Mock murder scene brings CSI to Rogers classroom
Posted on Sunday, February 19, 2006
ROGERS - The blood-covered "body"was in the middle of Traci McCormack's classroom at Kirksey Middle School when the teacher returned from the library, she said.
McCormack, who teaches gifted and talented students, took a deep breath and called Rogers Police Department crime scene technician John Langham to help her and her students solve the murder mystery.
The mock murder scene, which included everything from items scattered across the floor to bullet casings and blood spatter, was the culmination of a semester of studying mysteries. The next unit to be studied, McCormack said, is forensic science.
The "body"was a 180-pound dummy formerly used by the Rogers Fire Department for training. The "blood"was a mixture of red food coloring and corn syrup.
The investigative "tools"used by the students, aside from their brains, included fingerprinting, taking DNA samples and matching shell casings to a gun.
But the questions asked and answers sought by the several dozen 11- and 12-year-olds in McCormack's GT classes were often worthy of a real crime scene.
After all, the students had been preparing for an investigation. Each had been assigned a specialty: physics, anthropology, entomology, pathology and psychology were some of the forensic specialties they were allowed to choose from. And they'd been studying and compiling information.
The class, in which the Police Department's Langham has participated before, began with the basics: who, what, when, where and how. But even the basics weren't so easy.
First, Langham told students, a complete inventory, including photographs, had to be taken of the "crime scene."That was the true beginning of the investigation, and if it was messed up, it could destroy any chance of solving the mystery in the future, he said.
Next, the students began the process of establishing a cause - that seemed obvious, there were bullet casings lying on the floor - and the time of death, and, of course, identifying the victim before searching for a killer.
It was clear as the exercise in investigation went on - the class lasted two hours - that the students were having to think, and occasionally, their theories were creative. The theoretical suspect, seen on video in a school hallway in women's clothing, could have been "in disguise, a woman or a crossdresser,"one student said. "My biggest challenge,"McCormack said," has been to convince them to collect all the data and facts before they jump to conclusions."
Langham, too, explained that it's easy to theorize, but a real investigator must rely on the evidence. "What you have to do is stop your mind from running because you have a lot of ideas right now,"Langham said. Limit yourselves to the facts you can establish, he said.
Though the class was billed as a CSI-type exercise, it was a bit more like unsolved mysteries. "We're conditioned to want to have an answer,"McCormack told her students. "Better yet, we want that conclusion in one hour." "Investigations take time - weeks, months, years,"Langham said.
And the class project, like reality, produced no solution to the mystery of who killed the dummy in McCormack's GT classroom.
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