They party all afternoon on
Friday, the guys in the mid-block rental who installed security bars
on every window - the Hispanic guy who pays the rent, a couple of
his homeboys, and two Black guys who had never been seen in this
neighborhood before.
They drink beer and laugh and play music. Some of the beer bottles
end up on the front lawn. They take it indoors as the day gives way
to night - into a house furnished only with plastic lawn chairs and
a big-screen TV.
The two Black guys won't live to see the next day.
Some folks in this Northwest Phoenix neighborhood are already in
bed, others are watching the 10 o'clock news when they're startled
by the unmistakable sound of trouble: "BAM, BAM, BAM, BAM."
One neighbor rushes to his front door when he hears the gunshots,
and sees a Black man stumbling and collapsing on the street. He runs
outside to the dying man, and then hustles inside to call 9-1-1. The
call reaches the dispatcher at 10:11 p.m.
Another neighbor peers out of his front window, seeing three
Hispanic guys rushing out of the rental so fast that they leave the
front door wide open before fleeing in a van.
Another tells his sister in Spanish about the party he saw that
afternoon, and asks her to translate for the police, who he knows
will arrive any minute.
By 10:15 p.m., the first patrol officers are on the scene. Gingerly,
with guns drawn, they enter through the open door of the house. In
the kitchen, they find a lifeless man whose hands and wrists are
bound with duct tape. The dead man on the street is lying face up.
Officers cover him with a plastic yellow tarp, leaving visible only
his Timberland work boots (laces loose) and baggy pants. He has duct
tape on one wrist, a nasty bloodstain on his shirt, and $13,000 in
cash in his pocket.
Officers call for paramedics - standard operating procedure - and
radio in a double homicide. The neighborhood is quickly decorated
with yellow "crime scene" tape.
By 12:15 a.m. on what is now Saturday, all of the information
collected so far has been shared with 16 men and women huddled
around the hood of a police car. Some are patrol officers, some are
detectives, some are crime scene investigators, one is an assistant
county attorney, and one is in charge of the Violent Crimes Bureau.
The crime scene team will remain at the scene until 7 a.m., working
through a night that gets cold enough to need a coat. They'll take
dozens of photographs of the murder scene.
They'll measure the scene. They'll take samples of the blood trail
that leads from the back door to the dead man on the street. They'll
use sticky sheets of clear tape to take footprints off the tile
floor that leads to the kitchen. They'll look for gun casings, and
dig an embedded bullet out of the kitchen ceiling. They'll look for
anything that might be swabbed for DNA.
They'll also pick up the 8-oz. Bud Light bottles in the yard - an
accessory that's found at so many homicides, that somebody jokes
about how the brewery should include a warning label that says
drinking this beer might get you killed in Phoenix.
By the time they are done, they'll have collected some 60 individual
items that tell the story of these murders - the 58th and 59th so
far this year in the nation's fifth largest city. When it's all
tested and analyzed, they'll know everything about these victims and
the men who killed them.
But their experienced eyes have already seen enough clues: "What we
have here is a drug deal gone bad."
Welcome to CSI: PHOENIX.
Mention the popular CBS
television series that keeps spawning spin-offs - the original CSI:
Crime Scene Investigation, which is set in Las Vegas, was joined by
CSI: Miami and CSI: New York - and you get this reaction from the
lieutenant who's in charge of Phoenix's special crime scene agents:
"I hate that show."
Lieutenant Benny Piña can tick off all the reasons that such shows
have created "unrealistic expectations." "You don't get the DNA
results overnight - that can take weeks or months; you don't have
people leaving a crime scene and processing evidence themselves -
those are different jobs; you don't have one scene you can focus on
- we have an average of 20 homicide crime scenes a month."
And no, he says with a grin on his face, it's homicide detectives,
not crime scene technicians, who find the killers, even if
television erases that line.
"Sometimes, that show cracks me up," says crime scene agent Bill
McMahon, who's been on the job for five years and admits to watching
CSI: Miami every now and then. "In one scene, they used a gold
vacuum - it's the best you can get. There are only two gold vacuums
in the country, and it can be a $50,000 test. They used it on a
nothing case."
There's already a term for the unrealistic expectations of the
public when it comes to crime: It's called the "CSI Effect."
"The jury wants [sophisticated evidence tests] even when it's
superfluous," says crime scene agent Lanie Finlay. "You've got a guy
on tape carrying goods out of a store where he's arrested on the
spot, and the jury still wants to see the DNA evidence!"
