New technology allows investigators to virtually be at crime scene
CINCINNATI OH Feb 28 2020 Technology is moving law enforcement closer to a point that, until now, has only been available in Hollywood.
Virtual reality can now practically make an investigator or a juror an eyewitness to any crime.
When officers arrived at the scene on Christmas Eve on a lonely stretch of highway near Zanesville, they found a wrecked minivan resting quietly on the side of the road. Spencer Shrider was standing next to the wreck apparently uninjured.
Still strapped into the passenger seat, his friend, 22-year-old Sheyallen Herd, was dead.
“There wasn’t a lot of evidence found on the roadway due to the wet surface,” said Ohio State Highway Patrol Sgt. Fred Cook.
It was Cook’s job to gather as much evidence as possible. But instead of taking photos and measuring skid marks and other points of interest with a tape measure, he set up a high-speed, 3D laser scanner. It not only takes photos of the scene, it gathers more than a million measurements in just minutes, creating a 3D model of the scene — a much different process than just a few years prior.
“Tape measures and wheel tapes where we’d come out and measure it all by hand. And we’d take that information we collected by hand and we would go and do a scale diagram that we would also draw out by hand,” Cook said.
OSHP’s Lt. Christopher Kinn combines the 3D scanner data with some video obtained from a nearby surveillance camera and recreates the scene. Along with advances in virtual reality technology, he can virtually put you at the scene as the crash is occurring.
“We’ve taken a jury out to a crash scene, but the car’s not still there. Usually, this is months, years after the crash. There’s no longer skid marks there. Maybe the landscape’s changed. With this, we can take them back there to what that looked like the day and time of the crash,” Kim said.
“In this world of technology and everything you see on TV, the jury is expecting to be able to go to that scene just as if they were there,” Bryce Adams of Trimble Forensics.
Trimble Forensics near Dayton developed the VR software and the 3D scanners that are making science fiction reality for crime scene investigators. And this is going far beyond simply reconstructing crash scenes. Adams, a former sheriff’s deputy, says the technology is helping untangle complex crime scenes.
At Kentucky State Police headquarters in Frankfort, Lt. Hunter Martin mocks-up a crime scene. He uses a drone to gather information. That along with his 3D scanner provides a complete picture of the scene. A vehicle is a distance from the scene. Is it relevant? Investigators can now, months, or even years, later, go back to the scene as if they were there and have measurements accurate to within 2 millimeters. It’s exactly what happened when a man was gunned down in 2016.
It happened at a farmhouse off of a country road in rural Lawrenceburg, Kentucky. The uncle of a KSP trooper was found shot to death. Investigators didn’t know what evidence at the scene that day would be relevant.
“We were able to go back to the laser scan, see where the vehicle was and, lo and behold, take measurements and link that vehicle to the crime that occurred. Ultimately, we found DNA evidence in the vehicle linking the suspect to the crime,” said KSP’s Lt. Hunter Martin, who is on the Critical Incident Response Team.
Gary Luttrel is now serving a life sentence at the Kentucky State Prison. Back in Ohio, Spencer Shrider is serving a five-year sentence for aggravated vehicular homicide. Both men may not have been convicted if it weren’t for the new technology used by investigators. The Herd family says the man who killed Sheyallen going to prison doesn’t take away the pain, but does help a little.
Courts in South America are already allowing jurors to wear virtual reality goggles so they can virtually be at the crime scene. Prosecutors in the United States say courts are slow to adopt that technology.
WKRC
