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The camera swoops down and zooms across Tampa Bay toward the Pier in St. Pete. It glides over the Vinoy, past Bay Walk and down Central Avenue. 'Who Are You" blares from the screen as crime scene investigators race to their van and speed off down First Avenue North toward the scene of the crime. It's CSI -- St. Petersburg.
Real life might not be as action-packed as its Hollywood imitators, but screenwriters could not imagine the characters crime scene technicians of the St. Pete Police come across every day; the worst of the worst, the dumbest of the dumb, and the weirdest of the weird. It's a menagerie of humanity against a backdrop of hard science working to clean up the streets -- and in some cases get someone's stolen stereo back.
I rode along with crime scene technician (they are called technicians in St. Pete, not investigators) Candace Marklin on two 11 p.m.-to-7 a.m. shifts to see what a crime scene tech really does.
The streets of St. Pete are a different world after dark. A strange sense of calm enveloped the night, yet one turn down an alley and you were watching the drug dealers ply their trade. The streets were mostly deserted, but some late-night hangouts were filled with people even on a weeknight. We drove through upscale neighborhoods and down-at-the-heel parts of town. We even took a side trip through Roser Park, which takes on a Twilight Zone air late at night, with its stately homes towering above the twisting streets set 30 feet below the surrounding land.
Crime scene technicians are not sworn police officers in St. Petersburg. They are officially civilian employees. They do not carry guns or even pepper spray to crime scenes. Of course, there is always a police officer with them, but it still seems odd that they have to go out to an active criminal investigation scene with no protection. As any cop will tell you, things are very unpredictable and situations can change in a heartbeat.
Thursday, April 4, 11 p.m.
The first night, I meet crime scene tech Candace Marklin at the lab across the street from the St. Petersburg Police Department's main building. I half expect the place to look like the lab in CSI. It doesn't. The walls are not glass; the machines are not quite state of the art, and no one has an individual office. There are some cool gadgets, though, large storage areas for evidence, and a coffee machine.
Some of crime scene technicians are certified through an academic program, like one at St. Petersburg College (formerly SPJC), which has one of the top forensic programs in the state. A few techs who have been around since before the certification program began five years ago don't have the certification but may have degrees. Marklin has a bachelor's degree in criminology from the University of Tampa.
She did an internship back home in Nassau County, N.Y., during her college years. 'I worked with the latent examiners, photo section, lab guys, even the handwriting analysis guys," she says. 'But where I loved spending the most time was with the crime scene search section. I realized that was a way to be part of the action without actually being in the action."
11:20 p.m.
The first call comes in at the beginning of the shift. A domestic dispute. We get in the van and race over to the west side of U.S. 19, near Gulfport. When we arrive, two patrol cars are there, finishing up their questioning of the victim and some witnesses. Marklin walks over and gets the lowdown on the situation.
The victim says her boyfriend broke into the house and smacked her around. Then he took off. Marklin is there to take photographs of the victim's injuries. Before she starts, she fills out a sheet of paper with the case number on it. Then she readies her digital camera (all crime scene techs use digital cameras and camcorders).
I'm allowed to walk in with her. It feels weird, invading the space of a woman who was just assaulted. No one notices though. The house is a mess, with newspapers and pillows strewn about and chairs overturned. It's hard to tell whether it's from the fight or it's always this way.
The victim has some minor cuts on her arms. Her face is red and puffy from crying; her hair is disheveled. She looks scared. The tech takes pictures of injuries from a variety of angles and uses a ruler against them for scale. Since the police know who the perpetrator is, there is no need for fingerprints or further processing of the scene.
Back in the van, Marklin talks about the huge interest in forensics and the popularity of forensic TV shows. 'It's just like anything; people like to learn how things are solved in these unique ways. It's just like watching detectives. How did they solve the crime? It's good to see people wanting to learn what we do."
2 a.m.
The next call is for a stolen car stereo on the south side of St. Pete. When we arrive, the owner of the SUV is outside.
Marklin briefly talks to the owner, trying to find out if he touched the vehicle at all, where he may have touched it, what was broken into, and a few other specific questions geared toward finding the best place to dust for fingerprints.
