Last month I had the opportunity to attend the Bevel, Gardner, & Associates Shooting Incident Reconstruction (SIR I) course in Omaha Nebraska, USA. It was hosted by the Douglas County Sheriff’s Office and taught by Jonathyn Priest and Iris Dalley.

The course was a week long and was made up of attendees from across the US (and two of us representing Canada). It was a very interesting course and I learned a lot! It included a good mixture of classroom instruction, range instruction, and labs/workshops.

In the classroom we took apart cartridges and shotshells to examine the components of different types of ammunition, learned how to process and document a shooting scene, learned the concepts of trajectory analysis and got some hands-on experience with it, and learned about gunshot residue (GSR), stippling, wound tracks, and other topics related to wound dynamics.

Shooting Incident Reconstruction – S&W 40 Cal. Cartridge

Shooting Incident Reconstruction – Remington 12 Guage Shotshell

Shooting Incident Reconstruction – Trajectory Rod Workshop

We spent some time on the range to observe the effects of different types of weapon on various substrates (plate glass, laminated glass, wood, etc), examined ricochets off metal, wood, and and sand, analyzed a mock scene on a car with several bullet defects, and learned about wound dynamics through the shooting of a pig carcass with a handgun, a rifle, and a shotgun.

Shooting Incident Reconstruction – Bullet Holes In Glass

Shooting Incident Reconstruction – Shooting A Car On The Range

Shooting Incident Reconstruction – Bullet Ricochet Off Car Hood

I look forward to learning more about Shooting Incident Reconstruction and how it relates to my current work in Bloodstain Pattern Analysis.

Thanks to Michael Maloney and Jonathyn Priest of Bevel, Gardner, & Associates for organizing things for me!

A couple of weeks ago I attended the 2013 Association for Crime Scene Reconstruction (ACSR) conference in Atlanta, GA, USA. It was a much smaller conference than the previous ones, but that meant that there were a lot more questions and discussions surrounding the presentations. All-in-all, Ross Gardner (Bevel, Gardner, & Associates) did a good job with the content of the conference, though being stuck at an airport hotel wasn’t exactly ideal…

Some highlights for me were:

• The Laser Trajectories workshop with Michael Maloney (no relation) and Jon Priest (both from Bevel, Gardner, & Associates)
• Cory Latham‘s (Kansas Bureau of Investigation) discussion of staged crime scenes
• John Paul Jones II‘s (National Institute of Standards and Technology) presentation NIST Research, Guidelines, and Tools that Support the Forensic Science Practitioner
• David Dustin‘s (Dustin Productions) workshop Crime Scene Virtual Recreation: An Overview From Capture to Deliverable
• Jon Priest also presented an interesting double homicide case from Colorado

Incidentally, Michael Maloney and Jon Priest from Bevel, Gardner, & Associates are offering 40-hour courses on Shooting Incident Reconstruction in Nebraska (June 2013) and Colorado (July 2013). If you’re interested, you can find details on their website.

Shooting Incident Reconstruction – Laser Trajectories

The next ACSR conference is being organized by Cele Rossi (Montgomery County Sheriff’s Office) in Houston, TX, USA. It’s already taking shape and looks like it’s going to be a great lineup of talks and workshops. Hope to see you there in Feb 2014!

Last week I attended the IABPA conference in Edinburgh, Scotland. The conference organizers Amanda Pirie and Chris Gannicliffe [Scottish Police Services Authority (SPSA)] and their team did a fantastic job. It was held in a great, historical venue – The Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh – and the schedule and talks were quite good. They also planned a couple of amazing evenings. The first was a reception with the Lord Advocate in The Great Hall at Edinburgh Castle. The second event was dinner and a céilidh at the Ghillie Dhu. Very impressed that everyone who stayed until the wee hours of the morning still made it to the conference on Wednesday morning!

Some of the presentation and workshop highlights for me were:

• Pump Up The (Blood) Volume: Simulated Projected Blood Patterns using the ‘Arterial Pump’ workshop presented by Jo Millington [Manlove Forensics] and Gillian Leak [Principal Forensic Services]
• BPA in Road Traffic Collision Investigation—a Forgotten Art? presented by Chris Gannicliffe [Scottish Police Services Authority]
• Chemical Treatment of Footwear Impressions in Blood on Fabric presented by Kevin Farrugia [University of Abertay]
• Case Presentation: The murders of Angelika Kluk and Vicky Hamilton presented by Carol Weston and Nicola Clayson [Scottish Police Services Authority]

Special thanks to Craig Severin and Iain Harkness [SPSA] for keeping the céilidh evening flowing…

This conference set the bar pretty high for future conferences!

It has yet to be decided where the next European conference is going to be held, but there was talk of… Rome, Italy…

I attended the 2012 IABPA conference in Tucson, AZ, USA last week. I was fortunate enough to have been invited to present my work on cast-off visualization as well as a workshop on HemoSpat. Thanks to Norm Reeves [BPA Consulting] for all his work organizing the conference and for inviting me to present.

This conference had a great mix of research, case, and other presentations. It’s encouraging to see so many others presenting their work. I was particularly glad to see Céline Nicloux [Institute De Recherche Criminelle De La Gendarmerie Nationale] and Elisabeth Williams [Environmental Science & Research] present research on cast-off that fit so well with what I’m doing with it.

There was a more international flavour at the conference this year which was refreshing. People came from Korea, Japan, South Africa, The Philippines, France, The Netherlands, Australia, New Zealand, UK, and of course the USA and Canada.

The standout talks for me this time were: The Characteristics of Blood On “Wicking” Fabrics presented by Rich Tewes [Pioneer Forensics], Paulette Sutton’s [private consultant] Proving a Priest Killed a Nun (“Can I get a Holy Crap?!“), Bloodstain Pattern Documentation: A new Approach presented by Michael Perkins [Las Vegas Metro Police Department] (his recommendations are exactly the direction HemoSpat is headed) and André Hendrix’s [Politie Zeeland] presentation about the shooting of Prince William of Orange titled A 400 Year Old Royal Crime Scene.

Even the general meeting was interesting this time…

Thanks to André Hendrix, Klaas Vervolet, and Jos Albers for participating in the Adopt-a-Canadian program. We had fun running around the Tucson area after the conference.

Next stop: Edinburgh.

FORident Software is pleased to announce the release of HemoSpat v1.6 for Mac OS X 10.5-10.7 [64-bit Intel], Windows XP, Windows Vista, and Windows 7.

The larger changes include a new interactive 2D viewer, a new tutorial on working with SketchUp, Mac OS X 10.7 support, and improvements to the COLLADA (.dae) exporter.

There are many other changes and fixes as well. For download links and a more complete list of changes, please see the release notes.

New 2D Viewer

We look forward to hearing any feedback from you!