Bloodstains may look gruesome to someone viewing a crime scene but to an investigator the stains reveal clues, students in Southwestern Community College’s CSI West Summer Science Day Camp learned.

During SCC’s week-long CSI: West Summer Science Day Camp June 11-15 students like Naschia Lambert experimented forensic methods of solving crimes. Common substances, even an apple, can look like blood when seen on fabric and even give false positive results on a blood screening test, the Cherokee High School rising junior learned.   From left, Curtis Betz and David Parton measured the velocity of falling blood droplets during a forensic lab experiment at SCC’s week-long CSI :West Summer Science Day Camp June 11-15. The two discovered that in one day blood in their body travels nearly 12,000 miles. “That’s a lot of mileage for six quarts of fluid,” said the Swain County High School students.

"A bloodstain can tell you the force involved in an impact, the location of the victim and even the sequence of events,” Naschia Lambert of Cherokee learned in her lab analysis. A rising junior at Cherokee High School, Lambert attended the camp last year and said she learned so much and had so much fun that’s why she returned this summer.

Her lab partner, Brittany Lossiah, a rising senior at Cherokee, measured the diameter of a bloodstain to tell the distance which the droplet fell.

"Although it looks exactly like it, it is not real blood,” stressed SCC instructor and CSI camp director Dale Hall, who created the non-toxic recipe he found in a forensics magazine. “But still we teach the students to handle it safely and with respect- and that means wearing plastic gloves.”

David Parton, a rising sophomore at Swain County High School, said he had always been interested in forensic science, especially latent evidence and cyber crime. Attending the week-long CSI Camp on the Jackson Campus pretty well cinched his decision to go into cyber crime, said Parton, who just finished solving a simulated chromatography case.

In that case an office employee received a threatening note and contacted the police because he was concerned with his safety. The employee shares an office with two coworkers. Parton said he measured the dilution and separation of ink the note was written with to trace the pen used.

While chromatography, which literally means color drawing, may sound like a complicated word, Parton discovered science isn’t always complicated. In fact, paper chromatography is only a slight adaptation from cleaning the water from your kitchen table with a paper towel, he found. “You can moisten the entire towel by simply placing water in one corner. This is known as capillary action- the same type action that moves water to the tops of trees.”

Wearing their own white lab coats personally monogrammed CSI:West, students said they really felt part of a crime investigation team. Curtis Betz, a rising Swain County High senior taking the camp on the advice of his biology teacher, appreciated choosing the labs he took.

"We’ve had 10 labs all going on at the same time,” said Hall, noting others included analyzing hair for identification, finding hidden fingerprints, determining the source of an explosion, gathering trace evidence from food dyes, testing blood samples, using crystal formations to distinguish drugs and calculating the distance a bullet travels.

###