“What we were potentially looking at, at that time, was over 10,000 rape kits, representing over 10,000 cases where women had reported, whose lives and what had happened to them was sitting on a shelf and nobody cared. I was shocked, and I think I was kind of stunned -- and not too much stuns me,” Worthy told Kate Snow in an interview airing Friday at 10 p.m. ET/9 CT on NBC’s Rock Center with Brian Williams."

“To know that we had all of these potential victims sitting out there, all of them, mostly women, and nothing had been done, was just truly appalling,” Worthy said.

“You would think that with that discovery, everybody would be outraged, but it seemed that this office was the only one,” Worthy said.

Worthy took action because she says she got little support from the police chief at the time. Worthy says the police chief at the time promised an internal review, but she didn’t think that was enough.

She found volunteers on her staff to start sifting through the rape kits trying to match each one with a victim using old, handwritten police logbooks.