News

October 23, 2009

State police offer view from inside

Public gets chance to see how crimes are investigated and solved in the real world.

FORTY FORT – What goes on at real crime scenes is unlike what is seen on television shows like “CSI.”

“Each and every time you walk in and out of a crime scene it changes,” said Cpl. Christopher J. Wilson, a state police supervisor at the Wyoming Barracks.

Wilson, who has been a member of the organization’s Forensics Services Unit since 1997, spoke to residents at Thursday’s Pennsylvania State Police Citizens’ Police Academy at the state police training facility in Forty Fort.

Forensic specialists are different from forensic scientists who test crime scene evidence at a laboratory, the corporal said.

The unit investigates several types of crimes ranging from homicides to fatal accidents. They go out and document the scene, collect evidence such as latent prints, and properly preserve it before presenting it at court.

Wilson first spoke about the significance of gathering fingerprints.

“When we process a car for a homicide it may take us an entire day or two days because we start at the bumper and work the other bumper and then go from side to side, top to bottom,” he said.

Prints are checked through criminal arrests entered into the Automated Fingerprint Identification System, a database known to police as AFIS.

Before fingerprints can link a suspect to a crime, Wilson said an examiner must first look at possible print matches found in the AFIS database.

Unlike the crime laboratory seen on “CSI,” examiners make line-by-line, point-by-point comparisons, Wilson said.

In addition to fingerprints, investigators look for other physical evidence, such as shoe and tire tracks, tool marks, blood, hairs and fibers. Like fingerprints, shoe prints can be identified to a particular shoe. Tire tracks can lead to a make and model of a vehicle.

Investigators also look at the body of the victim at crimes.

One thing they look at is wound patterns such as defensive wounds on hands and arms. A gunshot wound to a body can indicate if a person’s injury was self-inflicted or caused by homicide.

Residents at the police academy also learned about maggots, which are only supported by one thing – decaying flesh.

“The beautiful thing about maggots, if there can be a beautiful thing, is that maggots lead to flies,” Wilson said. “Maggots grow in a scientific progression from the time that the egg is laid to the time the fly actually hatches.”

That progression can give investigators a clue of how long a body has sitting outside, Wilson said about forensic entomology, which is the science of insects, their life function and relationship to humans.

In the first half-hour of the academy, residents stepped outside the training facility to learn about the organization’s Aviation Unit. Sgt. Robert Gerrone, a state police supervisor who is trained in aviation, gave a demonstration of the state police helicopter, which aids in searches and rescues in the northeast region.

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