She walks around the Ford Explorer, methodically dusting the outside of the car. Finding a few prints, she lifts them, using a thick piece of tape. She tapes the print to a piece of white paper and labels it. Now she goes to work inside, looking around for an ideal place for prints, where someone may have touched, leaned or reached in to grab the stereo. A few more are lifted. Her work is done, so she checks out with the patrol officer at the scene and we leave.
In the van, Marklin talks about the difficulty of lifting prints from some types of materials. Fingerprints cannot be lifted off bricks or rocks. Unfinished wood poses its own set of problems. Since it has many grooves in it, the prints are not easily identifiable. Techs often use both black powder and a chemical method to lift the print.
Many times, however, prints are not visible to the naked eye. At the St. Pete lab, the techs use a variety of methods to get latent, or invisible, fingerprints. Among the chemicals they use is ninhydrin, which causes the fingerprint to come up purple, making it more visible. It reacts with amino acids in body oil.
Unfortunately the ninhydrin stays on for a long time, so if the victim needs the material that was fingerprinted back, the techs use a different method, iodine fuming, which involves putting the object in a closed chamber where iodine fumes are released. They attach to the print and raise it off the object, turning it yellow. The print is then photographed immediately because it will disappear in a short time.
Another fuming method is cyanoacrylate fuming. Cyanoacrylate is actually Super Glue. It's put into a closed chamber where it's heated. The vapors react with the latent print's oils. The print rises and turns white. The techs then put the black powder over the raised print and lift it. The print actually hardens on the object so it can be lifted more than once if the first try is not successful. This method is used mostly for guns and other metal objects.
Another interesting chemical that the techs use is Luminol. This substance shows blood not visible to the naked eye. It reacts with iron and proteins in the blood. Luminol is the stuff you see TV investigators spraying on a floor and turning off the lights to see. It actually glows and can show blood trails, splatters or pools. Luminol is not specific to human blood, so occasionally further analysis is needed.
While lifting prints might not seem like exciting work, it does put away a lot of criminals. Marklin recalls a case where two guys broke into a fast-food store and committed an armed robbery. They snatched the money from the safe, and no one was sure if they were wearing gloves. Marklin watched the surveillance video of the robbery and noticed that one of the perps kicked over a bucket of grease.
'As he turned to head to the back, he lost his balance and grabbed onto a bread rack, which was about 5 feet tall. I noticed no gloves on his hands, so I took the top, where there were buns in plastic wrap and dusted it. I got two good prints and I nailed that guy."
There are no more calls for the rest of this night. That's how it is sometimes, she tells me. You can have a night when calls come in from all directions, then nights like this, when nothing seems to be going on.
We drive around some areas of St. Pete I have never been to and some I've never seen at night. It really is a different place in the day. We ride through a new development near Gandy, where Marklin spots an unoccupied van with the door open. She slows down for a look. Nothing out of the ordinary but she calls it in anyway.
While driving toward the south side, Marklin talks about her first day on the job, when she was called out to an accident where a person was decapitated. Understandably, the episode has stuck with her. 'Getting that experience right off the bat, it was nice to know I could handle it but it was an unfortunate accident."
Marklin has worked for the St. Petersburg Police Department for almost seven years. 'I just passed my three years as a technician in the beginning of April. Before that I was a complaint writer answering 911 calls and a dispatcher for a couple of years." Sunday, April 28, MidnightThis seems like a good night to ride along. The moon is full, which, police say, generally means a busy night with plenty of weirdoes.
Our first call is a possible domestic break-in on Ninth Street. On our way over, Marklin says the crime scene techs have received 231 calls so far this year. It's shaping up to be a busy one for the techs.
We arrive on the scene, a run-down apartment complex just north of downtown. We meet an officer at the scene and walk around to where the break-in occurred. The door appears to have been tampered with.
As we round the corner of the apartment, I see a lady arguing with her cats and a small dog. She sees us and makes some strange noises, grunts, growls, incoherent mumbling and gurgling. Marklin and the cop ignore her. They start looking over the crime scene. I'm fascinated by the strange show going on next door.
A Harley comes rumbling down the street and pulls up right in front of the neighbor. The woman greets him. He picks up the small dog, French kisses it and walks into the house.
Marklin is taking some pictures and talking with the responding officer. She figures out which marks around the lock are new. Evidently the place had been broken into before. She takes some more photos with a ruler to show the length of the marks. She finishes up her evidence collection, and soon, we are back on the beat.
