League City DNA tool helping to solve cold cases

LEAGUE CITY, Texas — Detectives across the country are turning to the League City Police Department for help solving cold cases.

“This is the last Hail Mary option for people,” said Amber Lasala, an evidence technician at LCPD. “This is why I came to forensics. This is why I do crime scene.”

It’s called M-Vac, which is basically a vacuum that sucks up hard-to-reach DNA.

It’s technology prosecutors used to land a conviction for the 2016 murder of Josue Flores. Andre Jackson was originally arrested, but charges were dropped after DNA evidence was inconclusive.

However, when detectives tried a second time, sending his jacket to a lab in Florida with the M-Vac, they found DNA.

“It shows this stuff does work, like what we are doing is not just some wackadoodle science we pulled off the street,” said Lasala.

League City got their M-Vac in 2019. Since then, they’ve used it on their own cold cases and they’ve also gotten calls from across the country. Currently, they are fulfilling those requests for free.

“When we had Little Rock call us and they were like, we called M-Vac and you were the closest one to us, I was like oh my gosh,” she said.

A reminder to Lasala just how lucky she is to have it in-house.

“This will get people results on evidence they thought years ago wasn’t going to get you results, it’s amazing to me,” she said.

For that reason in League City, they’ll keep running as much evidence as they can. Hoping it will close even the coldest of cases.