"Rep. Natalie Higgins, a sexual assault survivor and former rape crisis counselor, has been fighting to secure more funding.
“The state has a duty to rebuild trust here. We failed survivors. We didn’t treat their evidence with the care and respect it deserved and we’ve got to fix it,” Rep. Higgins (D-4th Worcester) said."

"The news of the cold case being solved brought "so many feelings" for state Rep. Natalie Higgins, herself a survivor of sexual assault and the legislator who fought to pass the law requiring testing.
"Thankfulness for District Attorney Quinn and his whole team for being proactive in pursuing this, trying to try to be a model of best practice, to say these cases need the attention that they deserve," the Leominster Democrat said.
The law passed in 2021 after 5 Investigates revealed that more than 6,000 kits going back to 2000 had been submitted to the State Police Crime Lab from counties other than Bristol but never tested.
"I'm hoping that it will create more of a sense of urgency with those kits that still remain untested, that there's a reason we've been asking for that, and there's a reason why we've been holding the administration accountable to test these older kits," Higgins said."