CSI: Fort Gillem Enclave, Georgia

December is, hands down, the busiest month of the year. Shopping, traveling, and lots of holiday events. I love it!! It does get a little crazy, though. And this year, I added to the hectic month of December by spending a week away from work at the US Army Criminal Investigation Lab for an "introduction to forensics" course. It is basically the real-life version of the forensics lab on NCIS, located at the now-defunct Fort Gillem, Georgia, just a small parcel of federal-borrowed land on the bad side of Atlanta.

The class was very interesting and enlightening. Of course it's not quite like the TV shows - what takes 10 seconds on TV takes weeks of painstaking labor in the real world. But, we learned how crimes are solved with minute fibers of clothing left by a suspect, invisible fingerprints, bare traces of blood, handwriting analysis, etc. The firearms experts showed us how they could tell whether or not a specific bullet was fired out of a specific gun, based on the microscopic imperfections inside the barrel of that weapon. We were shown a huge pressure chamber which depressurizes its interior to the equivalent of outer space, and then uses vaporized gold and zinc to bring out latent fingerprints on a surface. Pretty amazing stuff. And while none of it is a perfect science, I left there wondering how anyone could ever possibly get away with a crime!! It will also help me on the job, since I'll understand the forensic tools behind the investigation much better.

Now I'm back home, and will update this blog shortly with some events of the recent past. I hope you are all getting ready for the holidays and enjoying the season!!!