Her rape kit had a DNA match. In San Francisco, that’s not enough 41%
By Anya Schultz69%
7/20/2026, 1:00:00 PM
BS Summary: This article contains 42 faulty reasoning types, including Hasty Generalization, Self-Serving Bias, and Availability Heuristic, with Negativity Bias as the most egregious example at 22.1% saturation with 1,089 hits. Analysis detected 5,769 faulty-reasoning hits from 4,928 analyzed words, generating a BS Score of 46% and a BS Rank of 41% (11,228 of 18,785 articles). This article is better (less manipulative) than 59.80% of the article peer group.
The 25-year-old couldn’t stop shaking as she signed a document authorizing nurses at San Francisco General Hospital to catalog her body as a crime scene.
She’d moved thousands of miles away from her family to start a career in San Francisco as a mechanical engineer.
After a summer spent training for a marathon, her legs should’ve been strong, but they trembled beneath her.
Over the next two months, she did everything a rape victim is supposed to do.
Her case produced a DNA match to the man she identified, who was already in the FBI’s database.
And then San Francisco did what it almost always does with rape cases: nothing.
She’d arrived at the hospital at 5:36 a.m. on a Saturday in July 2025, according to an Uber receipt.
In the emergency room, she was asked to relive the night’s events.
According to the San Francisco Police Department incident report, she’d gone to the Financial District apartment of Michael “Mickey” Gerold, whom she’d dated briefly the year before, a little after midnight.
By 3:30 to 4 a.m. everyone had left but Gerold and his friend, whom she did not know.
What happened next, she’d later allege to police, felt calculated: The two men looked at each other, and Gerold stepped out of the room.
She told police the man kissed her, groped her, subjected her to oral sex, and penetrated her with his fingers, according to the report.
The report notes repeatedly that she never consented nor explicitly told the man to stop “because she ‘froze’,” and that she was “extremely scared and completely distraught.”
In the report, the incident is classified as “rape, forcible.”
During the exam, evidence was collected from her head to her toes.
Blood was drawn from her arm for a toxicology test.
Her mouth and body were swabbed for DNA — both hers and his.
A lamp was shone over her skin to search for traces of semen or saliva.
Finally, a pelvic exam.
The nurse found a cut inside her vagina and photographed it.
The sexual assault forensic exam took four hours and 15 minutes, according to the SFPD’s report.
Fifty-eight days later, the crime lab results came back: DNA collected in the kit matched the man she said had assaulted her, whose genetic material was already in the FBI’s national database.
It wasn’t a common result — the city’s crime lab matched DNA to a suspect in just 50 rape cases last year.
It gave her hope that the investigation might pick up.
Instead, it stalled.
To understand why San Francisco rarely builds investigations on sexual crimes to the point of making an arrest, The Standard interviewed more than a dozen sexual assault survivors, along with advocates and attorneys, and reviewed more than a decade of the SFPD’s staffing studies and disciplinary files, reports to the Police Commission, and local and national crime and public health data.
We found that over the past decade, the share of rape cases the SFPD solved has fallen by more than half.
Last year, the SFPD made an arrest in, or otherwise closed, just 14% of its rape cases — half the national rate of 28%, according to data reported to the FBI.
Over the last five years, San Francisco cleared rape cases at the lowest rate of any county in the state with more than half a million residents, according to data from the California Department of Justice.
San Francisco’s record on rape is among the worst of similarly sized U.S. cities.
SF reports rape at one of the lowest per-capita rates of any big city, yet solves the smallest share of nearly all of them.
Over the past four years, a rape was more than three times as likely to be solved if it was reported in Denver, Nashville, or Milwaukee.
And it’s not a caseload problem — each of these cities had more reported rapes than San Francisco.
The SFPD is legally required to publish twice-yearly reports on the testing and investigative status of every rape kit but has failed to do so for 10 years.
The Standard requested the reports in May.
They were posted on the department’s website in early June.
The reports show that while rape kits are being tested faster, fewer alleged rapists are being actively investigated.
Meanwhile, the number of investigators working sex crimes has nearly halved since 2019, leaving the unit the smallest it’s been in the department’s available records.
