CSI: Phoenix

They party all afternoon on Friday, the guys in the mid-block rental who installed security bars on every window – the Hispanic guy who pays the rent, a couple of his homeboys, and two Black guys who had never been seen in this neighborhood before.

They drink beer and laugh and play music. Some of the beer bottles end up on the front lawn. They take it indoors as the day gives way to night – into a house furnished only with plastic lawn chairs and a big-screen TV.

The two Black guys won’t live to see the next day.

Some folks in this Northwest Phoenix neighborhood are already in bed, others are watching the 10 o’clock news when they’re startled by the unmistakable sound of trouble: “BAM, BAM, BAM, BAM.”

One neighbor rushes to his front door when he hears the gunshots, and sees a Black man stumbling and collapsing on the street. He runs outside to the dying man, and then hustles inside to call 9-1-1. The call reaches the dispatcher at 10:11 p.m.

Another neighbor peers out of his front window, seeing three Hispanic guys rushing out of the rental so fast that they leave the front door wide open before fleeing in a van.

Another tells his sister in Spanish about the party he saw that afternoon, and asks her to translate for the police, who he knows will arrive any minute.

By 10:15 p.m., the first patrol officers are on the scene. Gingerly, with guns drawn, they enter through the open door of the house. In the kitchen, they find a lifeless man whose hands and wrists are bound with duct tape. The dead man on the street is lying face up. Officers cover him with a plastic yellow tarp, leaving visible only his Timberland work boots (laces loose) and baggy pants. He has duct tape on one wrist, a nasty bloodstain on his shirt, and $13,000 in cash in his pocket.

Officers call for paramedics – standard operating procedure – and radio in a double homicide. The neighborhood is quickly decorated with yellow “crime scene” tape.

By 12:15 a.m. on what is now Saturday, all of the information collected so far has been shared with 16 men and women huddled around the hood of a police car. Some are patrol officers, some are detectives, some are crime scene investigators, one is an assistant county attorney, and one is in charge of the Violent Crimes Bureau. The crime scene team will remain at the scene until 7 a.m., working through a night that gets cold enough to need a coat. They’ll take dozens of photographs of the murder scene.

They’ll measure the scene. They’ll take samples of the blood trail that leads from the back door to the dead man on the street. They’ll use sticky sheets of clear tape to take footprints off the tile floor that leads to the kitchen. They’ll look for gun casings, and dig an embedded bullet out of the kitchen ceiling. They’ll look for anything that might be swabbed for DNA.

They’ll also pick up the 8-oz. Bud Light bottles in the yard – an accessory that’s found at so many homicides, that somebody jokes about how the brewery should include a warning label that says drinking this beer might get you killed in Phoenix.

By the time they are done, they’ll have collected some 60 individual items that tell the story of these murders – the 58th and 59th so far this year in the nation’s fifth largest city. When it’s all tested and analyzed, they’ll know everything about these victims and the men who killed them.

But their experienced eyes have already seen enough clues: “What we have here is a drug deal gone bad.”
Welcome to CSI: PHOENIX.

Mention the popular CBS television series that keeps spawning spin-offs – the original CSI: Crime Scene Investigation, which is set in Las Vegas, was joined by CSI: Miami and CSI: New York – and you get this reaction from the lieutenant who’s in charge of Phoenix’s special crime scene agents: “I hate that show.”

Lieutenant Benny Piña can tick off all the reasons that such shows have created “unrealistic expectations.” “You don’t get the DNA results overnight – that can take weeks or months; you don’t have people leaving a crime scene and processing evidence themselves – those are different jobs; you don’t have one scene you can focus on – we have an average of 20 homicide crime scenes a month.”

And no, he says with a grin on his face, it’s homicide detectives, not crime scene technicians, who find the killers, even if television erases that line.

“Sometimes, that show cracks me up,” says crime scene agent Bill McMahon, who’s been on the job for five years and admits to watching CSI: Miami every now and then. “In one scene, they used a gold vacuum – it’s the best you can get. There are only two gold vacuums in the country, and it can be a $50,000 test. They used it on a nothing case.”

There’s already a term for the unrealistic expectations of the public when it comes to crime: It’s called the “CSI Effect.”

“The jury wants [sophisticated evidence tests] even when it’s superfluous,” says crime scene agent Lanie Finlay. “You’ve got a guy on tape carrying goods out of a store where he’s arrested on the spot, and the jury still wants to see the DNA evidence!”

The show also inflates the expertise of the crew. “What people see on ‘CSI’ shows on television is a crime scene investigator with a minimum of a bachelor’s in science or biology,” Lieutenant Piña says. “Our crime scene agents have a minimum of a high school [diploma], but are trained to collect evidence in homicides.”

