NORWALK, Conn. Paulina Gomez had a question for a Norwalk Police officer Friday: How do you identify a body if the person has been dead for a while before you find them?
"If you can't do any type of facial recognition stuff then always start with the obvious," Sgt. Arthur Weisgerber said. "I'm going to check for a wallet or paperwork on them, fingerprints."
Weisgerber was at Brien McMahon High School, where juniors in Bob Kane's American literature class studied two murder scenes re-creations from John Steinbeck's book, "Of Mice and Men."
Kane said he was showing them the real-world application of the topics they study geometry, chemistry, biology by giving them a chance to look inside a $200,000 police forensics vehicle and to question four police officers.
In previous years, Kane asked students to debate what charges might be filed against Steinbeck's characters. He thought of the CSI approach when he was tossing around ideas with School Resource Officer Jeremy Salley.
"They're getting a real-life experience," he said. "They're applying fiction to real life, they're seeing the resources that are available to their community, great people that are the police officers who do the work that they do. Selfishly, my father was a state police officer for 25 years, and I sense in the school and in the community that there is a distrust of police officers that I think needs to be addressed. That needs to be certainly stifled."
Salley, who was Kane's student in 1999, brought the CSI unit. Students arranged two CPR dummies behind the school, one in a shed (in the book, the victim was in a barn) and another in a field using makeup to simulate the wounds. This authentically portrayed the deaths in Chapters 5 and 6. Each teen studying the scenes had a clipboard and was required to draw the scenes and ask police three questions, once inside the van.
Paulina didn't wait, questioning Weisgerber outside the shed, wondering how police would determine which gun a bullet came from.
"You've got to get the bullet and the gun, and then they can tell you for sure that it's fired by that gun," he said.
DNA is important, he said, but it's not like a television show. "You can't solve these things in the first 15 minutes," he said. "It takes a while."
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