developing a biotechnology research laboratory at Claflin.

Meanwhile, another road was being paved, a road that would eventually be destined for the same goal.

As the 1990s progressed, Orangeburg County’s crime rate was rising and local law enforcement officials realized something had to be done.

A three-year study of crime in the First Judicial Circuit identified drugs as the core issue behind violent crime in Orangeburg County.

However, defendants released on bond were committing more crimes before their initial charge could be brought to trial. The problem lay in an ever-increasing backlog of evidence examination.

To compound the problem, it was a given that those arrested had a year or more before their case went to court. The drug analysis at the only lab in the state became backlogged.

“In that time span, these persons had the opportunity to commit additional crimes, a lot of times progressively more violent, and try to identify and intimidate witnesses,” Davis said. “Now you get a situation where, instead of being involved in one crime, he might be involved in three or four more crimes.”

Back at Claflin, Dr. Omar Bagasra, a renowned pathologist, AIDS researcher and certified forensics scientist, was hired in 2001, and would eventually create the South Carolina Center for Biotechnology.

Classes for an undergraduate degree in biotechnology began in 2003, the first to be offered in the Palmetto State. Two years later, the school enrolled its first master’s students.

In 2004, the two separate roads merged when a meeting between school officials and law enforcement agencies within the First Judicial Circuit was held and the idea to create a new, free-standing forensics lab was formed.

Each partner arrived by different roads at the same goal and each will benefit in unique ways.

Claflin sees its graduates filling the void of certified forensics scientists in the Southeast.

“They will be able to spread out across the state,” Tisdale said. “In addition to that, we have scientists in the research area” returning to the school.

One such former student is Krishna Addanki, a graduate of the Claflin program and also of the University of New York, Albany, where he was tops in his class. He is now an instructor at the university.

In May, five more students will graduate from the program.

The benefit to the Orangeburg community and much of the First Judicial Circuit is a decrease in the time it would typically take to analyze a DNA sample taken from a crime scene. It will take weeks to do what used to take sometimes more than a year.

Perhaps most importantly, any DNA evidence is indisputable, whether it convicts an individual or clears another. The lab augments a fingerprinting machine and drug lab already in place.

“This is now the gold standard for crime solving,” Bagasra said. “You need solid evidence. DNA, fingerprinting — it is becoming the gold standard.”

Expected to be certified for DNA and forensics analysis, Claflin will provide staffing for the on-campus lab.

“Claflin has the motto of being visionary,” Davis said. “I appreciate Dr. (Henry) Tisdale’s being visionary in seeing the benefits this lab will have for the community.”

T&D Staff Writer Richard Walker can be reached by e-mail at rwalker@timesanddemocrat.com or by telephone at 803-533-5516. Discuss this and other stories online at TheTandD.com.

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