As the cases pile up, police heavily rely on an investigation tactic wherein survivors attempt to extract confessions from their alleged rapists in recorded phone calls.
No confession usually means no arrest — even in cases like that of the 25-year-old engineer, where there is a DNA match.
Gerold and his friend hired attorney James Hann to represent them.
In a statement, Hann said “The accusation is categorically false” and that “no one raped, sexually assaulted, made sexual contact with, or mistreated” the engineer that night.
Hann provided sworn statements signed under oath from Gerold and two guests who were at his apartment before the alleged assault, but declined to provide their names or allow The Standard to interview them.
In his statement, Gerold declared that “nothing inappropriate occurred.”
He said that his friend left by 4:30 a.m., and that the other two guests could confirm it.
The guests’ statements don‘t mention the friend leaving — only that they themselves left around 4 a.m., and that nothing sexual happened while they were there.
The engineer told police the alleged assault occurred after the guests left, when she was left alone with the two men.
Gerold said that the engineer slept in his bed and brought him coffee in the morning.
A time-stamped receipt shows she left in an Uber at dawn for the ER, where she underwent an hours-long sexual assault exam.
Gerold is listed as a witness on the resulting police report, while his friend is listed as a suspect.
After The Standard reached out for comment, Gerold and his friend each sent a defamation lawsuit to the engineer.
Gerold also sent a defamation lawsuit to The Standard.
The engineer asked to remain anonymous and asked The Standard not to name the man she alleges raped her, fearing further legal retaliation.
Neither man has been questioned or arrested by police or charged with any crimes.
For most of the last two decades, the untested rape kit has been the defining scandal of how U.S. police fail victims of sexual assault.
The perception was that the bottleneck between a rape and a rapist in custody was laboratory capacity.
Testing the kit would mean solving the crime and some measure of justice.
It was a scandal that the country moved to fix.
Over the last 20 years, the federal government has spent more than $1 billion on expanding lab capacity to reduce a backlog in DNA testing, and all 50 states passed some form of rape-kit reform.
San Francisco had its own backlog, and its own reckoning.
In 2010, hundreds of rape kits sat in the city’s crime lab untested, some as old as five years.
The Police Commission called it “a crisis,” then “an emergency.”
Then-Mayor Gavin Newsom signed off to fund the testing, but it took time.
In 2013, the crime lab director said the backlog was gone; the following year, after an audit found another 753 untested kits, SFPD Chief Greg Suhr ordered mandatory testing of every rape kit going forward.
Only in 2016, after a survivor’s federal lawsuit and another round of hearings, did the lab finally staff up.
San Francisco’s testing apparatus soon became a model for the state.
But alone, it wasn’t enough to solve the problem.
In 2018, then-Supervisor Hillary Ronen called a hearing on the city’s handling of sex crimes.
The SFPD commander did not know the rape clearance rate.
He was unaware that the number of sexual assaults had risen 21% that year and conceded that rape suspects are not always interviewed.
The district attorney’s office couldn’t say how many rape cases were charged or led to convictions the year prior.
Ronen closed with a directive: “Let’s blow this all up and redo it, because this system is not working for survivors of sexual assault in San Francisco.”
The city created a survivor advocacy office, SHARP.
By a follow-up hearing in 2024, SHARP’s two staff members had yet to meet with leaders of the SFPD’s Special Victims Unit.
In 2025, the San Francisco Women Against Rape crisis line received a total of 2,420 calls from around 1,100 people — a 15% increase from 2024.
The number of adults who sought medical care after sexual abuse has roughly doubled over the past decade, according to the San Francisco Department of Public Health.
Today, more kits are tested, in a matter of a few weeks on average.
Yet fewer rape cases are investigated.
In its rape-kit reports, the SFPD sorts cases into three categories.
“Open” means investigators are actively working the case.
“Cleared” means it’s closed, often because there’s been an arrest, but also for other reasons, such as a transfer to another jurisdiction, the statute of limitations running out, or the suspect dying.
“Inactive” is the department’s term for open but back-burnered cases that are sitting on a shelf.
Six years ago, more than half of rape-kit cases were open or had been cleared.
