MOUNT VERNON — Knox County Sheriff David Barber said his office and the Ohio Bureau of Criminal Identification and Investigation have a shared responsibility in the events involving the return of a portion of remains of Jonathan Sheasby, who was a victim of a homicide in Knox County in 2005.

Barber said a portion of the victim’s femur was submitted to BCI’s laboratory in London for a DNA standard by a BCI crime scene agent working on the homicide with sheriff’s detectives. After the lab determined it had no further need for that evidence, the detective in charge of the Sheasby homicide, who is now retired, was notified that the evidence could be picked up. Although the former detective failed to pick up the evidence, it was not until March of this year that BCI returned the evidence to the Knox County Sheriff’s Office.

Barber said that on March 17, when a current sheriff’s detective was submitting evidence to BCI, he was given evidence to return to the county; this evidence included the Sheasby evidence. The standard practice for the sheriff’s office in retrieving submitted evidence from the lab has always been to ask for any completed evidence while they are at the lab and it is taken back to the county at that time.

“Unfortunately, a shared breakdown resulted in this traumatic situation for Sally Sheasby and her family, and on behalf of myself and the Knox County Sheriff’s Office, I extend our sincere apology,” said Barber.

According to a spokeswoman from the Ohio Attorney General’s Office, in addition to formal quarterly audits of the BCI labs performed for national accreditation, BCI staff perform informal checks of stored evidence in its labs by hand on a nonscheduled basis. It was one of these checks in February 2010 which determined the Sheasby bone fragment had not yet been retrieved by the Knox County Sheriff’s Office.