By Kate Martin | Carolina Public Press

Sitting in shelves and languishing in storage rooms throughout North Carolina, more than 16,000 untested sexual assault kits contained the keys to solving decades-old crimes.

Two of these kits stored by the Durham Police Department yielded their secrets, and earlier this month, two men pleaded guilty to separate sexual assaults after law enforcement identified them using the DNA they left in crimes committed years ago.

Carlos Dominguez-Aguiar assaulted a woman at knifepoint after breaking into her home in 2015, according to the Durham County District Attorney’s Office. Timothy Rorie’s saliva was found on his victim after he broke into her home in 2005. In both cases, the evidence of the crimes sat in a Durham County Police Department untested rape kit for years, the DA’s Office said.

It’s a familiar refrain playing out in police departments and courtrooms across the state as the decades-old backlog of rape kits is finally tested. 

The two kits yielded enough quality DNA to be included in the federal Combined DNA Index System, or CODIS, database. Law enforcement later learned of a match in each case.

Since the assault in 2005, state records show Rorie had been convicted of several crimes, including robbery, kidnapping, burglary and assault on a female, a crime commonly associated with domestic violence, according to the N.C. Department of Public Safety. Dominguez-Aguiar was…