Last year, barely 1 in 5 was.
The other 78% of the 334 rape-kit cases sat inactive.
The Standard asked the SFPD why so few rape-kit cases are investigated.
Spokesperson Evan Sernoffsky lauded the city’s quick processing time and lack of a rape-kit backlog and said cases may become inactive when a kit yields no additional evidence.
He did not address the decline in active investigations.
In its rape-kit reports, the SFPD lists the possible reasons a case may go inactive.
One stands out: “Suspect thought the sex was consensual and there is no other corroborating evidence.”
Experts say that’s a dangerous reason to stop investigating an alleged rape.
“It’s a giant public-safety problem,” said Ilse Knecht, director of policy and advocacy at the Joyful Heart Foundation, the nonprofit that led the national movement to clear the rape-kit backlog.
“Most rapists are serial offenders.
They commit rapes over and over again,” she said.
“A hit means nothing if you don’t do anything else.”
Four days after her rape exam, the 25-year-old engineer went to the Special Victims Unit headquarters to give her statement to police.
There, she was turned away.
An employee told her that while the SVU investigates sex crimes, she’d need to file the report with a regular officer.
She walked to the SFPD’s Southern Station, about a mile away.
After an hour and a half waiting in the lobby, she was brought into an interview room, where she sat across from an officer.
She said she was “terrified” to come forward at all, fearing retaliation from Gerold and the man she alleged raped her, according to the police report.
In the days since, she’d barely eaten or slept and was having panic attacks.
Still, she’d come prepared with a 20-page document of evidence she thought might be helpful: witnesses to contact, her Uber receipt, a timeline of the night’s events.
According to the report, she told the officer she believed Gerold had “planned” the assault as a form of payment.
Before she fled the apartment, she told police, she saw a discreetly placed security camera in the living room that likely captured the alleged assault.
She took a quick photo of the camera at 5:19 a.m., which she included in the packet.
It was entered into evidence.
The crime type listed on the police report: “forcible rape.”
It took another 12 days for her case to be assigned to a detective.
She answered a phone call from a blocked number and learned that the detective was SVU Sergeant Johnathan Ng.
She said he asked her to retell the night’s events, then offered the one investigative step on the table: a “pretext call,” in which the victim tries to draw an admission from the attacker.
She agreed to try.
She sat in a room at the SVU headquarters with Ng and a recorder.
She dialed the man she alleged raped her.
He didn’t pick up.
She tried again.
No answer.
“If we don’t get an admission, it’s a he-said, she-said thing,” she remembered Ng telling her.
Then, she said, he offered some unsolicited advice.
“He told me that I probably shouldn’t be hanging out with 55-year-old men,” she said.
The SFPD never contacted or interviewed Gerold, the man the engineer identified, or any people who were present in the hours leading up to the alleged assault.
Gerold and the man’s attorney Hann told The Standard that there is an audio recording made from 2:30 a.m. to 4:30 a.m. at Gerold’s apartment from that night in which the engineer can be heard engaging in friendly conversation.
Gerold said the recording was made “with consent,” and that the recording “shows that she was fully capacitated and of sound mind.”
The engineer told The Standard that she never consented to being recorded.
Hann declined to provide The Standard with the unedited audio file.
Instead, he provided three brief clips, which he said “reflect conversations occurring after 3:30 a.m.” and include the engineer speaking.
The SFPD declined to comment on Ng’s conduct or on any specifics of the case.
“Due to the open investigations, we are precluded from releasing further details regarding these incidents,” said spokesperson Robert Rueca.
The pretext call has become the primary, often sole, tool investigators rely on in rape cases — frequently the only act between a report and the shelf.
Sernoffsky would not comment on the SFPD’s use of pretext calls or “any investigative methods in these very sensitive cases.”
But nearly every sexual assault victim The Standard interviewed said they were asked to make a pretext call, and the SFPD’s heavy reliance on the method is captured in complaints to the Department of Police Accountability, an oversight office within the Police Commission.
Victims describe the same sequence: An investigator took the report, suggested a pretext call, and, when the call produced nothing, marked the case as inactive.
In every case, the officer was found to have followed department policy.