Finlay and McMahon both learned the basics of gathering evidence from a 40-hour homicide school sponsored by the Arizona Homicide Investigators Association. Finlay has also taken specific classes on bloodstain- pattern analysis, shoe and tire track impressions, and latent fingerprints. McMahon recently attended an FBI class on gathering evidence from an explosion, and he’s getting ready to go to a class on buried bodies. Everyone attends yearly forensics seminars and monthly sessions with the Medical Examiner’s Office, which are required for the job. If you’re trained in these things, you see through some common TV ploys that are just plain wrong. “Fingerprints don’t change, and you can’t scrape them off or try to alter them,” Finlay says, debunking a favorite TV technique. “Fingerprints go all the way through the skin like solid granite.”

Crime scene agents are always looking for patent fingerprints (those that are obviously visible) and latent prints (those that are not). And, yes, like on television, there’s a computerized identification system against which you can match the prints.

“They get some stuff right on the ‘CSI’ shows, but the biggest liberties are the timelines,” Lieutenant Piña says. “What they’re doing is not even physically possible. If I had an open checkbook and unlimited resources, to do things as fast as they do them would actually take months, instead of just hours or days.”

But Piña does admit that the popular shows are drawing more and more people into the field of forensic science. But the “CSI Effect” is at work there, too. As the Los Angeles Times recently reported, these glamorous shows are luring young people to the field, but once they get there, many are surprised to find out there’s so much “science” in forensic science. Four years of required chemistry is not exactly the image of the trendy investigators who are seen on television.

Finlay just laughs at the thought that she has a “glamorous” job. She recently had to process the scene of a dead man who had “cooked” in a car for days in the middle of an Arizona summer. And most of the time, she says, it’s just tedious work that takes hours and hours. It’s not unusual to spend 10 hours at the scene collecting evidence, and then 40 to 60 hours documenting everything that was done at the scene.

But, as Lieutenant Piña stresses, those who are genuinely turned on by the prospect of the often dirty, always grimy, frequently disgusting job of collecting evidence at a murder scene are welcome to apply.

It’s 10 a.m. on any Wednesday morning, and time for the weekly evidence meeting on the third floor of the Phoenix Police Department – the same floor that homicide detectives call home. There are 11 people in the room, and over the course of the next hour, they’ll go through a half-dozen cases, talking about what evidence was collected, prioritizing its testing, filling in the blanks. The meetings have helped overcome the communication gap that had long been a problem in solving crimes.

“Evidence is listed in order of it being collected,” Lieutenant Piña explains. “If it’s a house, it is from the door in. But No.1 might not be the most important evidence you need tested. Maybe it is No. 85. We needed better communication. Our problem is resources – we have a case load that’s way too taxing.”

In 2004, Phoenix had 234 homicides, among the highest of any city in the nation. Ditto for 2003, when 247 people were murdered. Most of those cases have yet to be solved, and the number keeps climbing in 2005. So far this year, there are already more murders than at this point last year.

Meanwhile, the Crime Lab had 35,807 requests for analysis last year. They completed 27,467, meaning they were 8,340 re-quests behind when the 2005 cases started rolling in. So, it’s meetings like this that keep everyone “on the same page,” Lieutenant Piña explains.

One case that’s discussed at this meeting involves a drive-by shooting on a recent Friday night. There were six victims: four were shot, one died, one was grazed, and one girl lost her liver. It appears the victims just drove by the wrong house looking for a party.

“It looked like a video game, there were so many bullets,” one officer notes.

Police have recovered four weapons, and Lieutenant Piña wants them matched with the shell casings and shotgun pellets collected at the scene – some were found as far away as two houses.

A lab technician asks if there is “any blow-back of blood,” and the answer is no – the shooter wasn’t close enough to the victims. It’s the kind of information that helps determine priorities in testing evidence.

Lieutenant Piña is a Phoenix native who attended Brophy High School, got a bachelor’s at Arizona State University and a master’s at Northern Arizona University. He has spent 16 years with the Phoenix Police Department.

He started out, as all new rookies do, in a patrol car unit of the Squaw Peak Precinct. He earned his sergeant stripes in five years, and finished first in the lieutenant’s test, which got him promoted in 2003. Late last year he became head of the Violent Crimes Unit.

His unit includes 24 homicide detectives and four specially trained “crime scene agents” who collect evidence only at murder scenes. The agents are hired under a Justice Department grant that has allowed Phoenix to upgrade its crime scene investigations. In fact, until the grant went into effect in July 2004, most of the real evidence collection was done by the homicide detectives – who added that labor-intensive chore to everything else they had to do to solve a crime.
Prior to the grant, Phoenix had only “evidence technicians” working out of the Phoenix Crime Lab, but their training was minimal, and the scope of their work was limited. (A scathing city audit last year recommended massive changes to this system, some of which are now underway. In addition, the lab’s 12 crime scene investigators now cover everything but murders.)