The show also inflates the expertise of the crew. "What people see
on 'CSI' shows on television is a crime scene investigator with a
minimum of a bachelor's in science or biology," Lieutenant Piña
says. "Our crime scene agents have a minimum of a high school
[diploma], but are trained to collect evidence in homicides."
Finlay and McMahon both learned the basics of gathering evidence
from a 40-hour homicide school sponsored by the Arizona Homicide
Investigators Association. Finlay has also taken specific classes on
bloodstain- pattern analysis, shoe and tire track impressions, and
latent fingerprints. McMahon recently attended an FBI class on
gathering evidence from an explosion, and he's getting ready to go
to a class on buried bodies. Everyone attends yearly forensics
seminars and monthly sessions with the Medical Examiner's Office,
which are required for the job. If you're trained in these things,
you see through some common TV ploys that are just plain wrong.
"Fingerprints don't change, and you can't scrape them off or try to
alter them," Finlay says, debunking a favorite TV technique.
"Fingerprints go all the way through the skin like solid granite."
Crime scene agents are always looking for patent fingerprints (those
that are obviously visible) and latent prints (those that are not).
And, yes, like on television, there's a computerized identification
system against which you can match the prints.
"They get some stuff right on the 'CSI' shows, but the biggest
liberties are the timelines," Lieutenant Piña says. "What they're
doing is not even physically possible. If I had an open checkbook
and unlimited resources, to do things as fast as they do them would
actually take months, instead of just hours or days."
But Piña does admit that the popular shows are drawing more and more
people into the field of forensic science. But the "CSI Effect" is
at work there, too. As the Los Angeles Times recently reported,
these glamorous shows are luring young people to the field, but once
they get there, many are surprised to find out there's so much
"science" in forensic science. Four years of required chemistry is
not exactly the image of the trendy investigators who are seen on
television.
Finlay just laughs at the thought that she has a "glamorous" job.
She recently had to process the scene of a dead man who had "cooked"
in a car for days in the middle of an Arizona summer. And most of
the time, she says, it's just tedious work that takes hours and
hours. It's not unusual to spend 10 hours at the scene collecting
evidence, and then 40 to 60 hours documenting everything that was
done at the scene.
But, as Lieutenant Piña stresses, those who are genuinely turned on
by the prospect of the often dirty, always grimy, frequently
disgusting job of collecting evidence at a murder scene are welcome
to apply.
It's 10 a.m. on any Wednesday
morning, and time for the weekly evidence meeting on the third floor
of the Phoenix Police Department - the same floor that homicide
detectives call home. There are 11 people in the room, and over the
course of the next hour, they'll go through a half-dozen cases,
talking about what evidence was collected, prioritizing its testing,
filling in the blanks. The meetings have helped overcome the
communication gap that had long been a problem in solving crimes.
"Evidence is listed in order of it being collected," Lieutenant Piña
explains. "If it's a house, it is from the door in. But No.1 might
not be the most important evidence you need tested. Maybe it is No.
85. We needed better communication. Our problem is resources - we
have a case load that's way too taxing."
In 2004, Phoenix had 234 homicides, among the highest of any city in
the nation. Ditto for 2003, when 247 people were murdered. Most of
those cases have yet to be solved, and the number keeps climbing in
2005. So far this year, there are already more murders than at this
point last year.
Meanwhile, the Crime Lab had 35,807 requests for analysis last year.
They completed 27,467, meaning they were 8,340 re-quests behind when
the 2005 cases started rolling in. So, it's meetings like this that
keep everyone "on the same page," Lieutenant Piña explains.
One case that's discussed at this meeting involves a drive-by
shooting on a recent Friday night. There were six victims: four were
shot, one died, one was grazed, and one girl lost her liver. It
appears the victims just drove by the wrong house looking for a
party.
"It looked like a video game, there were so many bullets," one
officer notes.
Police have recovered four weapons, and Lieutenant Piña wants them
matched with the shell casings and shotgun pellets collected at the
scene - some were found as far away as two houses.
A lab technician asks if there is "any blow-back of blood," and the
answer is no - the shooter wasn't close enough to the victims. It's
the kind of information that helps determine priorities in testing
evidence.
Lieutenant Piña is a Phoenix
native who attended Brophy High School, got a bachelor's at Arizona
State University and a master's at Northern Arizona University. He
has spent 16 years with the Phoenix Police Department.
