Published: April 25, 2006 03:20 pm            

One hot ride

WVU forensic students get first-hand arson experience

STAR CITY, W. Va. — Locked inside the charred trunk of mid-80s Ford Tempo, Jeff Ronosky finds a small, fire-blackened handgun.

“That would be the gun, wouldn’t it?” he said as he held it up with his gloved hand, for everyone to see.

“Let’s take some samples from the trunk and from the front and back seats,” Suzanne Bell announced to her team. Using a shovel, they dug soaked debris out of what’s left of the car, still smoldering, and place it in metal cans.

“The chemists will take some samples back for analysis,” she said earlier.

Though it might look and sound like a real crime scene -- it’s not. Professors in WVU University’s forensics and investigative sciences program torched the car so their students could learn about arson first-hand.

“Several of us have worked in crime labs before, we try to make it as realistic as we can,” Bell a forensic chemistry professor at WVU said. Her team is made of students from her class, one of several participating in the exercise at the state fire training academy in Star City.

“We set this up as a crime scene, we put some dummy materials inside. A firearm, a manikin in the front, some clothes,” she said.

The exercise is particularly helpful to students like Ronosky who’ll participate in forensic reconstruction, according to Bell, because they were able to see the scene develop.

Another one of those students is Jessica McClintick, a senior forensics major from Charleston. She’s in the school’s investigative track, and hopes to be working in crime scenes one day.

Overall, McClintick said she thinks “it’s a really good program, each year they improve it so much. And it’s a changing field, there’s always new technology to work with.”

“It’s the real life situations like this one that they try to put us in,” she said.

The car was a gift to the forensic program about six-years ago, according to the school. Recently, all its windows were broken out in a real-life vandalism in Evansdale, according to Jim Bissett, a school spokesman. He noted that vandalising a car looked-after by future crime scene investigators may not have been the smartest idea.

“These guys were all over it,” Bissett said. “They took it personally. They’ve really started to take ownership in their program.”

E-mail Justin McLaughlin at jmclaughlin@timeswv.com.

        

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