Just The Story Behind Bloodstain Pattern Analysis_2020 Case Studies_143

Welcome to Just Science, a podcast for justice professionals and anyone interested in learning more about forensic science, innovative technology, current research and actionable strategies to improve the criminal justice system. In episode 2, Just Science sat down with Aaron Sims, forensic lab manager at the Lincoln, Nebraska Police Department about bloodstained pattern evidence in forensic investigations. Not all crime scenes will have bloodstains, but when they are present, analysts can use them to help determine the types of activities or mechanisms that produce them. Aaron Sims believes that bloodstain patterns can tell the unknown story behind a crime. Listen along as she discusses the application of bloodstain pattern analysis and how it fits into the larger puzzle of crime scene investigation in this episode of Just Science. This season is funded by the National Institute of Justices Forensic Technology Center of Excellence. Here is your host, Dr. Mike Plante. Hello and welcome to Just Science. I'm your host, Dr. Mike Plante with NIJ's Forensic Technology Center of Excellence, a program of the National Institute of Justice. Here to help us stay with our discussion is guest, Ms. Aaron Sims. Aaron has been employed with the Lincoln, Nebraska Police Department for 38 years. She started her career as a uniform police officer for nine years, was then a detective sergeant for 16, and was promoted to forensic lab manager of LPD's Forensic Identification Unit in December 2008. Her areas of expertise include latent print examination processes, crime scene processing, and bloodstain pattern analysis, of course, the topic of today. Welcome to the podcast, Aaron. Well, thank you. Thank you for having me. Our topic today focuses on bloodstain pattern analysis. This could be great value and importance to the crime scene. Before we get into the specific case we're going to discuss, can you just describe to our listeners what bloodstain pattern analysis is and the true value to crime scene investigation? Well, bloodstain pattern analysis is generally defined as a systematic assessment of the size, the shape, the distribution, and the appearance of individual bloodstains as well as bloodstain patterns. And we do this as a means of helping determine the types of activities or the mechanisms that produce those. There's not going to be bloodstain patterns at all of your crime scenes. There's lots of different ways to kill people or injure people, but it can help you in some cases to piece together what happened. And I always like to say you shouldn't just rely on a bloodstain pattern analysis. You really need to look at it as one piece of the totality of the evidence in that case and, you know, back it up by DNA, back it up by wound analysis from your pathologist. So like I said, it's just one of the small pieces, but it can be really helpful. Sure. And so the value, when you go to a crime scene, it's really about reconstructing the events, right? And kind of a verification of statements. You have a lot of witnesses or you have victims or even suspects. And just what I usually do is I wait until I'm done with my analysis and then I go in and I read the statements and I see which ones follow along with the evidence and which ones don't and then why and point that out to the investigators that are following up on the case. And it just helps with movement through the crime scene. It can help maybe differentiate between a homicide or a suicide attempt or an accidental, like I said, you are looking at the patterns, but you're also looking at the totality of the case as well. Exactly. It's really talking about how the blood was distributed, whether it's pooling, what was the activity of the actors in the scene that you might be able to detect positioning, whether people were moved, whether a certain type of weapon or a weapon at all was used. And even things around concealment and cleanup, you're able to identify and detect. Yes, yes, all of that. It's a pretty big open field, but it really helps sometimes. And I think that's one of the things that kind of maybe not necessarily unique to blood scene pattern analysis is that what you're doing, you're dealing with not only the internal properties of blood, but then every crime scene is different, right? You have these environmental factors, you have different actors, and you might have multiple locations, the primary crime scene and secondary, and all of these things kind of come together. And just like an accident or automobile investigation, in general crime scene investigation, you kind of have to take all this variability and all these factors into account when you're trying to reconstruct and contribute to your analysis. Yes, and I would say too, to move very slowly and look at all the angles and then make sure your work is peer reviewed by somebody else who is well trained to kind of make sure that you're not going off on some tangent or something like that. That's really interesting. When you talk about the process and how this has evolved, you have a lot of experience as a police officer. So tell us a little bit, how did you get into this area of blood scene pattern analysis, and what kind of drove you down that line? Well, basically, when I was a detective, I worked a lot of cases and crime scenes, and I would go into some place and come out with more questions than I had answers for. And so I was offered by my department to send me to the basic 40 hour class. And I kind of got hooked after that first class. And I can tell you, when I came home from that, I'm kind of like, now what and how do I apply this? Because in the basic 40 hour class, all of the experiments that you do are very structured and rigid. And crime scenes are not structured and rigid. So what you see in that class, maybe a little bit different looking when you actually apply it to a crime scene. So I just started spending my own money then and went to as many