He started out, as all new rookies do, in a patrol car unit of the
Squaw Peak Precinct. He earned his sergeant stripes in five years,
and finished first in the lieutenant's test, which got him promoted
in 2003. Late last year he became head of the Violent Crimes Unit.
His unit includes 24 homicide detectives and four specially trained
"crime scene agents" who collect evidence only at murder scenes. The
agents are hired under a Justice Department grant that has allowed
Phoenix to upgrade its crime scene investigations. In fact, until
the grant went into effect in July 2004, most of the real evidence
collection was done by the homicide detectives - who added that
labor-intensive chore to everything else they had to do to solve a
crime.
Prior to the grant, Phoenix had only "evidence technicians" working
out of the Phoenix Crime Lab, but their training was minimal, and
the scope of their work was limited. (A scathing city audit last
year recommended massive changes to this system, some of which are
now underway. In addition, the lab's 12 crime scene investigators
now cover everything but murders.)
Lieutenant Piña took four of the most experienced evidence
technicians from the Crime Lab, got them more training, and focused
their attention on the particular needs of murder scenes. "Homicide
detectives wanted their own crime scene agents, because it frees
detectives up to do all of the follow-up work they need to do," he
says.
So, instead of spending hours processing a murder scene, the crime
scene agent does that while the detective is tracking down witnesses
or following up on license-plate numbers or whatever clues lead
toward the killer.
Lieutenant Piña is in the midst of experimenting with a new system -
two of his homicide crews have their own crime scene investigators,
while two do not. He wants to see which teams are most successful in
solving crimes. Although the outcome of the test seems obvious, this
is the kind of hard data that folks at the Justice Department or the
front office like to have to make changes.
Lieutenant Piña also saw what he says has always been a big problem
in solving crimes: the turnaround time it takes evidence to be
processed by the Crime Lab (which itself has been criticized by the
internal audit that included some 200 recommendations for
improvement). He believes his new weekly meetings and better
communication will greatly improve the turnaround time.
He feels so strongly about his improvements, that he's put his own
career on the line: In his recent job-performance review, he was
asked to name his leadership goals, which would become a benchmark
for next year's review. His goal is to solve a lot more murder
cases. Currently, the "clearance rate" is around 35 percent.
He told his supervisors that he wants to get that number up to 60
percent.
The American Heritage
Dictionary defines "autopsy" as "the examination of a dead body
to determine the cause of death." It sounds so civilized, but it's
anything but. "Brutal" is a far more accurate word to describe what
happens in-side the Maricopa County Medical Examiner's Office,
several hundred times a year.
It's not an unkind brutality or an uncaring brutality, but there
just isn't a gentle way to get beyond the skin and fat and muscle
that give us our worldly appearance.
The two men from the Northwest Phoenix murder scene ended up on an
autopsy table here. So does every single homicide in the county. The
information their dead bodies give up will become crucial to the
case against their killers.
It starts with the "standard 'Y' incision," which looks exactly as
it sounds, if you consider the open ends of the Y to be the
shoulders, and the long stem to be the centerline of the chest. It
happens in a flash - three quick swipes with a scalpel.
There's not much blood, because there's no longer a beating heart to
push it through the body. What's there doesn't gush out, as it would
if you scalped a living person. But the blood is still inside the
body - it's just soaked into the tissue.
Dead body tissue cuts exactly like bread dough. With the torso cut
open, the skin and fat can easily be peeled away to expose the
ribcage. Then, a long-handled tree clipper is used to cut apart the
ribs that keep all of the other organs - the lungs and stomach and
liver and spleen and guts - caged inside the body. An electric drill
is used to cut apart the skull so that the brain can be exposed.
If you're watching all of this, it helps if you forget that two days
ago this was a young man out having Saturday night beers at the
local bar. Now he's a crime scene. Forensic doctor Rebecca Hsu is
digging inside his body with her gloved finger to find the bullet
that killed him.
He's just one of those visiting the Medical Examiner's Office this
day. In the coolers, which are kept at 40.8 degrees around the
examining room, are 21 body bags. Those in blue are homicide or
traffic accidents; those in white are considered "normal deaths." In
the "release cooler," 17 bodies have already been autopsied and are
ready to be released to a funeral home.
The law requires the medical examiner to rule on the death of
everyone, but those who die normally, of old age or disease, are
examined to be sure there's no foul play, and then they're released.
They aren't cut.