In one complaint from 2023, a victim told investigators that being asked to call the man she alleged raped her was inappropriate and traumatizing.
The department acknowledged that the call “may have been uncomfortable” but noted that such calls are “extremely common.”
“A lot of the time, these calls amount to nothing,” said Knecht.
“It is one tool in a toolbox.
It’s not a make or break in any kind of case.
It is not where you stop.”
Most rapists are serial offenders.
They commit rapes over and over again.
A hit means nothing if you don’t do anything else.
The pretext call is not a new tactic.
Another woman who spoke to The Standard was allegedly raped in her apartment in 2016.
Within 12 hours, she had called police, gone to the hospital for a rape kit, given a full statement, identified her attacker, and recorded a pretext call.
Four months later, the DNA came back as a match.
A decade later, no suspect has been arrested, and her case remains inactive.
In 2019, Mission Local reported that when a victim declined to call the man she accused of raping her, the investigator responded, “Well then, you don’t have a case.’’
Over the last four years, more than 50 complaints have been filed with the Department of Police Accountability about the SFPD’s mishandling of sexual assault cases, according to The Standard’s review of the DPA’s open and closed complaint reports.
In 2022, a victim complained that the only work being done on her case was periodically running the suspect’s DNA though the national database to see if it matched anyone.
She did “not feel that was investigative work,” according to the report.
The DPA found that the police conduct was justified and closed the complaint.
The DPA has found in favor of only one of these complainants, after an officer admitted in 2023 that he responded to a 911 call about a sexual assault by telling the victim, “We don’t have time for this fucking bullshit again.”
When it comes to investigative conduct, it’s often the victim’s word versus the officer’s.
Under department policy, officers do not turn on body cameras for preliminary interviews with victims of sexual assault, even if the victim asks to be recorded.
After the alleged rape, the engineer felt a mix of fear, anxiety, and self-blame.
“I felt contaminated and a lot of shame,” she said.
But it was the police response that made her angry.
“If I had come in with bruises and blood, they would have taken me seriously.
But because I had scratch marks and I was shaking, they didn’t,” she said.
So she kept working the case on her own.
She identified the brand and model of security camera in Gerold’s living room as an Arlo Pro 5S 2K and emailed Ng to suggest he send the company a preservation letter for the footage stored in the cloud.
Ng wrote back that unless Gerold had a premium account, Arlo usually deletes footage after a week.
It had been 19 days.
Still, she sent emails and phone numbers Gerold might have used for his account.
“I do want to avoid tipping off Michael,” she wrote.
“He does lash out when feeling betrayed.”
Five weeks later, Ng let her know by email that the DNA found in her rape kit came back as a match to the man she said raped her — his genetic material was already in the system.
In a statement to The Standard, Hann, the man’s attorney, conceded that his client’s DNA is in the national database but said it’s due to an incident from when he was a minor and that he has no criminal record.
He suggested that any of his client’s DNA found on the engineer would have come from “friendly, consensual physical contact” such as shaking hands.
That argument has become “popular as a defense” in sexual assault cases, said Mike Cariola, a forensic DNA expert and CEO of Bode Technology, the country‘s largest private forensic lab, which San Francisco contracted with to clear its rape-kit backlog.
While it’s possible to transfer DNA that way, he said, it depends on the specifics of the case.
“ DNA can tell you that it is most likely this individual,” Cariola said.
“It’s not as good at telling you how that DNA got there.”
Two days after telling the engineer about the DNA match, Ng emailed her to say that it was not enough evidence for an arrest.
Her case would remain inactive.
“Let me know if you want to attempt another pretext call,” he wrote.
If the will exists to investigate rape in San Francisco, sufficient staffing no longer does.
The SVU, the SFPD unit charged with handling rapes and sexual assaults, has dwindled, through attrition and cuts, more than twice as quickly as the force around it.
In 2019, the SVU had 72 employees.
Today it has 42 — one fewer than when The Standard reported on the unit’s decline last fall.
While the SFPD shrank by roughly 19% since 2019, the SVU’s investigator ranks fell by nearly half, from 60 to 31.
