San Marcos Record, San Marcos, TX

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  • An FBI agent in San Marcos for a Disaster Fingerprint School at Texas State’s Forensic Anthropology Center, examines a human hand. The agency’s Emergency Response Team works worldwide. Some of the remains used in the course are from people who donated their bodies for forensic research. See story on page 2. (Photo by Anita Miller)

    Focus on forensics
July 29, 2010

FBI specialists get forensics training at Texas State

By Anita Miller News Editor

— Halfway through the demonstration, they needed fresh air.

That’s hardly surprising when the demonstration involves dead body parts.

FBI agents from across the country were in San Marcos on Wednesday, learning techniques of collecting post-mortem fingerprints at the Grady Early Forensic Anthropology Research Laboratory, a part of the Forensic Anthropology Center (FACTS) that also includes the Forensic Anthropology Research Facility (FARF) also known as the “body farm.”

The course teaches the agents “how to recover fingerprints in circumstances that are difficult,” said FACTS Director Dr. Michelle Hamilton, for instance, from a body that is partially decomposed or has been burned or mummified.

Those skills can be used in the wake of manmade or natural disasters where individuals need to be identified. The same techniques can recover the fingerprints of a perpetrator from the body of a victim of homicide.

Other topics included using injections to “plump up” finger tissue for better fingerprinting, hydration techniques to enhance ridge detail and procedures for using chemicals or powders to enhance fingerprints.

Agents attending the class were all members of the FBI Evidence Response Team (ERT), a group that performs its services worldwide. For example, Hamilton said the team visited Indonesia after the 2004 tsunami.

Hamilton said the class is the first of its kind, though FBI agents participated in a mapping/GPS course. “Sometime maybe in the next year we will do an advanced human remains recovery class,” she said.

Hamilton said she has worked with the ERT’s supervisor since she was a student at the University of Tennessee, home of the country’s oldest “body farm.” After FACTS was established two years ago and she was a professor at Texas State, she called her old friend and told him, “we’ve got resources here you can use.”

Some of the remains used in the course are from people all across the country who donated their bodies for forensic research and some of them are from bodies donated to FACTS.

She said after body parts are used for the course, they are sent back to be placed with the rest of the remains.

Hamilton said the relationship with the FBI “is a wonderful opportunity” for students. “We’ve got a student who finished interning with the FBI last summer and a number of students who are thinking about joining the FBI for a career.”

 

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