Diana Morales: Texas; Austin police DNA lab supervisor: ('Oh, no. Here we go again' department...More grist for our mill as we head into 2017... HL); Her performance reported by The Austin American-Statesman to have "triggered alarm" in a sex assault case..." At one point, minutes before she was set to testify in the May trial, she also had to call another analyst to help her with calculations, prosecutors said. Grunewald and Smith documented their worries, and the district attorney’s office made those memos part of a file of potential witnesses whom they consider unreliable. Yet Morales, whose qualifications to analyze DNA had been questioned by a colleague as far back as 2010, continued working for the Austin Police Department. Only last week, after the American-Statesman revealed how Morales handled the broken freezer and state experts informed the department that they no longer wanted to help retrain her, did officials reassign her from the lab to the department’s records division. The latest revelations come as the scope of the problems inside the troubled lab continue to come into focus, rippling throughout the Travis County criminal justice system."

STORY: "Austin DNA lab leader’s work triggered alarm in sex assault case," by reporters Tony Plohetski and Andrea Ball, published by The Austin American-Statesman on December 15, 2016.