But homicides or those who died violently go through the standard
autopsy. First the body is photographed in the state in which it
arrived - dirty or bloody or whatever. Then the hands are "bagged"
in brown paper bags like you'd get at a supermarket. This is done
because hands can contain an abundance of evidence - gun residue if
there was a shooter; skin from the attacker if there was
hand-to-hand combat; smears of food or alcohol or chemicals that
might wrap up the case.
Dr. Hsu is wearing green scrubs and a light-blue paper gown. Her
hands are in blue rubber gloves; her hair is protected by plastic.
Her face is covered with a green-and-white-striped mask with a
faceplate similar to what a biker would wear. They call that the
"splash mask." She is wearing an earphone and a microphone and can
talk to the police officer who is in the adjoining room, watching
everything through a large picture window.
Some officers would rather be inside the actual autopsy room, and
they tell this story to explain why: The stomach contents of one
victim included french fries with the skins on them, and the officer
standing there knew there was one place in the area that served
fries like that. As it turned out, that clue led to an arrest. (If
it isn't a true story, it's a great urban legend.)
Dr. Hsu has a clipboard and a white pen and now begins the process
of measuring everything, while her assistant photographs the body.
The measurements are made with a blue plastic ruler or a yellow
Stanley tape measure.
When that's completed, one of the assistants squirts Joy dishwashing
liquid on a metal examining table. It makes the table slippery so
the body moves easier. The body is then washed with a brush hose,
and is temporarily draped with blue cotton towels. Next, they
photograph the corpse again - the "vanity shot" they call it, taken
mainly to show to the family.
This victim was shot at least once, probably twice. Dr. Hsu finds
"stippling" around the visible bullet hole - that tells her he was
shot at close range, within three feet. She digs into the hole with
her gloved hand and finally extracts the full-metal-jacket bullet.
Then she inserts a rod into the hole, which helps show the angle at
which the victim was shot.
All of this is meticulously recorded before the body is opened up
with the standard Y-shaped incision. As each organ is removed, Dr.
Hsu slices off a sample that can be tested. The rest of the organ is
dumped into a plastic bag that has been positioned between the man's
legs.
"This is usually the part where people have the most trouble," the
officer says as the man's skull is cut through and his scalp and
face are peeled away to get to the brain.
When they're done, they put his scalp and face back in place, stuff
the plastic bag that now contains his organs into his empty chest
cavity, and sew him up.
Viewing one autopsy is enough to last anyone a lifetime.
By the time they sort through
all of the evidence from the double homicide in the Northwest
Phoenix neighborhood, they know exactly what happened. The Black
guys drove to Phoenix in a stolen Chevy Tahoe with Indiana plates to
make a large drug purchase. They checked into a Day's End Motel,
showing their Indiana identification, before connecting with their
local drug dealers. The motel key found in one of their pockets led
officers to their motel room.
The house with the security bars is what officers call a "drop
house," or a place where drugs are stored for sale - hence, the lack
of real furniture, but a television to while away the hours for
someone on guard duty. In-side this house, they find 125 pounds of
marijuana, with a street value in Phoenix of $75,000 to $100,000.
That same dope on the streets of the Midwest, however, which is
where the buyers were headed, could be worth as much as $225,000.
At some point, the hosts of this party decided that they wanted to
keep both the drugs and the cash their customers had intended to
spend. Lieutenant Piña surmises that their plan was to bind both of
the men in duct tape and drive them out into the desert, where
they'd be shot and left as just another "body drop." There'd be
nothing to tie them to this drop house or these murderers.
In the kitchen at the back of the house, they managed to get one guy
tied up with tape. But, apparently, the man who ended up dead on the
street wasn't about to go quietly. As they tried to tape his wrists,
he fought back, pushing away the gun that was pointed at him. The
gun went off. The medical examiner found a "defensive wound" on his
hand. The bullet passed through his flesh and ended up in the
ceiling of the house.
Then he bolted. But he was a big guy, and the only way out from the
back yard was through a carport that was already filled with a van.
As he wedged past the van, someone shot at him. The bullet didn't
hit him, but it ended up in a cement pillar - a chunk of the pillar
broke off and propelled itself into the man's chest. "At that point,
the guy had 35 to 40 seconds left to live," Lieutenant Piña says.
In those last moments, the guy stumped down the neighbor's yard and
collapsed in the street. His cell phone lay a few yards from him; a
trail of blood showed his path. "Cell-phones are how we solve a ton
of cases," Lieutenant Piña says. "Without a doubt, the last person
talked to is a suspect."
