Deer DNA cracks case
A homicide arrest last week by the state police cold case squad is one to capture the attention of devotees of the CSI series of shows. The case began nearly seven years ago during deer season when the body of hunter Paul Joseph Horvat Jr. was found shot to death in Menallen Township.
State police had a suspect then, Lawrence Cseripko of Uniontown, and a witness’s statement that he saw Horvat in the woods early that morning and spotted Cseripko a short while later sitting in his truck. The witness, Dewey Lawrence Stewart, also said he heard a couple of shots fired. Seeing a couple of men in the woods and hearing shots while deer are in season isn’t an usual occurrence. However, Stewart added that there was bad blood between the two men over the rights to another deer the year before and that Cseripko had allegedly told him that if he ever saw Horvat in the woods again, he’d kill him.
That might have been enough to make Cseripko the prime suspect, but it was little more than hearsay and certainly far from enough evidence to sustain charges against him, let alone win a conviction. But that didn’t stop state police from trying. A couple months after discovering Horvat’s body, police executed a warrant on Cseripko’s freezer and confiscated some deer chops and steaks.
The idea then was to match the deer’s DNA from the stock in the freezer to that of blood found on the victim’s hunting trousers and entails lying nearby. It was a good idea, after all even by the time of this shooting death in 1997, DNA was becoming the mainstream in locking up cases. However, thinking about matching deer DNA and finding a lab capable of running tests on animals rather than humans wasn’t that easy. It took years. But if there is one thing that homicide suspects ought to have learned by now, the cold case squad doesn’t give up easily and its members rarely forget a case.
Finally, the DNA test was performed at a New York lab and an arrest was made last week. We wish to emphasize that an arrest is not proof of guilt. Police and prosecutors still have a long way to go to make their case, but the blood evidence is a tremendous help. Still, competent counsel could mount an aggressive defense. Police believe that the use of deer DNA may be the first of its kind in a homicide case, or any criminal case for that matter. As such the burden might be just as cumbersome to prove its credibility as when DNA cases first began appearing in court.
It should prove an interesting case to watch unfold.