classes and as much training as I could and talk to as many of the other people in the discipline. And it basically kind of reached out for help because I'm in Nebraska, we have a low crime rate. So I don't get a lot of repetition, but I wanted to make sure that I was doing it the right way when it was necessary. Not having a lot of crime is a good thing. And it also allows us to maybe spend a little bit more time at the crime scene than maybe other agencies might have. So I really kind of just jumped into it. I really felt that it helped answer a lot of questions for me and was more likely to point me in the right direction. And maybe before we go on to this case, can you talk about what is some of the tools, photography of course, but what are the types of tools that would a bloodstain pattern and let's use at the crime scene? I would say the camera and a tripod is probably the big one. Number one, I like to use sticky measuring tape and put that on the walls and surround my patterns from the floor up to show just where on the wall this event occurred. Also a lot of close-up photos. I usually don't do any of the math at the scene. I've been kind of doing it long enough that you can kind of visualize it in your head, but I still do stain selection at the scene. Select the ones that are the best shape in that pattern for me to use to do math, to do the trigonometry, to find an area of origin on that. So there are some things I do at the scene and then a lot more that I do back when I get to my desk and rested because a lot of times you'll be at the scene for 12 hours or so and you might come back the next day and do another 12. So like I said, we have that opportunity to do that because our crime rate is lower, but I'm sure some people are going oh my goodness. We have to be in and out in an hour, but then I would say if your agency does that then just be really good with your photography. Take everything at 90 degree angles. Make sure you're in focus because we can reconstruct it from photos if they're taken properly, but it is a little bit more difficult. It's a lot better if you get to go to the crime scene yourself. Apparently there is crime in Nebraska because we're going to go through a case right now and this is a really interesting one. It's a big who done it and I think the title of your presentation was the blood same patterns will help tell the story when the victim can't or won't and that's really where you can run into certain things like you said around the testimony of whether it's a victim or other actors there and trying to reconcile what has happened. So you want to introduce it to this one? Sure and I'm going to kind of start at the beginning which is always the best place to start, but I didn't get called to the crime scene until day four. This particular case was worked by our county sheriffs and we share a crime scene investigation team so we will go help them. They come in and help us whenever we need manpower. This particular incident happened out in the county so about 20 miles outside of town on a farm and it was the first time they became aware that this man had suffered a gunshot wound was on Monday at about 2 p.m. He actually made a phone call to his own private doctor that was in Lincoln and said hey I have a laceration and I need some stitches and I was wondering if I could come in right now and the doctor was open so he said fine. This is a 58 year old man and it took about 30 minutes to drive in and get to his doctor's office. So basically the first thing he told his doctor was that he had received this injury not from a gunshot but a horse had kicked him and this pushed him into a hay bale lifter prong and for city folks who don't know what that is it's on the front end of a tractor and it's about three feet long about three inches wide and has a point and he used it to lift up bales and move them around your farm and so he said that his injury was caused by a horse kicking him into this prong. He took off his shirt and pulled out a wadded up white t-shirt out of the wound and it was underneath his left armpit about the size of a softball so quite a quite a large wound and when the doctor saw this you know he said you know this is really serious I'm going to call you an ambulance and we're going to get you to the hospital and he said you know I drove this far I'll just get in my truck and drive up there so he walked out he got back in his truck drove another couple of miles up to the hospital and then he didn't even go to the emergency room he just kind of wandered through the hospital for a while and somebody directed him to the emergency room and he's ambulatory he looks fine and he went up to the admissions desk and told him why he was there and he looked okay so they told him to have a seat in the waiting room well this is an emergency room so he sat in the waiting room for two and a half hours before he was seen and so about 5 30 in the evening is when he finally got in to see the e-room doctor and when he took off his shirt and told him the same story this doctor goes we're going to x-ray now and then when they got the x-rays back there was a gunshot pellet pattern inside the man's chest so that was pointed out to him and he goes well okay I've been depressed I've been I've been depressed and I shot myself and so okay they're they're gonna get him ready now for surgery and luckily one of our uniform officers was doing security at the hospital that same night and they always carry a little pocket digital camera and he got called down to the emergency room because of the gunshot wound to the man and he went in snapped a few photos luckily before they got him into surgery and I'll describe the wounds for you because the the pictures really do them justice but there is an entry wound mid chest about two inches left to center so maybe right above your heart and there's some charring so it's a contact wound and then an exit wound underneath his left armpit about the size of a softball and there's also some