Inside the house, the drug dealers no longer had the luxury of their
earlier plan - they now had one man dead in plain view and another
man hogtied on the kitchen floor. So, they put a couple of bullets
into the second guy, and fled so fast they left behind all of the
marijuana, and left the front door wide open.
But they also left behind footprints, fingerprints, DNA on beer
bottles, and rental records to pinpoint at least one of the killers.
Of course, they weren't the only ones walking around this crime
scene.
In addition, there was an entire unit of paramedics. Lani Finlay was
the crime scene agent on this case. On that Saturday morning as she
started to process the scene, she sighed heavily, thinking of all
the footprints that would have to be eliminated before they could
get to the ones that mattered. She refers to the firefighters as the
"evidence eradication team."
"Yes, life comes first, but they can ruin a crime scene - they don't
have to all come in, but they do," she says. In jest, she wonders if
she should go by the station house and wake up the paramedics to
take imprints of their shoes - she won't, of course, but she thinks
about it. Instead, she waits around until 8 a.m., when their shift
is almost over and they've already had their breakfast.
Inside the house is a rifle, but tests will show that it isn't the
murder weapon. That will be found in a Phoenix canal weeks later.
The evidence found in the house and on the victims will eventually
identify both dead men and their accused killers. The accused are
still on the run, but Phoenix police are looking for them.
Lieutenant Piña wants people to think about this scene when they
read about crime statistics.
"Last year, a dozen innocent people who had no involvement in their
own deaths were killed in Phoenix. All of the rest were high-risk
lifestyles - prostitutes, pimps, drug dealers, illegal smuggling,
domestic violence. I make that point, not because every death isn't
bad, but because this is a pretty safe city. If people have concerns
about crime running rampant, they shouldn't."
Encouraging words from a real cop, not an actor who plays one on TV.
|
CSI: Phoenix
solves the Murder of One of Its Own
It used to be rare to pick up the newspaper and read about a
police officer being a homicide victim in Arizona's capital
city. The first Phoenix officer killed in the line of duty was
Haze Burch back in 1925 - his son, by the way, would
eventually become the city's leading zoning attorney in
Phoenix's big growth spurt of the 1970s.
It took 27 years for another officer to be killed - Walter
Stewart in 1952. And then another 18 years for the city to
mourn the third and fourth officers to die in the line of duty
- Albert Bluhm and Dale Stone, who were killed together in
1970.
Since 1970, 27 officers have died. The latest, Officer David
Uribe, died in the course of researching the accompanying
story (CSI: PHOENIX).
Lieutenant Benny Piña, who heads the local crime scene unit,
is proud of how thorough and successful his team was in
finding the accused killers and taking them into custody.
Officer Uribe was shot to death in the street on what should
have been a routine vehicle check about 11 a.m. on a Tuesday
morning in May. The getaway car was found several blocks away.
By 4 a.m. the next day, police had identified the suspects,
and could "put them in the car" at the time of the murder. The
next day, they were arrested.
Of course, the entire Phoenix Police Department sprang into
action at the news of Officer Uribe's killing, but it was
Lieutenant Piña's unit that was front and center.
Crime scene agent Lanie Finlay worked with a detective at the
site of the shooting, while another crew started collecting
evidence from the abandoned car, and a third was in the police
helicopter photographing the vast crime scene.
They went over the car thoroughly before towing it to an
underground basement at police headquarters. From their first
tests, they lifted fingerprints and a nearly perfect bullet
that was lodged in the tire well - apparently shot there as
the suspects tried to blow up the car by shooting into what
they thought was the gas tank. Most importantly, the crime
scene team found a timed restaurant receipt from a local
Denny's. From surveillance tapes at the restaurant, they were
able to match the receipt to a photo of two men - by that
evening's television newscasts, those pictures were being
broadcast throughout Arizona.
In the garage, they "vapored" the car - when a super-glue-like
chemical is heated, it becomes a vapor that fixes itself to
latent fingerprints. Investigators found dozens of prints.
Meanwhile, Lieutenant Piña set up phone banks, working with
Silent Witness and the 9-1-1 operators. Calls that sounded
promising were put on a "hot" list. Others were put on the
"things to get to" list. One message on the "get to" list was
a woman who'd called to say that she saw two sweaty men with
tattoos sitting in a café waiting for a ride not long after
the murder. Her tip went onto the "hot" list after officers
watched the Denny's video and noted the tattoos on the
suspects. That witness eventually picked the suspects out of a
lineup, and the person who provided their getaway ride from
the café.
At press time, the case was still pending. |
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