Assignment:
Directions: Answer each of the following questions as thoroughly as possible. After completing your crime scene sketch, please take a picture with your cell phone or other camera and upload it when turning in your assignment.
1. When arriving on scene, what would you do to ensure that the scene is safe to enter and why?
2. Explain the need for the preliminary survey and why is it important concerning the integrity of the evidence?
3. Explain how you would document a crime scene through photography of an inside room, and then of a vehicle.
4. Complete a crime scene sketch using the following information and instructions:
a. Before collecting evidence, before moving the corpse, before any other action can be taken, you must prepare a complete and accurate record of the crime scene. This includes documentation of the location of all evidence (from the body of a victim to tiny blood drops on a wall) as well as a written account of the crime scene. The primary record is NOTES and a crime scene sketch. The secondary record are photographs.
b. Instructions: You are part of the CSU team that has just been called to 875 South Bundy Drive in the Brentwood area of Los Angeles, California. It is 12:15 AM on Saturday June 12, 2020. Your job is to take all of the information contained in the rough sketch and create a finished sketch that can be presented as evidence in court.
c. Note the following:
The diagram establishes permanent record of items, conditions, and distance/size relationships - diagrams supplement photographs.
Rough sketch is drawn at scene (normally not drawn to scale) and is used as a model for finished sketch.
All of the following should be found on the finished sketch:
Title containing:
o Specific location of the scene (street address)
o Date of the crime
o Time (approximate time crime was committed)
o Case Number
o Your Name the Artist)
o Weather conditions (raining, clear, windy)
o Lighting conditions (bright sunlight, dark moonless night, lamps turned on/off)
Key containing:
o Scale (EX 1 inch = 4.5 feet)
o Compass orientation with North indicated
o Evidence (exact locations and conditions where each piece of observable evidence was found)
Number and Description of each piece of evidence
• Distances from fixed objects to locations of body, or other evidence.
• Evidence should be numbered on sketch.
How you complete the sketch:
Draw the basic perimeter (outer limits of the entire crime scene)
Diagram fixed objects first such as furniture, walls, gates, etc.
Indicate position of each item of evidence (in relation to fixed objects like walls)
Indicate distances of each item of evidence from fixed objects.
A title area at top with Case Number, Address, Date, Conditions should be located at the top of sketch.
Include a key with all evidence numbered and identified.
A compass orientation indicating North
CRIME SCENE DESCRIPTION/NOTES:
It was late on this foggy Sunday evening, June 12, 1994. A woman, who lived across the street, heard a dog barking, and when she looked out of her window, she saw the dog, a white Akita, pacing up and down outside the front of 875 South Bundy Drive. The dog was barking and trotting up and down in an agitated manner. The dog dragged the neighbor back to number 875, where it stopped and gazed down a dim, tree-shaded pathway. Following the dog's stare, she saw a shape of someone lying at the foot of some steps, part of the body sprawled under an iron fence.
The first officer on the scene was mainly concerned about not stepping in a small lake of blood as he proceeded up the tiled walkway where he reached the first body, which lay about 15 feet from the street sidewalk. It was a woman, sprawled face down, left cheek pressing into the ground, her right leg jack-knifed under the gate frame to the left and her buttocks pressed up against the first riser of the four steps that led up to the path leading to the front door of the condominium. She was wearing a short black dress, drenched in the blood that had poured out of wounds to her upper body and throat.
To her right, just beyond an agapanthus bush in a small garden off the walkway, lay the body of a man. He was crumpled over on his right side, sprawled against a garden fence. His eyes were open and his light brown shirt and blue jeans were saturated in blood. There was a set of keys, a dark blue knit cap, a beeper, a blood-spattered white envelope and a bloodstained left hand leather glove lying under the agapanthus plant in the small garden to the left of the pathway only a few inches from woman's body.
There was a trail of bloody footprints leading away from both bodies going back to the entrance door. At the upper end of the path the back of the property and alongside the footprints, drops of blood were trailing in the same direction.
Attachment:- Crime scene sketch.rar