Amateur vs Professional

was thinking about if it was a car jacking. Let's just say, I don't know, pretend if it was a carjacking, maybe they touched the door and then saw the little toddler in the back seat and got spooped and ran away. Or maybe they turned him over so they could reach in his back pocket and see if he had a wallet, you know what I mean, like those kinds of touches, you know, can that be processed? And then another thing

that I was really thinking about a lot was the shellcasings. Yeah, it's my understanding that shellcasings are difficult in the past to process because when the gun is fired, it like burns up the DNA right to.

And I think that for the laymen, they do follow that line of logic and they think about how you know it is something that is left behind and to kind of frame it. And I always fall back to a man named mom Lecarde, who's our person in forensics. It's kind of the godfather in forensics for us, and over one hundred years ago he made a statement. It says, every contact leads a trace. There's something there and you know,

like you just imagine your thumb. Where an individual is loading a magazine, they're pressing down very hard, particularly when they're gay to the high end of the capacity of the magazine. They're having to apply more pressure directly to the surface of the months of the live round. But get it into the magazine comes more and more tense, so more contacts you have there, the higher probability is that you'll leave a latent print and there have been

latent prints that have been recovered off the shellcases. We do things like super glue, fumine, those sorts of things. You can kind of capture it in that moment. But the DNA DNA is so and the term molecular is very accurate here because it's so timy, and it gets into these places that I think the normal everyday person you're thinking about, well where can I find evidence? Well, evidence can be in the tightest of areas, the tiniest little recesses. When it comes to DNA, it's just do

you have the knowledge and the ability to collect it? Well, if you use a semi automatic weapon, unless you've got what's referred to as a brass catcher that catches the ejected shell cases, you're leading evidence behind. You know, a pro, a pro worth their salt, would use a revolver, and you know there are many cases where you can use like a twenty two magnum for instance, revolver, which is you know, rather robust round to be so tiny and caliber,

it's highly effective. And obviously in this case, they weren't trying to mute sound because even the baby, you know, we have to think back, what did the baby say you know, boom boom boom, daddy fell down, or you know, I'm not doing it justice. But that was essentially the jest of it. So they weren't trying to mask sound here. They weren't trying to suppress sound. So a pro would have used a revolver. If you use a revolver, guess what you do. You take that evidence with you because

the spent rounds in the cylinder are still there. You're going to haul that off with you. Who this perpetrator is as cold and callous as it was, and this is this hits a level of brutality I think just from a lack of just empathy on his part for this baby that was at the scene. It wasn't very bright because you know, you've got all these multiple points of contact this this tire with a rim, there's points of contact on that where you can leave you know,

DNA evidence that can be harvested. You could leave a fingerprint that say, if you're not wearing gloves, because if you think about any tire, it's got that kind of dust that's on the surface of it. You know, many times it's break dust. You'll have grease that's on it and if you have grease, if you touch that area,

that's what referred to as a plastic print. If you're very careful when you look at that, you essentially if if folks listening, we'll just think about think about when we were kids and we'd use plato or we'd use silly putty, you know, and you press your finger into it. You press your finger into it, you can actually pick up ridge detail off off of that print that has been left behind. Well, this is kind of a plastic print if you touch that that kind of greasy or

dusty area. The trick is we're they careful to preserve all of the surfaces of that tire. So I know, going kind of far field.

they do. You've got perhaps, as you rightly mentioned, if this was in fact some failed carjacking attempt where you're going to muscle somebody and they put their hand on that door lash to force it open and have them

step out of the vehicle. Knowing Florida and the way they process scenes down there, I would imagine that truck was hauled off and taken to a forensic garage as a crime lab, and the whole thing is being I mean they have gone from stemmed the stern on this thing, looking at every point of contact in there, that baby's

car seat, what is part of the scene. They're going to be taking a look at that, any any point of contact where people are placing their hands on a surface, And it doesn't matter if it's a smooth, non poor surface like glass or metal or even fabric, because if you touch fabric, if you touch fabric, there's a high probabilit right there that you could source DNA out of that just through touch DNA that DNA that comes off

from slough skin cell. Yeah, then you think about the tire, you know, so you've got the tire and all the components with that, You've got the truck with the Layton prints, You've got these shell casings. And one of the things I'm fascinated by is that when you look at the aerial photography in this case of the area where this went down, this is immediately adjacent to a very damp environment. As a matter of fact, there's kind of a little canal that runs adjacent to the roadway out there. It's

got water. This water in dwelling in the space, and so you know that it's a damp, humid environment. I know a lot of people would say, well, that's Laura, that's no big revelation. You're right, it's not. But if that water is in that canal area because of the recent rain, if this perpetrator set this tire out at this choke point, wheel housing entire however we're going to phrase it, they had to wait. Well, the question is what did they do while they were waiting?