injury or damage to his bicep of that left arm and most likely that would put his arm in the position that his elbow is up so kind of elbow up shoulder length to go through the chest and then peel off the bottom of his bicep and officer holm said that they would lift his arm up and he could see inside his chest cavity and he could actually see his heart beating and what was left of the left lung was just kind of flapping in the breeze there so yeah how how he was able to drive into town with this type of injury is amazing to begin with so it also in talking to him he said yeah this happened out on on my farm so they called in the deputies and the deputies were familiar with him because they had been out to his place on domestics and shooting calls and just a lot of fighting and drinking going on in his past so the deputy that arrived he was familiar with him and he told that deputy the same story of how he shot himself and he said well tell me exactly how you shot yourself and he said I put the butt of the shotgun on the ground outside my shed and I put the barrel up into my armpit and I pulled the trigger okay so that's not right because of the wound pattern so wound analysis the wound pattern that story is not correct either so at about that time they're they're loading him up now they're going to move him to the trauma hospital for surgery there and he kind of added oh this happened yesterday this happened on sunday between three and four p.m. and he said well was anybody else there he said no I was by myself all day and then later he said well I guess my son did stop by but I don't I don't remember much about that he goes the next thing I remember is walking around my house at seven o'clock and noticing there was a lot of blood just everywhere and I thought about cleaning it up but I was kind of dizzy so I just went back to bed and passed out he said on monday he woke up he was still dizzy he was in a lot of pain but he saw that blood and he decided he's going to start cleaning up and he was trying to use a knife well he took a shower he also tried to use a knife to kind of clean up the wound a little bit to see if he could tape it shut I guess this is a tough old farmer so anyway and so that's about the time he decided that maybe he needed medical attention so the deputies really wasn't buying any of this and they had recalled like I said discharging firearms and chasing each other around on pass calls for service so he left to go have surgery and they decided to go out and start interviewing the family members and I should mention the the shotgun it was a 12 gauge 8 shot so 409 pellets and the wadding all went through his body and he's still upright so they went to the victim's home and just kind of secured it locked it down they got a hold of his ex-wife she's pretty much said I haven't seen him for five years I got divorced when I walked out he said you can't take anything with you if you're gonna leave just leave so she grabbed her daughter and they both left and she said they had been married for 20 years divorced for five she said the reason he left was because um he had previously suffered two traumatic brain injuries and had been depressed and drank heavily after that and was just it changed his personality so she said 13 years earlier he had been electrocuted and fell off a 20-foot pole and then 10 years earlier he was kicked in the head by a quarter horse and he was found unconscious by the barn and so she said you know these injuries really changed his personality caused his disability he suffers memory problems he got real depressed and he normally drank about three six packs a day he got fired from his job um so he's just kind of spiraling and she said I just had to get my daughter out of there but the son had elected to stay with dad so two people living in the house and they're looking for the son because he wasn't at the house and while they were talking to the ex-wife she said well he was in the process of moving out because he had kind of seen this coming and dad was like gonna be evicted soon anyway so he had been slowly moving his stuff out and she said as a matter of fact he went over there on sunday and he moved his gun case and his guns out and that was about three and he got home about oh at least by seven because he was home for dinner and she said she didn't notice anything in his demeanor so they hunted him down and he was very cooperative he let them look at his truck took his guns gave up his phone his clothing he was wearing and he said yeah I went out there at three on sunday I had called him like four times before that telling him I was coming and he said this was my last load and I know I left about four because that's when I called my girlfriend when I was pulling out of the driveway and the cell phone records backed that up but he said when I entered the house I first I couldn't find him and then I found him laying in bed and he was kind of mumbling and slurring his speech and I thought well he's drunk and I don't like him when he's drunk so I'm just gonna get my stuff and get out and so he went upstairs he said and got his guns got his gun cabinet which he had to slide down the steps but he said I finally got it out of the house and he denied seeing any blood in the house at all and left about four o'clock so then on Tuesday the Tuesday the deputies spent the first day completely searching all 30 acres of the farm there's a house a large shed that has a wood shop inside of it there's two horse barns there's six outbuildings so they spent the entire day combing the farm basically and they did interview one of the son's friends who had reported that several months earlier the son had called the friend wanting him to come pick him up at dad's house because he told him he was currently hiding in the bushes on the property and that his dad was mad and drunk and was basically hunting him with a gun and was shooting just into the bushes and into the trees trying to flush him out and the friend decided he wasn't