Lieutenant Piña took four of the most experienced evidence technicians from the Crime Lab, got them more training, and focused their attention on the particular needs of murder scenes. “Homicide detectives wanted their own crime scene agents, because it frees detectives up to do all of the follow-up work they need to do,” he says.

So, instead of spending hours processing a murder scene, the crime scene agent does that while the detective is tracking down witnesses or following up on license-plate numbers or whatever clues lead toward the killer.

Lieutenant Piña is in the midst of experimenting with a new system – two of his homicide crews have their own crime scene investigators, while two do not. He wants to see which teams are most successful in solving crimes. Although the outcome of the test seems obvious, this is the kind of hard data that folks at the Justice Department or the front office like to have to make changes.

Lieutenant Piña also saw what he says has always been a big problem in solving crimes: the turnaround time it takes evidence to be processed by the Crime Lab (which itself has been criticized by the internal audit that included some 200 recommendations for improvement). He believes his new weekly meetings and better communication will greatly improve the turnaround time.

He feels so strongly about his improvements, that he’s put his own career on the line: In his recent job-performance review, he was asked to name his leadership goals, which would become a benchmark for next year’s review. His goal is to solve a lot more murder cases. Currently, the “clearance rate” is around 35 percent.

He told his supervisors that he wants to get that number up to 60 percent.

The American Heritage Dictionary defines “autopsy” as “the examination of a dead body to determine the cause of death.” It sounds so civilized, but it’s anything but. “Brutal” is a far more accurate word to describe what happens in-side the Maricopa County Medical Examiner’s Office, several hundred times a year.

It’s not an unkind brutality or an uncaring brutality, but there just isn’t a gentle way to get beyond the skin and fat and muscle that give us our worldly appearance.

The two men from the Northwest Phoenix murder scene ended up on an autopsy table here. So does every single homicide in the county. The information their dead bodies give up will become crucial to the case against their killers.

It starts with the “standard ‘Y’ incision,” which looks exactly as it sounds, if you consider the open ends of the Y to be the shoulders, and the long stem to be the centerline of the chest. It happens in a flash – three quick swipes with a scalpel.

There’s not much blood, because there’s no longer a beating heart to push it through the body. What’s there doesn’t gush out, as it would if you scalped a living person. But the blood is still inside the body – it’s just soaked into the tissue.

Dead body tissue cuts exactly like bread dough. With the torso cut open, the skin and fat can easily be peeled away to expose the ribcage. Then, a long-handled tree clipper is used to cut apart the ribs that keep all of the other organs – the lungs and stomach and liver and spleen and guts – caged inside the body. An electric drill is used to cut apart the skull so that the brain can be exposed.

If you’re watching all of this, it helps if you forget that two days ago this was a young man out having Saturday night beers at the local bar. Now he’s a crime scene. Forensic doctor Rebecca Hsu is digging inside his body with her gloved finger to find the bullet that killed him.

He’s just one of those visiting the Medical Examiner’s Office this day. In the coolers, which are kept at 40.8 degrees around the examining room, are 21 body bags. Those in blue are homicide or traffic accidents; those in white are considered “normal deaths.” In the “release cooler,” 17 bodies have already been autopsied and are ready to be released to a funeral home.

The law requires the medical examiner to rule on the death of everyone, but those who die normally, of old age or disease, are examined to be sure there’s no foul play, and then they’re released. They aren’t cut.

But homicides or those who died violently go through the standard autopsy. First the body is photographed in the state in which it arrived – dirty or bloody or whatever. Then the hands are “bagged” in brown paper bags like you’d get at a supermarket. This is done because hands can contain an abundance of evidence – gun residue if there was a shooter; skin from the attacker if there was hand-to-hand combat; smears of food or alcohol or chemicals that might wrap up the case.

Dr. Hsu is wearing green scrubs and a light-blue paper gown. Her hands are in blue rubber gloves; her hair is protected by plastic. Her face is covered with a green-and-white-striped mask with a faceplate similar to what a biker would wear. They call that the “splash mask.” She is wearing an earphone and a microphone and can talk to the police officer who is in the adjoining room, watching everything through a large picture window.

Some officers would rather be inside the actual autopsy room, and they tell this story to explain why: The stomach contents of one victim included french fries with the skins on them, and the officer standing there knew there was one place in the area that served fries like that. As it turned out, that clue led to an arrest. (If it isn’t a true story, it’s a great urban legend.)

Dr. Hsu has a clipboard and a white pen and now begins the process of measuring everything, while her assistant photographs the body. The measurements are made with a blue plastic ruler or a yellow Stanley tape measure.

