Who Are You?

Forensics fascinates me. I love how crime scene investigators can solve mysteries by the evidence left behind. Today, my family got to pretend that we were C.S.I.s ourselves.

Big D woke us up early (doesn't he realize this is Spring BREAK?) so we could beat the crowd at the Houston Museum of Natural Science. There they have a C.S.I. exhibit. Three different scenes with their own crime, lab work, & conclusion. We chose Who Got Served? about a waitress named Penny. She was found dead near a trash can behind the Sundancer Motel. She had definitely been run over by a car. But, was that the cause of death? Who killed her? How did she die? And is Penny her real name? All of that was for us to find out! Gil Grissom welcomed all the new recruits and gave us the lay of the land. He warned us how important evidence is and that if it's not in the report, it didn't happen.

We gathered evidence at the crime scene. You can see by our evidence sheets that we have different styles of crime solving. Big D (top left) was meticulous with pictures & words. I (top right) obviously couldn't care less about recording the scene. I was the crime photographer. Lamb (bottom left) didn't draw any pictures. She just wrote where each piece of evidence was found. Bear (bottom right) took Big D's style but used more pictures than words. If you can call those pictures. ;)

After the evidence gathering, we went to the lab where we could "talk" to the experts & research our findings. We needed to find out what information we could gather from her cell phone. What prints, if any, could be found on a torn picture. Which tire tracks from suspects' cars match the tire tracks on the body. Once those were determined, we moved to Lab 2.

At that lab, we needed to find out what drug was in the plastice baggy by Penny's body. How long she had been dead by the growth of the Blow fly larvae found on her body. I did not enjoy that aspect. Who is Penny? We used DNA to confirm her true identity. From there, we moved to the morgue.


Medical Examiner, Dr. Robbins, welcomed us to his domain. We saw cool virtual graphic autopsy. Even the bugs crawling out of her ortifices seemed real. Again, I did not enjoy that 5 seconds of my life. We saw the Y incision and what the organs told him during the autopsy. No worries, it wasn't graphic at all.

We were ready to submit our reports now. Luckily, Grissom wasn't in his office to freak us out as we were writing the reports.

All 4 of us were correct and we are now Rookie Crime Scene Investigators. Grissom is proud, I'm sure.

It was so much fun. We are ready to go back and do the other 2 scenes now! I left out all the pertinent information in case you are able to do this too. I don't want to spoil it for anyone!