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.
We use math in calculating point of orgin of bloodstain patterns. The sin of the angle of impact equals the width over the length of the blood stain. When we have a group of bloodstains on a surface like a wall or floor we can use this to calculate the point of origin. Also the fingerprint database searching uses complicated algorithms to rank fingerprint matches in terms of similarity. Forensic chemists probably use math more than I do--for example, to calculate the amount of alcohol in a person's blood. I hope that helps!
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I'm afraid you'd have to ask a doctor. I'm not an expert in that area, but I could make a guess that it depends a great deal on what he lands on when he falls. Also, has anything in the loft changed recently? Maybe he rearranged the furniture so his bed is closer to the edge?
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I'm sure you are, since most positions are civilian positions without those kinds of restrictions.
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See below.
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You can't go wrong with science classes. When I was in college they didn't have courses specifically in forensic science, so that wasn't an option. Look especially for classes where you can do hands-on work in the lab or field. And different agencies will have different requirements, so you might want to go online and check out the different vacancies to get some idea of what requirements are out there.
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Officers who talk their sergeants into calling us out to a scene for five minutes of processing because they don't want to use the fingeprrint kits that they've been issued for just that purpose.
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That's impossible to say, since there's no way to know if perhaps it was left but simply not discovered. Perhaps they touched something that didn't appear out of place so we didn't fingerprint it. Perhaps they touched everything but have very dry skin so they didn't leave prints. Perhaps they left DNA on the steering wheel of a stolen crime but we didn't collect it because the state lab doesn't do touch DNA analysis on non-violent crimes. There are too many factors involved.
I can say that burglars cut themselves climbing through broken windows perhaps 2-5% of the time. But only a fraction of burglars break windows, so....
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