Thursday, June 21, 2007
Day 4 started off with Captain David Rose of the OSU
Police with firearms and ballistics. Ballistics is the study of an
object in flight and is under the domain of physics. The study of
firearms is completely different in the terms that you focus on the
manufacture, operation, and performance of the firearm. We moved on to
discuss the types of firearms which are: handguns, shoulder guns, and
rifles. Each gun is then broken down further by speed and agility into
categories of revolvers and semi automatics for handguns and single
shot, repeating or semi automatic for rifles. There is tremendous
variation in types of ammunition as well, which makes the investigation
of crimes involving firearms extremely complex and chalenging.
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Learning the skills of taking a good fingerprint. |
Using florescent light to read a fingerprint |
The rest of the morning we spent
time with some very cool fingerprinting and molding tools that are used
by actual crime scene investigators. We used a variety of powders for
fingerprint analysis like black powder, white powder, florescent powder,
and even magnetic, this was by far the most exciting and least messy.
We then got to create authentic teeth marks by biting on our arms and
then applying casting material to the marks. As a bonus we got to keep
our teeth moulds as souvenirs !
Creating
authentic teeth marks
Casting the mold
for the teeth marks
The afternoon consisted of
fingerprint analysis with Rob Lawson and Paul Bivens of the Columbus
Police Department. We discussed three main categories of fingerprints,
the loops, arches and whorls and characteristics such as bifurcations,
dots, and ridge endings, which makes each individual unique and
therefore identifiable.
The 2007 OSU/PAST Foundation Forensic
Archaeology Field School is sponsored by:
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