12:30 a.m.
This call sends my heart up to my throat. It's vandalism at the Holocaust Museum in downtown St. Pete. My first thoughts are not pleasant. Images of swastikas and anti-Semitic graffiti flood my mind.
When we arrive on the scene, one of the sculptures on the outside is knocked over. There is no graffiti in sight. The cop on the scene says it's most likely a drunk who did the damage; the downtown has no shortage of them this time of night. There isn't much for us to do except take some pictures.
12:49 a.m.
Our next call is a domestic battery. A woman says her ex-husband broke into her house, punched her, knocked her down and tore the phone out of the wall when she tried to call the police.
When we arrive, there's a raucous party going on across the street. Throbbing bass shakes the whole street. The officer at the scene briefs us on the case, and I follow Marklin into the house. The woman has some marks on her. As the officer is taking statements, Marklin takes pictures of the wall where the phone was ripped out as well as the woman's injuries on her hands, face and legs. The pictures are cataloged. The whole house is on edge, but the victim is sure her husband will not come back.
Driving back to the station, we stop at an accident scene and talk to some officers there. Marklin says that camaraderie between techs and cops is important. 'I prefer to be friendly with everybody out here," she says, 'so they let me do the work I need to do."
2:45 a.m.
We get a call for a deadly missile. I'm thinking rocket launcher. We pull up to a nice house in a middle-class neighborhood on the south side. Someone has tossed a brick through the front window. The victims seem sure of who did it. It turns out their son had a fight with another young man earlier that day. While we are inside taking pictures, the father gets in his car and takes off.
While we're driving back, the subject of chain of custody of evidence comes up. Marklin says that the crime scene technician has to insure that the evidence is collected, bagged and shipped off without any opportunity for tampering or contamination. Pieces of evidence are collected in separate bags and sealed. The bags are stored in a locked van until they can be brought back to the station. The evidence is logged in back at the crime scene lab. If the evidence needs to go to Florida Department of Law Enforcement in Tampa for further analysis, there is an in-depth protocol for keeping records of chain of custody.
Television makes it seem as if the techs do all the analysis of crime scene evidence, but in reality different people do different kinds of analysis. 'There's one person that does blood work," says Marklin, 'One person who does tire impressions, one person who does shoe impressions, fabric and hair impressions."
Then there's the intriguing if yucky world of forensic entomologists who study the decomposition of bodies by identifying insects and other bugs that inhabit a corpse. The University of Florida has a body farm where entomologists bury pigs and study the various bugs it attracts. They look at rate of decomposition and recruitment of different species. Occasionally a crime scene tech will come upon a scene that needs entomological evidence collected, usually maggots. The larvae are boiled for a few seconds and then readied for special shipping to the university for analysis.
Many of the technicians feel that the television show CSI is accurate in concept but obviously dramatized for effect. Much of the forensic science shown on the program is on the money, they say. Techs do indeed use lasers to follow bullet trajectories, and the tiniest shred of evidence can seal a case. Of course not all cases get solved as fast as the ones on the show. 'I guess if we did have all our lab services in the building and manned 24 hours a day, sure cases may go quicker." Marklin says.
Curiously, the popularity of the TV shows, as well as other forensic theme shoes on The Learning Channel and Discovery, contribute to a growing annoyance among the techs: people who think they know the techs' jobs better than the techs do. 'Some people who watch the show think they know what the techs can and cannot do," says Marklin
Crime scene technicians are the unsung heroes of the never-ending struggle against crime. They collect the stuff that sends the bad guy away. 'The forensics people are a vital part of the investigation," says Rick Stelljes, a former assistant chief and major in charge of detectives in St. Petersburg. 'Their commitment to accuracy is paramount to making or breaking a criminal case. One little print or one tiny piece of evidence they find in a picture can change the outcome of a case. Many times cases can be made or broken in court, depending on how precise they've been."
The techs agree. As one technician, who did not want his name used, told me, 'Police officers put the bad guys in jail. Forensic techs put them in prison."
Scott M. Deitche is a freelance writer based in St. Petersburg. He has previously written four articles on organized crime for the Planet and can be reached at sdeitche@tampabay.rr.com.
