Back in 2009, Wayne County, Michigan (Detroit) Prosecutor Kym Worthy made a horrifying discovery.  Over 11,000 rape test kits were sitting in a storage facility used by the Detroit Police Department--and hadn't even been touched.  In some cases, they'd been sitting there for a decade or more.  Now Worthy is leading an effort to get them tested.

“To know that we had all of these potential victims sitting out there, all of them, mostly women, and nothing had been done, was just truly appalling,” Worthy said.

She is spearheading the fight to correct the injustice. Worthy said that what’s happening in her city is happening across the country.  From Chicago to Los Angeles to Houston, cities are grappling with thousands of untested rape kits.  Through a national grant, Worthy is attempting to set a protocol for how other states tackle backlogged rape kits.

Worthy sat down with NBC's Kate Snow for an interview that will air tonight on Rock Center.  Watch it here:

This first started when one of Worthy's assistants, Rob Spada, went to the warehouse to help sort through the voluminous material stored there.  He happened by row upon row of boxes, and was told they were rape test kits.  When a promised internal review never happened, Worthy took it upon herself to sift through them.  Although the Wayne County prosecutor's office is massively overburdened (it handles over half of the felony cases in Michigan), several of her assistants were concerned enough that they volunteered to try to match each kit with a victim.  

Worthy takes this personally because she was raped while studying law at Notre Dame.  However, she didn't report it at the time.

“This may sound strange, but I think what happened to me in law school happened for a reason and kind of led me into what I’m doing now. I always felt that way. And I always felt that that was a part of what made me a very good prosecutor, and certainly that is part of everything that I do. But it wasn’t the driving force,” she said.

Worthy said her experience allows her to better identify with the women whose cases were left untouched for years, but ultimately her time as a prosecutor during Detroit’s tumultuous last decade sparked her determination.

So far, 600 kits have been tested.  Some of them have yielded some absolutely ghastly results.  One kit linked a man who was in prison for murdering three women to a 2002 rape.  As it turned out, the murders took place while the kit sat in the warehouse.  Another kit came from Audrey Polk, who was raped in 1997.  It sat there for 14 years--during which her son had trouble in school and she herself was afraid to stay alone at night.  However, Polk's case at least had a happy ending--two years ago, they caught the scumbag who raped her, and he's now serving 60 years in prison.