going to be any a part of that so he called the county sheriff at that time anonymously but they figured out who he was and when when they arrived they talked to both the father and the son and they denied that there was any problems so okay there could have been problems it sounds like there probably was maybe just a little bit of instability so they went around the neighboring farms nobody heard any gun shots most of the people that lived around said we really keep a wide berth of that house because he's angry all the time and he didn't appear to have any friends probably his son was his last friend and his son was moving out of the house so the deputies went back to the hospital and said hey you know your stories aren't adding up first of all you know the wound's not right are you sure maybe your son didn't accidentally shoot you and you're not telling us the truth and he was actually being wheeled into another surgery when this conversation was going on and he said yeah my son and I were arguing I don't even know about what but then we went out to a rabbit hunt in the back area and he said it was my fault because I was moving around and I stepped in front of the shot as the sun was tracking a rabbit and fired so he says the sun actually shot him but it was an accident and the deputy kind of said well how far away were you standing and he said oh about 10 feet so it's like well that one doesn't really add up anyway and they took him off to surgery and he basically was in the hospital for the next two months had like eight surgeries total kind of left him alone after that because it's kind of like anytime you talk to him you get a new story so yeah we went from an angry horse to suicide to now rabbit hunting right accident so you've gotten you've gotten three scenarios so far right and like I said the deputies were still thinking you know angry x y angry sun they it could have been a homicide too and that's kind of when I got called in was to come out and help them so I went in there on Wednesday and I was out there for probably about five hours or so and kind of a shed it's a big metal shed it's about 30 by 60 feet overall and there's a woodshop that's kind of self-contained inside that that's about 15 by 30 and when I that like I said the deputies had already been over the entire property so they they hadn't picked up the evidence yet they still had all the markers out and they gave me a tour of everything and then took me to the woodshop because that's where they had decided that the shooting had actually occurred and walking up to the door of the woodshop there is a shotgun hole that has been shot out the wall about oh four feet up and you go into the woodshop and it's your normal woodshop it's not the cleanest of shops but it's pretty orderly in the overall pictures you really don't see any bloodstain you really do have right yeah yeah it's not a mess and you really do have to get in and up close to some of the surfaces to find the blood spatter yeah typical garage like what you would imagine where there's a concrete for some type of floor there's paint stains and other stains all over the place and then now you're talking four days later picking up those bloodstain patterns just not obvious right and this is a woodshop so this is where he finishes furniture so you have stains all over that and but there doesn't really appear to be any sign of cleanup either I mean it's the floor is covered with dust there's a shotgun laying on the floor there's spent shotgun shells on the floor there's I think five of them or six there's actually five other shots that were taken inside so something was happening in there to cause someone to start shooting basically the woodshop up and so I was called in to do the shooting reconstruction along with the blood spatter really won't go into the shots but the blood spatter what I found was there was a impact spatter or forward spatter so forward spatter is what leaves the exit wound and it's traveling in the direction of the force so the shotgun force is shooting it out the exit wound and there is a large spatter pattern on the cement floor right in front of the door as you walk in and it's about two feet wide and about six feet long of large blood spatters and then on the west wall which is where the door is there is another spatter pattern that is basically eight feet high and ten feet in diameter that covers the whole door and wall there and that's just because of the force of the shotgun has created that large pattern but in photographs that's real difficult to see you really need to get in there get up close and inspect things and that's why it's important to take close-up photos so you can reconstruct it and I did do some work on the shotgun because there was actually the small pellets I could use the shape of the pellet spread to also figure out the angle that the shot was fired from and I actually did some stringing it doesn't look pretty in the photos but basically all of the shots come back to the center of the room and that's also where all the spent shell casings are on the floor someone shot out the window put several into the ceiling one into the wall and then it appears that probably the final shot was the one that went into his chest and everything is undisturbed so there's no cleanup and then the next part of the spatter pattern that I start looking for is a trail and given his wound you should be bleeding a lot but I think probably what he did was he pinched his arm down to his side and maybe his hands up over his entry wound on his chest and he's putting enough pressure on that and it's winter too it's February so he's probably got a coat or something on but you can still follow a drip trail out of the woodshed into there's a dirt floor inside the bigger shed so that's a little bit harder to follow in dirt but then you get to snow and you can follow it through the snow until you get to the sidewalk again and then back up to his back door so basically it led on into his house so you