The SVU handles around 1,000 sexual assaults per year, a number that’s stayed consistent since 2018, according to staffing reports and SVU presentations to the Board of Supervisors.
The unit handles a grim mix of crimes against the city’s most vulnerable.
Of the 31 investigators, 22 belong to “the PIT,” a pool responsible for all domestic violence, sexual assault, child abuse, and elder abuse cases.
By the SFPD’s own methodology, the PIT can’t possibly keep up with its workload.
Last year, the PIT’s cases required more than 60,000 hours of work; 22 investigators, even giving every available hour to casework, can handle about half that.
The staffing formula the department uses came from a 2020 report it commissioned from experts at Matrix Consulting Group.
Matrix did not like what it found in the PIT.
Its report warned that the structure was “not the prevailing practice for larger agencies,” and the PIT assignment was so undesirable that detectives transferred out as quickly as they could, leaving less experienced investigators to handle cases that “require advanced skillsets.”
Break up the PIT, the report recommended, and create a specialized sex-crime unit, where detectives handle no more than six to eight cases a month.
Six years later, the PIT remains the same.
Sernoffsky described the SVU as a desirable, challenging assignment and said a recent survey found that no newly promoted investigator had wanted to leave.
The investigators’ caseloads, he said, have not changed since 2019, but “not all cases are assigned.”
Due to short staffing, the unit has created a new kind of vague case status.
“ If cases are not assigned to an investigator immediately, they’re placed in our pending folder,” SVU acting captain Dan Silver told the Board of Supervisors at a hearing in May 2025.
The number of cases unassigned at a given time varies, he said, but cases can stay there for several weeks.
Experts who spoke with The Standard expressed shock at how the SFPD has handled alleged rapes.
John Wilkinson, a former prosecutor who trains district attorneys across the country on how to handle sexual assault cases, said he would expect an alleged rape to be treated as a high-priority case, meaning investigators move quickly to gather evidence and corroborate a victim’s account.
After murder, he said, rape “is the second most serious crime that we have, and so, normally, it’s going to be a high priority.”
The 12 days it took the SFPD to assign a detective in the engineer’s case is “an extremely long time,” he said.
Cariola said a DNA match in a rape kit, such as the engineer’s, is a starting point, not a conclusion — the kind of lead that an investigation builds on.
With a hit already in the database, he said, the next step is obvious: “Why don’t they do a direct comparison of him?
They have probable cause, it seems.
Go collect a sample and investigate.”
Instead, the SFPD asked the engineer to do a pretext call after her rape exam.
“ To go through all that, and then put it on her to phone the suspect — I’m sorry, that’s just infuriating,” he said.
The SFPD’s twice-annual rape-kit reports show that the share of cases being actively investigated fell from 28% in 2019 to 11% last year.
Fewer cases investigated means fewer suspects arrested.
Advocates who work with sexual assault survivors in the city understand how rare it is for a rapist to be arrested and charged.
Last year just 13 people were convicted of rape.
Janelle White, who has served as executive director of San Francisco Women Against Rape for 20 years, said she and her colleagues laugh that on “Law and Order: SVU,” “there’s always an ending.”
More often, her clients’ cases peter out, and they are left in the dark.
“They’ll call us and be like, ‘I made a report.
I talked to the investigator.
It’s been months.
I haven’t heard anything.
I don’t know,’” said White.
“And then they find out, oh, the case has been inactivated.”
The SFPD’s note on rape-kit reports that an investigation may be paused because the suspect thought the sex was consensual, said Wilkinson, “is a troubling statement.”
“I’d want to know, what did you do to corroborate this victim’s complaint?”
he added.
“You can’t just say there’s no corroborating evidence if you didn’t look for any.”
Under California law, a survivor’s testimony alone, if a jury believes it, is enough to convict — a rule so settled that judges read it as part of their instructions to juries in sex crime trials.
And state law limits the extent to which defendants can argue that they thought the sex was consensual.
District Attorney Brooke Jenkins’ office agrees that the law “does not require corroboration in sexual assault cases,” according to spokesperson Randolph Quezada, who drew a line between what the law allows and what the office will charge.
