How To Collect Hair & Fiber Evidence At A Crime Scene

Hi we're at the National Forensic Academy and what we're going to demonstrate now is searching and recovering hairs and fibers whenever you're searching for hairs and fibers, typically you're going to use oblique lighting, like we've discussed in a lot of different at other areas and oblique lighting. You'Re, just using the light at a certain angle and you're searching until you're finding hair most people are getting away from using vacuum cleaners because it pulls up hairs and fibers from long ago, and you want to focus on stuff. That'S happened recently, but using oblique lighting. You can identify the hairs and fibers and just go ahead and collect them accordingly, and how there's a lot of different ways to collect hairs and fibers, make sure you check with your lab to find out what they like best. Two of the most common are just the collection, just putting it in a druggist fold or a pharmacy fold, which is just where you fold it three ways and three ways. What I like to do is have some sort of information on the back of it that you can fill out prior to collecting it or, as you collect it after you collect it and just show where the evidence came from and if you are going to collect It you can use, sometimes you can use forceps to collect it or you can collect it with gloves, just be sure and change between between evidence collection. So, whenever you search for it, you go ahead and find it and just recover it, and what you might want to do just through the whole, like any other thing photograph it where it came from with without scale. If you need this scales are important and go ahead and collect it and put it in the druggist fold. So you can go ahead and see that you have it there and then you're going to carefully fold it over making sure that it doesn't come out as you're folding it, and once you get done folding it, you can go ahead and seal it up right on That open end and it keeps the hair and fiber from coming out another way for hair and fiber collection is just to use a sticky note and all you're doing is collecting a sticky note. I try to use a clean package of sticky notes every time I use this, so you will just use the oblique lighting again find the hair that you're looking for the hair is that you're looking for and whenever you find them. You just use the sticky portion of it. You can place it down on there. It will pick up the hairs and it'll go ahead and hold it in in place. What you don't want to do is is smash the root of the hair, so just be gentle. Whenever you fold it over, you can see the hair through the entire process, so it makes it easier and whenever you get done, you can go ahead and put that inside the drug is fold and you can see the hair right there and just fold it over. So you know that it's virtually impossible to lose at that point, you're going to go through the same process, we'll go ahead and fold it over fill out the information from where you collected it. How you collected it go ahead and seal it up, and then you can just put it inside an envelope whenever you're done you