have established it through the blood spatter analysis with the trajectory of the shotgun placement and the shot that he left in a walking pattern so again reconstructing all of those other stories right there was no horse in the barn it was impossible but you still haven't ruled out accident right but the shot was close contact so that barrel of that shotgun burned around his wound and then when we get further in and talk about the clothing it also shows a burn mark there so he either held the shotgun himself or somebody else held the shotgun but it was tied against his chest when the shot was fired I made several diagrams to help me visualize things and also to help people who were doing the investigation and so basically I have a diagram of the house that just shows all the basic rooms and all of the evidence that the deputies marked so they they marked a lot of blood evidence that was in there there was heavy bloodstaining in the bedroom there was a trail that led in the back door into the dining room into the living room into the bedroom into the kitchen and then into a laundry room in a bathroom so all over on the main floor no indication of going upstairs or downstairs it appeared that he lived basically on the main floor and that's where that blood trail was now the one of the questions was is that how did the sun show up to move all the stuff out and not see a blood trail and the blood trail is hard to find in parts of the house and if he wasn't paying attention he could kind of walk right by it I think when blood drop hits carpet it wicks down it doesn't form a big stain and if you have a dirty carpet anyway it just looks maybe like coca-cola or something like that some other it could be anything so it'd be real easy for the untrained eye to actually see this in the way that he left the trail was made because there just wasn't a lot of blood burning out of him but if you get into the living room that's where it becomes kind of interesting he's got a big blood saturation stain on his chair that faces the TV in the corner and there's also a drip trail that goes to the TV and back to the chair so it's usual for that guy right so he spent some time in that chair bleeding out he also kicked off his boots and took off a shirt there dropped it on the floor and the boots are dark so you have to get down close to those and light them up but they have spatter all over them and when you lay out the shirt there's an exit wound out the armpit and a lot of blood but again the way it was just laying on the floor is probably kind of normal you know for a teenage boy to just walk on by that and not really see anything when I walked into the bedroom there is a trail that goes in there and heavy blood stains on the bed so somebody bleeding out did spend a lot of time in the bed since that time though they had pulled the sheets off and they were in the washing machine there was a pad that was tossed outside on the stoop and it was heavily bloodstained but even the mattress was still heavily bloodstained there was a white t-shirt on the floor and when we spread that out it had the contact gunshot wound to the chest and then the exit wound out the armpit of that so and just more blood stains on his pillow I don't know if he maybe used that pillow to you know stuff under his arm and put some pressure on it and he had additional spatters on his the front of his jeans that were laying there and all of the heavy bloodstaining was on the left front and then there were some white patterns and so if you have blood on your hands you might wipe the thighs wipe them off on the thighs so that's what is his jeans kind of looked like there another interesting part of it was the kitchen because somebody had spent a lot of time mopping up blood because there was bloody mop marks that covered all the linoleum floor and then they put the mop into the sink and let it sit there so there was bloody water there but then somebody there's another drip trail on top of the mop marks so if someone else had had been there to clean up they didn't do a very good job and they also didn't make sure their their victim was dead yeah but it kind of looks like just from one of the stories he gave he kind of said you know I saw all the blood and I thought about cleaning it up but he didn't start cleaning up till Monday so maybe he did do the mopping himself and put the sheets in the in the washer there's just a lot of kind of strange things that kind of tended to start me on the side of a suicide or an accidental gunshot yeah because the concealment it's not really concealment it's more about like just trying to clean up and you would see on a floor it is just like you're mopping but he's just dripping over it and he probably doesn't recognize you're really on the rug like you said because it's not really detectable especially the condition in the house back to one other point you made I just want to highlight it he's talked about the saturation stains and that is specific because that means the person was there for some time right yes for some time so there is a saturation stain on his tv chair and it's right where his armpit wound would be so it bled out onto the arm of the chair there and then the bed the bed was very heavily bloodstained so he he probably did spend a lot of time there and and he may have thought I'm just going to go crawl in bed and die I don't know but it surprised me woke up the next morning yeah and drove to the doctors it's incredible actually when you see these photos here it should be mentioned too that there's three phones there's one out in the shed and there's one in the kitchen there's one in his bedroom by his bed and none of them have blood stains on him so all of this movement that he's doing there was never a thought of him you know like I'm under duress or I need an ambulance and maybe loss of blood you know kind of he's already got a traumatic brain injury and maybe loss of blood as you know his decision making is not real good at the time but there's