From victim's friend, joy and relief at suspect's arrest

Jodie Melodia received a message from a reporter on Facebook at 7:20 Monday evening and jumped up, shouting with joy.

A suspect had been arrested in the slaying of Casey Mahoney, one of her closest friends.

"I can't even express how happy I am," she said. "It's been a very long month."

Her friend was the third young woman found to have been sexually assaulted and strangled in Kensington last year. DNA evidence led police to believe that the crimes were committed by the same man.

The suspect, Antonio Rodriguez, gave a DNA sample to authorities in October when he was given probation on a felony drug charge. The lab result, however, was not fully integrated into the system for almost three months, on Jan. 10, when it could be matched to DNA found during the murder investigations.

When Mahoney's partially clothed body was found Dec. 15 near railroad tracks on East Tusculum Street, Rodriguez's genetic sample was still awaiting processing by state police before it could be uploaded into the FBI's database.

State police did not return repeated phone calls Tuesday. But in a letter to William Blackburn, deputy commissioner of the Philadelphia Police Department, Maj. Kenneth F. Hill, the state police's director of the bureau of forensic services, said that the state DNA lab has a backlog of about 5,000 cases and that from the time a genetic sample is taken, it takes about 80 days for it to be uploaded into the federal database.

"This backlog is due to having vacancies in DNA which were slow to be filled due to the hiring freeze for state employees," Hill wrote.

The letter was dated Jan. 17, the day that Rodriguez's DNA was matched to genetic samples taken from the Kensington victims.

News of the processing delay prompted State Sen. Larry Farnese, a member of the Judiciary Committee, to call for hearings Tuesday on whether state police should receive more funding for DNA testing and how the process might be improved.

"If we'd had that, things might have turned out differently," Farnese said.

While Melodia agreed, she said that for the moment, she was mostly feeling relieved.

"It's a system that probably needs to be looked at," Melodia said from her home near Scranton. "But a lot of felons are released every day. It would have been nice to have the evidence earlier, but they did a really great job getting a hit on that and making the arrest. I'm just glad he's off the streets and won't hurt anybody else."

As soon as she received news of the arrest, Melodia called Michelle Strickland, the maternal grandmother of Mahoney's son.

"She was screaming on the phone," she said. "She was ecstatic."

The week before Mahoney was murdered, Melodia paid for her bus fare out of Philadelphia and helped her enter a detox center.

"She left rehab because of lack of insurance," Melodia said. "And she ended up back on the streets."

Melodia, who was present at the birth of her friend's son three years ago, remembers Mahoney's corny sense of humor, infectious laugh, and generosity.

"She never had much money, but she never came to the house empty-handed. Even if it was just from the dollar store, she always brought presents for my children."

Last spring, Mahoney organized an Easter egg hunt for her son and Melodia's four children. "She hid those eggs 100 times that day. When they found them, she'd hide them again."

But Mahoney, damaged by a childhood of loss and neglect, had a bleak side and struggled with addiction for years.

Mahoney also told her friend, "Once I get myself clean, I'm going back to Kensington to help those girls, because I don't want anyone to live like that."

Melodia, who rarely visits Philadelphia other than an occasional family trip to the Franklin Institute, said she could only imagine her friend's last days, tumbling back into an addict's murky world in one of the city's most dangerous neighborhoods.

"All I can think of is that she was alone and it was cold, and wonder, was she crying? Was she begging for her life? The worst thing is that she left this life knowing only hate."