soil is very soft and very receptive. So if an individual is wearing a particular type of shoe boot, that soil would have been very receptive to holding on to a pattern left behind by the shoes that the individuals wearing. You know, the thing about it is is that if you get a group of cops that are, you know, kind of cowboying it up and they're just running around wild, which I don't think that they did, you can stop upon evidence and some of the stuff is very reprivual.

I hope that it was very well secured if they did find footprints, which I think there's a higher probability that they did out that same because of solid the soil, the texture of the soil, and you can document that maybe cast those areas you're going to have again another point of connectivity that could in fact leads you back to portrayer in this cave.

person wouldn't have gone into the woods. Right, The person likely wouldn't have gone into the woods.

It'll hit that contact and surface and it'll just bounce and there's no there's no predictability to it where it's going to wind up. Now that the casings were in the grass on the shoulder of the road, then again this isn't a great predictor, but at least you would kind of have them in a tighter area. But when you get onto a hard surface and you again popping off rounds, those cases can be distributed all over the place.

So you can't look at the distribution patterns of spent shell cases and say, Okay, this person was standing definitively right here, because it's just.

across the ground. Well, now you've lost all your points of reference, you know, with that where it was distributed, and that does happen. I'm chief among centers, I've kicked them, I've stucked them, and had not didn't have an awareness you know, that was going on. But if it's in the grass, that's that's totally you know, that's a bit different.

And this is just kind of one of those points when you think about crime scene investigations, and one of the reasons we really stress this is that you have to have a gatekeeper out there. You do not want a huge number of people inside the tape because you increase the factor that something could go wrong exponentially with every person that you put inside the tape. So the fewer hands on deck, you would think, well, god, we need somebody to help us manage this. Yeah, you do.

They need to stand outside the tape, and you have the technicians that are within the tape, particularly early on, so that you can kind of get a feel for what's going on. And this case is very difficult. Why people might ask why, you know, Morgan, why why is this case more difficult than you know than another, Well, it's outdoors, and anytime you have something outdoors, it's it's not controlled. I've had wild animals walk across scenes at uh,

you know, crime scenes. I've had dogs walk up and start snipping out of blood and drinking blood at crime scenes and you don't have any control over that, Whereas if you're inside of a dwelling, it's a controlled environment. You know that that you find yourself in at that moment time, and you can you know, shut the doors, and it's very I'm not saying it's it's easy, but

it's it's more controllable. And then of course in Florida, you never know when it's going to rain, and that's one of the worst things that can happen is that's crime scene investigati. When you hear the distant roll of thunder, I'm that that happened. That happens quite frequently.

that necessarily happened in this particular case. First off, crimesing units, it's kind of standard now that they carry a generator with horrible lighting. In the past, if it is so bloody dark out of the scene, we would actually call the fire department. And they have what's called a light truck at bigger departments, and it's got these gigantic, gigantic spotlights on the things that many people don't ever see these, and it will just blast away all of the darkness.

Set to call for other you know, for other assets to come in so that you can work this thing, you know, and you know, homicides don't occur at most convenient time. You have to, you know, you have to dance to the tune that's currently being played, and you have to be prepared to bit at one show up.

sun goes down. You don't necessarily want to be doing a body recovery in a non lighted environment, I mean where it requires daylight to do it. In those cases, yeah,

you would hold off. But in a case that's kind of dispersed and you really don't know what's going on, you can mind this occurred at night, you know, so you're not going to know the full depth and breadth of it, and you don't know what could be compromised by you not attending to it, particularly when it comes to blood evidence, and that's that's the big bugaboo here.