a lot of movement after the fact there's a lot of stuff going on that it kind of led me to believe if he had been the victim of a homicide attempt that maybe they would well maybe they should have stuck around you know a little bit longer to see where he was going when he walked out of the the shed and maybe even his urgency would be different right instead of just thinking about medical care the next day yeah maybe seeking at the same day you know I don't know but who knows right there's a lot of alcohol in the house and evidence of previous gunplay right right and and we found his bloodstained underwear in the hamper like I said the bloodstained sheets were in the laundry he had taken a shower and moped in the bathroom but then bled all over again in the bathroom he just couldn't get the bleeding to stop so that's when he finally figured he needed to have some stitches so my final um version of my diagrams is I think it's pretty cool looking it shows all of the blood trails through the house all of the saturation stains on the furniture it shows where the mop marks were so it just gives you an an idea and the mopping would have all happened after the sun had been over if he had shot himself I think it was just before the sun got there and maybe he wanted his son to find him the deputies were still kind of working under the theory that the sun had shot him and I wasn't you know going to interfere with that and they they followed that trail for a while but there was a lot of shooting evidence in the house it looked like they used to go out on the roof and shoot off the roof towards the road so we found shell casings up there one of the things I asked the deputies to do was to go to the hospital because I didn't want him to die and not get some measurements of how long his arm was is it physically possible for him to reach the trigger of the shotgun so I can say anything I want to say about bloodstain patterns but I want to know if it's physically possible so if the shotgun had been at his chest and aimed at his heart and held straight out in front of him he couldn't have reached the trigger with the shotgun that was used but if you move your arm to the side his arm was long enough then so he would have one hand a hold of the barrel and put it on his chest to hold it in place and then the other hand reach out to the side and pull the trigger and that could account for the direction of the wound through the the body and also for the elbow being up at the time and I told this to the deputies and I said or someone came up to him and put the gun into his chest and he turned and then the shot was fired I said but you know what comes afterwards there's no finishing him off there's all of this other activity so did I really answer the question with with the analysis so one thing you can look at is like you said like the blood dripping trail it's pretty plausible right there's not a lot of struggling activity within the house that you might see well even the the blood trail the blood trail from the shed itself is a slow-moving trail and and you can tell that by the shape of those drops too even though they're hitting different types of surfaces the snow versus the cement versus the dirt but it's just a slow-moving trail it's nobody's running they're not being chased they're not running from an altercation they're not running from another shot they're just there's no evidence somebody tackling or salty um and putting brown or anything right there's no disturbance in the dust on the floor there's no disturbance of the spatter on the floor and the spatter is right in front of the door so you know if anybody was going to go down and and have a a wrestling match on the floor they would have shown up yeah yeah there just wasn't any of that it was just after the shot every it just looked like everything stopped and then it was slow motion from there so where is it is the farmer still alive where are we well yeah some of the questions like I said he was he was in the hospital for about 60 days well longer than that he was shot in february he returned home in june unfortunately his workshop where his the shooting happened that burned down unknown cause the following year and then in 2009 is when he had he finally was evicted out of his house and had to move on it is officially classified at this time as a suicide they had polygraphed the son didn't have any triggers there didn't really have any information of anyone else going out there when they went and talked to the daughter she said I haven't seen him in years and his brothers didn't like him I can really see a situation where he was really depressed and a lot of really bad things were happening to him his son was leaving him he had gotten fired he was losing his house like I really lean towards suicide which for a lot of reasons outside of the blood spatter one of my questions that I had still was did occur on sunday or monday because that that changes the timetable too the son wouldn't have been there the cell phone information wouldn't have been there if he shot himself on monday so that is possible could he have lived overnight 24 hours with that massive shotgun wound to his chest but there's clotting and pressure and there's all kinds of things that we're working in his favor so I think we figured out where it happened I think we ticked off you know it wasn't in the horse corral it wasn't outside the wood shed it wasn't you know he didn't get kicked by a horse he didn't get shot hunting rabbits so I think we answered a lot of questions so eliminate a lot of those yeah that's absolutely right and uh it's investigators pulling together all the other information along with your blood stain pattern analysis he may not be purposely telling us lies either I mean some of the stories that he told bits of pieces of these actually happened in his life and he has brain injury and now he has a new injury and so he may have passed out or blacked out even if he was moving around he may have lost part of that memory