“Prosecutors must evaluate all of the evidence in a case and determine whether the charges can be proven beyond a reasonable doubt,” Quezada said.
“The legal sufficiency of evidence and the decision whether criminal charges can be ethically filed are not the same question.”
That type of procedural answer is often the only explanation a survivor might receive as to why their case was shut down.
“Some DAs are willing to meet with a survivor to talk them through why they made the decision not to charge,” said White.
But in her 20 years working with rape survivors in San Francisco, she’s never heard of a case in which the district attorney changed their mind.
Asked if a sexual assault case with a cooperating victim and a suspect identified by a DNA match would meet the office’s filing standards, Quezada said it would be “inappropriate to speculate” on a “hypothetical scenario.”
In October 2025, a man in Gerold’s social circle went to the SFPD to report allegations of rape, sexual assault, and drugging by Gerold he said he’d heard from 10 victims.
The Mayor’s Office of Victim Rights asked the SVU to take the cases related to Gerold seriously.
They were linked and assigned to Sergeant Chris Prescott.
Prescott emailed the engineer in early November, asking if she would agree to be interviewed.
She replied yes within 15 minutes.
They spoke on the phone for 39 minutes — her third time describing her alleged rape to the SFPD.
“Each time was horrible,” she said, but the way Prescott spoke to her was kind.
“He said, ‘By the way, all these sexual things you’re mentioning — no judgment.
Lack of consent is lack of consent.’”
Hann described the October police report as “fraudulent,” and Gerold said it is part of a “smear campaign” against him.
In January, six months after she reported the alleged rape, the engineer emailed Prescott to ask for updates in her case.
“At present, there have been no significant developments or steps taken,” he replied.
In February, after Gerold texted the engineer and left her a voicemail referencing The Standard’s forthcoming reporting and asking to meet, she asked the SFPD for an emergency protective order.
The police declined but invited her in for another interview, where she described her alleged rape in detail to the fourth officer in the seven months since she first reported.
In March, she said, police asked her to make another recorded pretext call, this time to Gerold, and suggested she act friendly.
Gerold later said that the engineer’s “accusations are contradicted by her own conduct and her own words,” including the March phone call where the two “exchanged pleasantries,” in a defamation suit he said he planned to file against her.
After The Standard published our first investigation into allegations against Gerold, the SVU reassigned the case to Sergeant Robert Glenn, who went on disability leave in May.
As of July, the case has not been reassigned to another investigator.
“I wish there was just someone in law enforcement who would take this seriously,” the engineer told The Standard at the time.
“No one’s taking it seriously.
And it’s so obvious to me.
It’s insane.”
In April, the SFPD held its “Denim Day” event, a tradition born from an Italian court ruling that overturned a rape conviction because the victim’s jeans were deemed too tight to remove without her help.
Mayor Daniel Lurie — the only speaker who did not wear denim — told the small crowd that “sexual violence is a public safety issue, and my administration and the SFPD are committed to treating it as one.”
He took a group photo, then left before anyone else spoke.
Lurie’s spokesperson told The Standard, “The SFPD and our entire city will continue to be relentless in standing up for survivors, and we would encourage anyone who has experienced sexual violence to report it to the police, who will use all of the tools at their disposal to deliver justice.”
SFPD Chief Derrick Lew declined to be interviewed for this story.
DA Jenkins initially agreed but canceled the day before.
“The SFPD takes these types of investigations very seriously,” said Rueca.
“We strive to hold every person accountable and to arrest the suspect if the investigation develops probable cause.”
The rape-kit cleanup was supposed to mean the beginning of a turnaround for San Francisco’s approach to sex crimes.
The SFPD promised to test rape kits in a timely fashion on one premise: DNA leads to arrests.
The 25-year-old engineer understood this without being told.
She was the model victim.
The lab reforms worked.
Her kit had a DNA match.
And it didn’t matter.
“ I moved here across the country, away from all my friends and family, because I wanted to grow my career.
And San Francisco, I think they want women like me.
And they’re just not protecting them,” she said.
She’s reconsidering if living in the city is the safest option, given how the SFPD has handled her case.
“Law enforcement has let me down and left me on my own,” she said.
Analysis
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