LIsa Black
Cape Coral, FL
Female, 49
I spent the five happiest years of my life in a morgue. As a forensic scientist in the Cleveland coroner’s office I analyzed gunshot residue on hands and clothing, hairs, fibers, paint, glass, DNA, blood and many other forms of trace evidence, as well as crime scenes. Now I'm a certified latent print examiner and CSI for a police department in Florida. I also write a series of forensic suspense novels, turning the day job into fiction. My books have been translated into six languages.
I'm sorry, I was sure I answered this long ago! Collecting buccal swabs is very easy--they come in a kit with everything necessary plus instructions for rubbing the swabs on the inside of the mouth and then packaging. Anyone could do it. I've never heard of a case where it was considered contaminated.
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That’s an excellent question that I”m sorry I can’t answer. You will need to ask a pathologist. Sorry I couldn’t be more help!
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You just do. Somehow you can either tolerate it or you can't, or you learn to cope with it. There are cops who can work homicide for thirty years and still have a weak stomach. They just don't let it keep them from doing their jobs.
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Supposedly, but I don’t know of any cases personally.
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Football Official
Were the replacement refs actually worse than the regular refs?
SWAT Team Commander (Retired)
How much protection do those bomb disposal suits really provide?
Freelance Writer
How do you go about getting your first clients?
We’ll hold the scene as long as we need to get everything done, and that could be a day or two or three, but for a kidnapping it probably wouldn’t be more than a day, just enough to collect all the victim’s stuff, and collect fingerprints, hairs, fibers, anything that might belong to the kidnapper. We eventually get tired and want to go home (though we can go and come back, so long as it hasn’t been ‘released’) and the police department don’t really want to hold it longer then absolutely necessary, because they have a cop or two sitting there doing nothing but guarding the scene, and it takes them off the road. Hope that helps!
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In my personal experience, I have only testified to bloodstain pattern analysis once, and it didn’t really tell anything significant about the case because there was blood everywhere, and the fingerprints in blood weighed more than the patterns.
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I do not, as I'm not trained in digital forensics. But my coworker who is says that many many times, what people think is deleted is not really deleted.
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