If you have any kind of blood evidence, whether it be from the victim, which there would have been blood evidence relative to Jared unfortunately, or if they got into a scuffle or something and the perpetrator was bleeding, you won't be able to appreciate those bits of blood and it can be compromised. So you have to flood it with as much light as you can and try to process it at that moment in time, because it can

be literally washed away. I mean. And again, my friends in Florida that I know that you know, do forensics down there. That's and I work in South Louisiana, which is not too much different than Florida and these hostile environments, and Florida is a hostile And I don't mean this about the people or the I'm talking about the atmosphere. I'm talking about that world in which people live in, you know, down there, and they're aware of it there.

You know, you're not breaking new news to them. They know every time you walk out of the house, you're dripping sweat many times, okay, And you're subject to the environment that you're in, any any environment that we're in. And then with biological evidence, in particular, the longer it is left unattended or uncollected and documented and all the sorts of things that we do, there's a higher probability

it's going to degrade. And you just you want to avoid that at all costs, and some you know, look, if the circumstances dictate many times, how we're going to react and behave and all those sorts of things. And you know, sometimes you get to a body and it's it's hours and hours after the person has died. You don't have any control over that, and so you kind of have to jump in midstream and just process it as best you can and just understand the world and what you're working.

witness to this event. Okay, they're going to try to get that into, you know, into the case they're going to when this thing goes to trial, or try to. They want to get that statement, you know, that statement that she made about our day. I could see them getting the police officer that took that statement or spoke with that child, or if it was a social worker or whoever, get them on the stand and address that issue.

In addition to that, I could see them reaching out to a side child psychologist or forensic psychologists and ask them how much how much weight should we give to this statement that was made, And then they'll go into the you know, into destruction of the brain of a child's age and talk about the cognitibility, their ability to communicate, and they'll get them on the stand. And it's probably

the combination of those two things. With the official that took the statement from a child, if you want to call it a statement, and then an expert rendering you know, how much weight should you get to it, they could probably get them understand I just can't see them putting on the sand.

and you go, well, that's not very professional. So there's a lot of talk about you know, you can identify the type of gun or from the hammer that strikes the firing cap in it. So obviously they're going to know the size of based on the shell. They're going to know what size bullet would use.

because they recovered spell, recovered spent brass. Let's saying, you know, unless somebody, unless this person was such a fool that they would dump a cylinder at the scene, you know, from a revolver, And I don't think that's the case.

slides up into the chamber. So when you talk about a brass catcher, that would be an attachment to it. So it's this case is this isn't the case where I go, well, that's not very professional to lead ship.

And you're not a board certified friends of pathology. So you know, immediately the defense hops on you and says, oh, really, where'd you go to medical school? Where'd you do your pathology residency? Where'd you do your fellowship in forensic pathology, So they can call it a gunshot wound. But the safest thing is to say this is a circular defect

in the body. Now, once the medical examiner makes their assessment and they say, yes, this is in fact a gunshot woman, we've got stippling here, we've got a powdered distribution. Oh and by the way, we recovered to let core projectile out the body, and we have X rays to

demonstrate this, and here's the physical projectile. Even if you have the ballistics on that, sometimes the bullet will be compromised to the point where you won't have the ability to say definitively that this is a certain caliber without sending it to the ballistics lab and have them visualize it, actualize it, examine it, and generate a report. Shortcut here is the fact that you've got spent brass at the scene.

So you can look at that and say, for the detective, this is huge because he's got spent brass laying all over the place. And not only can they say that it's this caliber and it's this manufacturer, because now you've got a place where you can start doing sales research exactly. And one other thing that people don't think about with spent brass is that you know, you did a great job of describing the sequencing of the ejection process when those rounds are loaded up through the magazine and you

initiate that firing sequence. Well, what happens internally with a semi automatic weapon is you've got a mechanism within it that essentially grabs that round that has been fired and it drags it across, drags it across the surface of these of this extractor mechanism that's inside the housing. And guess what, that's unique to that weapon. So now that piece of brass is flying through the air and it's

got extractor marks on it. So if you ever do you recover the weapon, you can take that piece of brass and you can fire that same type of ammunition

