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.
If you're working with the bodies then you'd probably be a medicolegal death investigator. You might want to check out their organization: http://www.abmdi.org/And this page: http://www.abmdi.org/faqBest of luck!
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I'm sorry, I haven't had any experience with that.
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Every agency--police departments, M.E. offices, state police--has their own rules and requirements. The best thing to do is check the websites or contact the agencies where you'd like to work and ask them.
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No, because simply from a news article you have no idea of everything that is going on. The officers might not be (should not be) telling reporters everything they know, in order to weed out truthful and untruthful witnesses. They're also not going to tell reporters (and if they did the reporters wouldn't write it) every last little boring tedious detail of everything they do. And information often gets garbled in translation, from crime scene to cops, from cops to the information officer, from the info officer to the press release, from the press release to the news article, from the neighbor looking over their fence and then talking to the reporter. That's just human.
Lots of time the story I get from Dispatch when they first call me turns out to be a totally different thing when I get there.
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Call Center Employee (Retail)
Do you think it's just a matter of time before all U.S. companies move their customer support overseas?
CPR Trainer
Are you supposed to perform CPR differently on a man vs. a woman?
Tattoo Artist
Is it illegal to tattoo a client if he's drunk?
Oh yes, I'm extremely smart. Just kidding! No, you don't have to be some kind of friggin' genius like you see on TV. You just have to be reasonably intelligent, reasonably sensible, reasonably observant, and have a good amount of attention to detail, respect for rules, and patience. It also helps to be pleasant and able to get along with people. Even though most of our victims are dead, the families, witnesses, cops and detectives are very much alive and under a lot of stress.
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I couldn't tell you the exact chemistry, but it reacts with the iron present in hemoglobin to indicate blood. However it also reacts with other oxidizing agents such as copper and horseradish. Unlike what you see on TV, we don't spray luminol and then use a UV light or some such thing. We make the room as dark as possible, spending a lot of time taping material over windows and door cracks and 'ready' lights, then spray the luminol.or Bluestar. It will glow on its own without any additional equipment, and won't last long. It can be photographed but that's a bit of work. It won't stain or harm anything.
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No. A .357 can shoot .38 bullets (not vice versa, or the gun will blow up) but 9mm can't shoot 38 bullets because they're shaped a little differently. It's confusing because what we call .38 caliber are actually .357, and 9mm is actually .380--in size, but a 9mm gun cannot shoot .380 bullets. You would have to read the forensic report carefully and maybe ask for clarification. I've never worked in ballistics, so perhaps there's a chance that the report is saying that the projectile had a .380 diameter, not that it was a .380 bullet, in which case it could have come from a 9mm gun?
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