AUSTINTOWN — Police may have the advantage in a cold case after receiving a state grant.

On Monday, the Austintown Police Department informed trustees that it had received a $24,900 Ohio Violent Crime Reduction Genetic Genealogy Grant from the Ohio Office of Criminal Justice Services.

Lt. Dan Burich on Tuesday said the grant will be used to perform specialized testing on DNA evidence from an undisclosed cold case.

“We look into all cold cases regularly. We have about eight or nine, and every one is assigned to a detective. They’re never tucked away in a box and forgotten,” Burich said. But he stopped short of identifying the case in question. “If we release the cold case that this was filed for, we’re giving people the heads up that we’re looking into it. And that’s not a good thing. They could move, they could avoid us on a knock-and-talk.”

Burich said that, like most police departments in the state, Austintown works with the Ohio Bureau of Criminal Investigation (BCI) to test evidence that local departments simply do not have the means to test.

“We used BCI and they’ve done what they can, but there’s one test in particular we are curious about, and we and BCI both feel it could propel the case forward and put us in a more positive direction,” he said. “But BCI doesn’t do it, they only have access to so much themselves. So we’d have to go through a third-party lab.”

The grant is for the exact cost of the testing, and Austintown will provide that to BCI, which will in turn pay the other lab for the test.

Burich said the test gives the investigation access to an avenue it has not yet been able to explore.

Whether it leads to a conviction or closure remains to be seen, but Burich said every case is worth closing if it can be done.

“I feel like in every case you’re gonna get a justice resolution, just by wrapping it up, whether it’s by placing handcuffs on someone…or at the bare minimum you give closure to a family. Because they’re still sitting at home with that question of what happened,” he said. “To what level, it gets resolved, that’s going to be determined upon solving it. But the grant is going to definitely put us in the right direction.”