at that time frame so so that's what happened but he's a tough guy he is a tough guy and live through that is it incredible uh yeah there's uh so looking forward you know this captures a lot of what blood pattern analysis can do for a crime scene right again who is there what were they doing what type of activity what happened at the primary scene versus secondary scene what is your thoughts on how this field has developed you know giving your experience over over the last two months we've got 30 plus years and some of the future uh in some of the research areas and thoughts about where this field could be going back when I took my first basic 40 uh our course which was way back in 1998 I think that basically was the class you could find I mean it was what the experts who had done research and had worked crime scenes had put together and they they had it all formalized and it's pretty close to what they do today but since that time there has been so many smart people much smarter than me with PhDs and physics and mathematics that have been doing research at universities and we've really benefited from this so there are additional advanced training courses out there now and the international bloodstain pattern analyst meeting conferences once a year and that's a week long and experts from the medical field from researchers just so much has has advanced since I first took that 40 hour class and like I said when I took the 40 hour class I was just left with more questions than answers and that's I think a person really has to apply themselves and follow the education and the training um hopefully you can find a a peer that can mentor you you know send your casework to and check your work basically um you know I started as a lowly cop so when I came on that what that was my my goal was just to be a police officer and do good things and I had no idea I would have maybe paid attention more in science classes at college if I knew anything about what I was going into now because I'm playing catch up so yeah and then can you say a little about because you're taking the certification course right or the testing there's standards being developed of course behind all of this and so can you say a little about that and um how that might be impacting the field yeah the international association of identification offers certifications on various forensic fields and blood stain pattern analysis is one to even apply to take that test you have to have 240 hours of training 100 of those have to be specific to blood stain pattern analysis but that is a lot more training than the basic 40 they also require three years of work experience so if an attorney or just a student took the 40 hour class they couldn't hang up a shingle and say I'm an expert you really need to get into a law enforcement agency I think because those are the people that are getting sent out to work the crime scenes and that's the experience you need you need to get into the crime scene and look around and in three dimensions you know you kind of feel what happened when you apply your your training you do have to have a bachelor's degree and there I think there's maybe some other requirements I can tell you that at three years I did not feel like I could pass the test I I um was a detective for 10 years before I tried and passed and also I'm on the certification board now so I assist with making the test now and it is a very difficult test it's a three-part test and you have six hours to take it we currently I think have 52 certified blood stain pattern analysts worldwide not a lot there are a lot more crime scene investigators um certified across the globe but it's an interesting field I'm fascinated by it and read any book and any uh article the OSAC committees organization of scientific area committees for forensic science they have our publishing standards now for blood stain pattern analysts and and I would suggest if you want to see what we're requiring go in there and look at those standards look at the standards for report writing and the standards for a training course and we also have a blood stain pattern bibliography that they put together 2019 that's got over 1300 research articles and books listed there so there are suggested topics for research needs on the OSAC website too so if you're a student and you're looking for something to do some research on go check there the rapidly developing a lot of interest from the scientific community and improving our knowledge around this space so really a lot of positive movement in the right direction well I was going to say um some people find are queasy with blood and I want to tell you as a young officer um I had never seen a dead body before I got hired I had never been to a funeral you know it was all completely new to me but I think maybe that's maybe the way I coped with it was I wanted to know how it happened and I wanted one of the answers and so once I flipped that switch then I was just full bore I want to learn as much as I can um this is part of my job so yeah and really you know to really understand what happened like you said and to serve justice so I mean I think that's the ultimate goal is a fair outcome here this has been a really really interesting uh discussion I want to thank our guest today Aaron Simms for sitting down with just science today thank you very much Aaron oh you're welcome if you enjoyed today's conversation be sure to like and follow Just Science on your podcast platform of choice for more information on today's topic resources in the field of forensic science visit forensic coe.org on my planning this has been another episode of Just Science. Next week Just Science interviews Heather Connor the latent print unit technical leader in Mesa police department's forensic services about the investigation of a grisly murder in Mesa Arizona opinions or points of views expressed in this podcast represent a consensus of the authors and do not necessarily represent the official position or policies of its funding