It’s been more than five months since 15-year-old Corban Henry was shot and killed in front of Kendall Perkins Park, but officials with the Owensboro Police Department said the case is ongoing and that making an arrest remains a top priority for detectives.
While officials said OPD continues to do their part in conducting interviews, logging in hundreds of reported tips and gathering information, forensic evidence from the state’s crime lab remains the biggest piece of the puzzle still missing.
That piece of the puzzle, according to OPD, is invaluable to the investigation. It’s also taken a long time to sift through, causing frustration for Henry’s family and friends and garnering questions from the public.
OPD Public Information Officer Andrew Boggess said the forensic analysis of evidence is much more complicated than is portrayed in movies or TV shows.
“It just takes time,” Boggess said. “COVID slowed it down even further. They got backlogged due to extended shutdowns because of COVID. Then they went back to work at reduced capacity. And during all that time, they still had cases coming in [on a daily basis]. Some pieces of evidence may have to be analyzed multiple times and it can be very sensitive that it is done in the correct order. And sometimes the analysis may be completed at different locations, and in a specialized field like forensics each employee typically has a specialty so one piece of evidence could need to be analyzed multiple times.”
Kentucky State Police is handling the forensics for Henry’s homicide while OPD handles the investigation, Boggess said. Those at OPD were never given a timeframe as to when the forensics analysis would be complete.
“It’s five months out, so I wouldn’t think it’d be too much longer,” he continued. “We could get it this week, or it could be weeks or even months from now. We just don’t know. Even in a best-case scenario, the forensics we had was going to take some time. Fingerprinting we can do in-house. The more advanced forensics, we have to rely on the state lab. DNA can take weeks to get returns once analyzed and there is typically some wait before that is done..”
Boggess said KSP’s crime lab prioritizes cases in order of severity, so a homicide case involving a juvenile victim such as Henry was likely somewhere at the top of the list. But with homicides occurring across the state every day, where Henry’s case stood among the rest was hard to determine, Boggess said.
Though OPD submitted “quite a bit” of evidence to the state lab, Boggess said it will be up to lab technicians to determine whether that evidence is applicable or not.
OPD also wants to build a solid case “that’s going to lead to a conviction,” Boggess said. Every homicide case is unique, he added, and some just take more time than others.
“With many cases we have a witness who saw something, or someone who can lead us to an important piece of evidence,” he said. “The descriptions we were given were more vague this time. I do think we’ve gotten a lot of good tips so far, and we want people to continue to call us with tips. But the totality of the circumstances is unique to each case.”
Boggess said OPD had fielded “hundreds” of phone calls regarding tips and information related to Henry’s shooter thus far. Some tips have included names of potential suspects.
While those tips have been immensely helpful, at the end of the day it’s all going to come down to proof, Boggess said. Securing that proof will take a little more patience for everyone involved.
Inevitably, the situation has been frustrating at times for Corbin’s family, and Boggess said he fully understood where that frustration was coming from.
“We’ve been honest with them from the beginning about this. I think they do understand,” he said. “This isn’t over. Charging the suspect and getting them in custody is our goal at the end of the day. This case is something that’s going to rely very heavily on the forensic evidence. And once we get those results I would expect the case can move forward.”
