O’Fallon, MO  (KTRS)  Missouri Attorney General Eric Schmitt joined the O’Fallon Police Department on Tuesday to gather untested rape kits to be sent for testing to a private lab in Virginia.

This is part of the Safe Kits Initiative launched last year. The effort is designed to inventory, gather, and test the backlog of untested sexual assault kits in Missouri. Seventy-nine kits from several jurisdictions, including St. Charles County, Wright City, and Moscow Mills were collected at the event help by the O’Fallon Police Department.

“Submitting to a test like this is a very difficult thing for victims and so they deserve to know when that the kit isn’t going to sit on a shelf.” Schmitt said.

Six-thousand untested rape kits were identified when since the launch of the Safe Kits Initiative. To date, one thousand of those kits have been sent for testing.

Schmitt said some of the untested rape kits date back to the 1980’s. The results of this latest round of tests could take up to a year.

Schmitt said the next phase is to create a tracking system that’s expected to launch this summer.