out of that weapon. Collect that brass and do a comparison between what you found at the scene and what you generate in a lab if you suspect that this is the weapon use and they can do a ballistic comparison with that, and it's it's not it doesn't have as much weight as when you're you see them in these movies where they'll fire a weapon into a big barrel full of water and they catch that round, and you look at the ballistic signature that's left behind the

striations and all these sorts of things that land and roods, and you know the the fingerprint that's essentially left on the soft metal surface of the projectile that carries more weight. However, you know the totality of that scientific examination where you have spent brass and then you marry that up with

the test fire round compared to the rounds that you recovered. Unfortunately, maybe from the body it's seen, or maybe around that has passed through the body lodged in them around or maybe because I still don't I still don't understand the positionality of the shooter relative to Jared. They shoot Jared once, knocking to the ground, and they stand over him and fire into him.

to get away with murder? Win on one, this is like the perfect crime. You know, we're ten minutes down the road. They still don't know. They have some ideas. But so that was the thing that stuck out with me so early. You would talk about latent prints and DNA on non porous surfaces. So how about a tire. Anybody who's ever changed a flat tire on the side

of the road knows it's very physical. Your hands on, you're gonna get dirty, You're gonna get brake dust and whatever your car's kicked up while it's driving down the road. So I'm assuming that tire was on the word f one fifty they're looking for. They had a flat, so I'm going they had to physically touch it.

you could capture a print in that environment. Another thing that they'll use also when trying to retreat prints is using what's referred to as alternative light sources. Because light is on a spectrum and so you're using, say, for instance, like ultra violet light. You can take photos of things using ultraviolet light filters and you'll be able to see things that you would not normally see. So that's another

way they can capture evidence off of the tire. I think, yeah, I think that probably we're reaching the outer marker now, but there's other pieces of evidence to consider here. I think, in going back to the tire, I think one of the things that we might forget about is you have to look to soil signs. In this case as well, you brought up you had brought up the idea that this person if they were from an out of state or they had traveled out of state, you know, all

soil is not the same. So if you're coming from let's say Florida is just adjacent to Georgia, right, Well, if you had used the truck on a job, if you're a contractor, use that truck on a job in the Piedmont region of Georgia, which is before you get to fall on, which is where the soil turns real sandy and it starts to sweep down towards the Gulf of Mexico and the Atlantic coast of Florida. That soil looks completely different in the Piedmont region than it does

down in that coastal region. The same thing applies as you go north of the Piedmont you start to get into Appalachia. If they're doing a job up there, let's say in North Carolina or Tennessee, that soil is completely different than Piedmont and it's certainly different than the coastal soil. So soil is certainly something you would look for on that tire. In particular, I can guarantee you they're looking at that.

thousand and eight. So let's just say the last year two thousand and eight is doing this thing. Most tires last forty fifty thousand miles. This you know, this vehicle is two thousand and eight twenty twenty twenty two. That's the eight years they've probably had to replace tires within those eight years. Is there information manufacturer information can be on this tire that may tell them when it was manufactured, where it came from, and possibly what area of the

country like I live in southern California. We don't buy snow tires and we don't need them, whereas people in the north and eat northeast too. Is there going to be information manufacturer information on the tire that may help them find where this came from.

going to supply that company. A is going to supply Ford Motor Company with this type of tire. You know, because when a vehicle rolls off the line, it's got tires on it. Okay, so they subcontract that out. So let's just say, for instance, that they had new tires that were placed on the truck and they had this

OE tire that they kept around for a spare. Well, that tells you something about the individual, right, it tells you the point of origin for the oe, what year was it manufactured, where did it come from, what lot

did it come out of? If you know, because if you just look at the on the sidewalls, if you just look at the all of that data that's contained on the side of there, you can kind of begin to paint a picture of the point of origin, maybe not specifically to that truck, but certainly to that that tire. And I think that that's very important here. And when you're trying to process all of this evidence, it does

take time. You know. It's like you know, Granny's quilt that she's passed down from years and years ago to the family and each body, each person involved it did a square. Well, each one of the squares has got a point of point of origin, okay, and it's what makes the quote unique. And in a forensic case, it's just like that, each one of these bits of evidence will be unique to itself. Even you drowning in evidence, okay,

sometimes you can have believe it or not. You have too much evidence, it becomes overwhelming, I think if you haven't planned accordingly, and when you have too much evidence, sometimes you can get focused on certain things and lose focus on other things. So you have to have somebody who's coming in charge that's saying, Okay, this is significant, this is significant, and just imagine the biggest vend docms that you've ever seen in your life, and everything has

its importance to the case. It's all about attempting to measure the value of each one of those little circles and what's it going to bring to the case. What's it? You know, right now we're still at the phase we just want to find out who this is and is this truck actually associated with the crime. I think there's probably a high likelihood it is, but we have to

get to that point first. Before you know, they actually put the bracelets on anybody and you see them purp walking into a courthouse somewhere.