When that’s completed, one of the assistants squirts Joy dishwashing liquid on a metal examining table. It makes the table slippery so the body moves easier. The body is then washed with a brush hose, and is temporarily draped with blue cotton towels. Next, they photograph the corpse again – the “vanity shot” they call it, taken mainly to show to the family.

This victim was shot at least once, probably twice. Dr. Hsu finds “stippling” around the visible bullet hole – that tells her he was shot at close range, within three feet. She digs into the hole with her gloved hand and finally extracts the full-metal-jacket bullet. Then she inserts a rod into the hole, which helps show the angle at which the victim was shot.

All of this is meticulously recorded before the body is opened up with the standard Y-shaped incision. As each organ is removed, Dr. Hsu slices off a sample that can be tested. The rest of the organ is dumped into a plastic bag that has been positioned between the man’s legs.

“This is usually the part where people have the most trouble,” the officer says as the man’s skull is cut through and his scalp and face are peeled away to get to the brain.

When they’re done, they put his scalp and face back in place, stuff the plastic bag that now contains his organs into his empty chest cavity, and sew him up.

Viewing one autopsy is enough to last anyone a lifetime.

By the time they sort through all of the evidence from the double homicide in the Northwest Phoenix neighborhood, they know exactly what happened. The Black guys drove to Phoenix in a stolen Chevy Tahoe with Indiana plates to make a large drug purchase. They checked into a Day’s End Motel, showing their Indiana identification, before connecting with their local drug dealers. The motel key found in one of their pockets led officers to their motel room.

The house with the security bars is what officers call a “drop house,” or a place where drugs are stored for sale – hence, the lack of real furniture, but a television to while away the hours for someone on guard duty. In-side this house, they find 125 pounds of marijuana, with a street value in Phoenix of $75,000 to $100,000. That same dope on the streets of the Midwest, however, which is where the buyers were headed, could be worth as much as $225,000.

At some point, the hosts of this party decided that they wanted to keep both the drugs and the cash their customers had intended to spend. Lieutenant Piña surmises that their plan was to bind both of the men in duct tape and drive them out into the desert, where they’d be shot and left as just another “body drop.” There’d be nothing to tie them to this drop house or these murderers.

In the kitchen at the back of the house, they managed to get one guy tied up with tape. But, apparently, the man who ended up dead on the street wasn’t about to go quietly. As they tried to tape his wrists, he fought back, pushing away the gun that was pointed at him. The gun went off. The medical examiner found a “defensive wound” on his hand. The bullet passed through his flesh and ended up in the ceiling of the house.

Then he bolted. But he was a big guy, and the only way out from the back yard was through a carport that was already filled with a van. As he wedged past the van, someone shot at him. The bullet didn’t hit him, but it ended up in a cement pillar – a chunk of the pillar broke off and propelled itself into the man’s chest. “At that point, the guy had 35 to 40 seconds left to live,” Lieutenant Piña says.

In those last moments, the guy stumped down the neighbor’s yard and collapsed in the street. His cell phone lay a few yards from him; a trail of blood showed his path. “Cell-phones are how we solve a ton of cases,” Lieutenant Piña says. “Without a doubt, the last person talked to is a suspect.”

Inside the house, the drug dealers no longer had the luxury of their earlier plan – they now had one man dead in plain view and another man hogtied on the kitchen floor. So, they put a couple of bullets into the second guy, and fled so fast they left behind all of the marijuana, and left the front door wide open.

But they also left behind footprints, fingerprints, DNA on beer bottles, and rental records to pinpoint at least one of the killers. Of course, they weren’t the only ones walking around this crime scene.

In addition, there was an entire unit of paramedics. Lani Finlay was the crime scene agent on this case. On that Saturday morning as she started to process the scene, she sighed heavily, thinking of all the footprints that would have to be eliminated before they could get to the ones that mattered. She refers to the firefighters as the “evidence eradication team.”

“Yes, life comes first, but they can ruin a crime scene – they don’t have to all come in, but they do,” she says. In jest, she wonders if she should go by the station house and wake up the paramedics to take imprints of their shoes – she won’t, of course, but she thinks about it. Instead, she waits around until 8 a.m., when their shift is almost over and they’ve already had their breakfast.

Inside the house is a rifle, but tests will show that it isn’t the murder weapon. That will be found in a Phoenix canal weeks later. The evidence found in the house and on the victims will eventually identify both dead men and their accused killers. The accused are still on the run, but Phoenix police are looking for them. Lieutenant Piña wants people to think about this scene when they read about crime statistics.

“Last year, a dozen innocent people who had no involvement in their own deaths were killed in Phoenix. All of the rest were high-risk lifestyles – prostitutes, pimps, drug dealers, illegal smuggling, domestic violence. I make that point, not because every death isn’t bad, but because this is a pretty safe city. If people have concerns about crime running rampant, they shouldn’t.”

Encouraging words from a real cop, not an actor who plays one on TV.