KP's Travels: Crime Scene Activity

You've all read how much I rave about my Forensic Science class and how much I love it. Today was a highly anticipated day because we got to investigate a REAL crime scene.

OK, not exactly real, but as close as we will ever get. Since my teacher is the Police chief he can basically do whatever he wants, and so he took all the evidence (copies of course not the real things) from a crime scene and adapted them to our class so that we can learn the process of investigating a real scene and the motions you have to go through.

We were placed into groups. My group had 9 people. Each group got their own classroom, and we were given a binder to look over. The binder had the introduction to the crime scene. We 9 students are the "forensic team" and we have been called to the scene bythe detective. All he tells us is they have probable cause to search the house, yard, cars, etc. and all we know is there was a woman reported missing 13 days ago, the owner of the house is the former lover of the woman, and there is a strange smell coming from the backyard. That was the only information we had to go on.

So from there, we had to decide as a team what we wanted to do first. We secured the scene and decided to go straight to the source of the smell. Our teacher is the facilitator of the crime scene investigation so once we decided what we wanted to do as a group, we would tell him our plan of action, and if it was correct, he would reward us with pictures of the next progressive step to processing the scene.

For example, we said "We secured the scene, so now we want to go straight to the source of the funny smell in the backyard" he said, "Nope, you're missing something." So we had to figure out what.... Finally we got it and said, "We want to call in an expert on shoe impressions to process our walkway to ensure we don't damage any evidence on the way (through the side yard) to the smell in the back yard"
"YES! He said, so we then had to submit a paper requesting a shoe impression expert and wait 2 minutes (to simulate waiting for the real expert to arrive on scene) and then he gave us pictures of the evidence that the shoe expert found. This went on from 9am-1pm (on a sunday I may add) and it was great fun and a wonderful way to learn. I absolutely loved it!

The only thing that put a damper on my experience was this horrible woman that was in my group. She was just absolutely unbearable and she chose to sit RIGHT next to me. She would talk over everyone, interrupt everyone, literally GRAB pictures out of people's hands, and shoot down people's ideas (most often WE were right and she was WRONG) with her "right ideas" and it was absolutely obnoxious. By the end of the 4 hours I was about to give my teacher a new crime scene to investigate.... I can tell you a lot more about this frustrating aspect of this wonderful day in person as I don't want to waste my time typing about it. But I have no problem telling it verbally ;)

Overall, it was an absolutely wonderful, once in a lifetime learning experience and I am so thankful for it. Now I have to write a 2500 word essay about it! Woo!

Here's two pictures. They aren't that great because I had to be sly about them!

(some of) my group.

We had brownies (yum) and you can see some pictures in plastic sleeves and binders with info. We sat in our group formation and discussed the evidence and decided what to do before going and talking to the teacher to obtain more evidence and move through the crime scene.