Paternity Suit Raises Doubts About DNA Tests

On Friday, the state of Illinois fired its DNA lab, Fairfax County-based Bode Technology, for failing to detect semen in 11 out of 51 rape cases. State police said the errors had not wrongly freed or convicted anyone, but they said they would have to reanalyze evidence in 1,200 rape cases.

At a July murder trial in Michigan, prosecutors acknowledged that a DNA test on evidence from 1969 matched someone who would have been 4 years old at the time of the slaying and couldn't possibly have been involved. Additional tests led to a second man, who was convicted.

In Las Vegas in 2001, a man spent a year in jail after being wrongly accused of committing two sexual assaults in the 1990s. Investigators later found that his DNA sample had been switched with another inmate's.

Human error "has always existed in all of the forensic sciences," said William M. Shields, a professor at the State University of New York in Syracuse who has testified in numerous DNA cases. "It exists in all the sciences."

Brad Smith, a LabCorp spokesman, said criticism from the judge in Chreky's case appeared to be the result of "some good lawyering on the challenge side."

"We are confident that we reported the correct results and that we followed appropriate procedures and good science," he said.

Smith added that he had worked in the identity and paternity testing field since 1982 and that "we've never had a result like this and or a [judge's] statement like this."

Nathaniel L. Young Jr., director of the Virginia Division of Child Support Enforcement, which pursued Chreky's paternity, said in a statement that he could not comment on the case, but he said procedures are under review.

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In the late 1990s, Andre Chreky already was a star hairstylist with his own salon. But he reached new heights after he was profiled in Washingtonian magazine and it became known that his clients included first lady Laura Bush. Soon after, Chreky said, a former receptionist began showing up at his shop on K Street NW, demanding money.

"You have a child," the woman, Adele Doudaklian, 43, of Gaithersburg, told him -- a teenage son he had never met. He ordered her out.

Doudaklian did not return phone calls to her home. Chreky said he dated her several times in the early 1980s but stopped long before Doudaklian's son, Andrew Lucas, was born in March 1986.