a vehicle? And then they had security camera videos in their house, but she had hidden some extra ones underneath the bed, adding debate in the kids room. Uh, they had found a USB stick in his vehicle that was recording audio and so apparently he had so he had confronted her about this. But one of the things Deanna and I was, it's only he put a tracking device on his vehicle that night or before to see where he was going, to be able to see where.

That technology does in fact exist. We've seen it in several other cases where you know, people were tracking others, you know, famously in the Pike in case, you know, where the police they put trackers on the Wagner family's vehicles and they became you know, very very very much aware of that. So yeah, and it's possible for people to you know, to do.

them and they're working on a case. From everything I've been able to understand regarding cases involved in the you know, digital digital evidence, you know, police contract things relatively easy, dependent upon they pulled the information off of local towers and that sort of thing. We're talking about cell phone data, these other items that are kind of buried within the technology of Apple. I think that that's a bit more difficult to harvest out of there.

I don't know, if you're kind of visualize in that, but it kind of sprays out and it's kind of why, well, imagine that that is a weapon that's being fired, and so the further away you are from the target area, the broader the deposition of the stippling is going to be. So the further you are away from your target area, with the analogy of the water hose, the spray will be broader. Okay, it'll be less concentric, it will kind

of spread out. Same thing applies to the fire when you fire a weapon into a static location, whether it's you know, a target that you have end up on a tree or a firing range, or into a human. If you're within with pan guns, if you're within about eighteen inches, that's going to be kind of the out limit where the power itself that is not burned up is just going to kind of drift down to the ground because it's not powder itself is not very aerodynamic

what the bullet is. So once that initial burst, you know, the ground is popped off if you will, the lack of aerodynaticism of the powder will cause it just kind of just away and the bullets spinning out of the end of the the end of the weapon is going to maintain and retain its energy until it strikes its target. So what we can understand here is that the closer you are through the target, the tighter the stippling pattern will be. So you know, when you're you know, we

have we do what are called the sparious ranges. Will say close close range, which would be you know, within about one to two inches, all right, And before you get close trained you have what's reports to as heart content pressed attact, which means the muscle is pressed into the target location, into the skin, and when you pull trigger and in initiates, you're not going to have a lot of powder because it's all being blown into the wound, into the cavities and created. So he stepped back, you

go to you know, two to three inches. That's close. And then before you drift back, you get into this realm that's called intermediate. Now, intermediate is kind of meduless. You know, they'll people will try to apply different ranges to it and say, well, this person was definitely add a ten inch raine. Okay, maybe they were, but you

it's it's going to be depended upon several facts. But what we can surmise is if the police are saying that there was stippling on Jared's body adjacent to this wound, we know that the killer was in relatively close proximity to him as his weapons being fount If they're saying three to four feet, that would be at the outer powder limits of of what you would find with powdered distribution. And when they're saying stippling, you know, stipling, you have

it on clothing, you truly can. But generally stippling is something that you know, most of the time we talk about relative to you know, scan so I'd be very curious to know where, you know, where this entrance land was, you know, Other than that you're begin to think about, you know, when you're talking about clothing, generally the term

issues just powdered distribution. So that's kind of you know, stippling is a very specific anatomical statement that you're making there because the powder is burned, it's kind of beneath, kind of embedded itself beneath the epidermis, and you can really see it. You know, it's it's striking, you know all it's easy to search out on the webcam to this quite quite easily, and so you get an idea

of different ranges for that. You know, you get up we're talking about why they have a bit more distance to them, you know, you know that claim that that will go out, you know, several feet and we'll just still get a powdered distribution. It's a lot more power though that you're talking about what you're talking about rock.