OC Sheriff's Department Crime Lab Advances Along with Technology

The Orange County Sheriff's Department crime lab in Santa Ana turns 60 this year. Forensic technology has come a long way since the late 1940s, and so has the lab. KPCC Orange County Reporter Susan Valot recently took a tour.

Susan Valot: Wind through the quiet, white corridors of the Orange County Sheriff's Department crime lab, and you come to a machine with a palette of vials.

[Sound of machine]

Valot: This is the first stop for blood and tissue samples – a robotic system that does toxicology testing. It checks for drugs or poisons in the body – let's say, in a methamphetamine case. About 10,000 blood and tissue samples move through here each year.

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A couple of rooms away, forensic scientist Kirk Pareti bakes blood samples in a high-tech oven. The heat releases ethanol and other substances as vapor. After you drink alcohol, you end up with those in your blood. They're key in DUI cases. Pareti says the vapor is injected with helium into a column that's as long as a football field.

Kirk Pareti: The different components in that sample are going to travel through the column at different times. It's gonna take different molecules, different types of molecules, different amounts of time to travel through that column.

Valot: At the end of the column, the molecules emerge grouped together – ethanol with ethanol, acetate with acetate. That lets scientists figure out how much of each is there. It's kind of like scooping up mucky water and letting the sediment settle into layers. In this case, a computer sniffs out what's what and graphs it.

Pareti: That's an ethanol peak there, and that's the peak of our internal standard that we use to dilute the sample.

Valot: We don't settle here too long. A quick elevator ride and we step onto a floor that's a little more reminiscent of CSI... DNA testing.

Dean Gialamas: As we go into this room, because of DNA contamination issues, there's going to be a limit to how far we can go in the room, and I'm going to need all of you to put on a facemask, so I'm going to get some of those...

Valot: Lab Director Dean Gialamas explains that even the air and spit that comes out of our mouths while we talk can ruin a DNA sample. Inside the room, scientists are collecting DNA, blood, and other evidence from guns, blood stains, even bullet holes. Senior forensic scientist Elizabeth Thompson oversees things here.

Elizabeth Thompson: Swabbing the weapons for handled DNA is relatively new. Bloodstain evidence has always been the traditional – blood and semen evidence, but by handling, you know, swabbing these handled items, that's been relatively successful for us in the last couple of years, and it's been one of our newer things, is doing that.

Valot: But each case isn't created equal. I may shed a lot of skin, leaving behind loads of DNA. But you might not shed much at all. But Thompson says the different investigation methods compliment each other.

Thompson: What's good for fingerprints is bad for DNA, and vice versa. So if it's a nice, smooth surface that you're going to get a fingerprint left behind, you're not going to usually get a lot of DNA left behind, but if you've got a rough grip of, say, a handgun, you're not going to be able to really get a fingerprint because of the pattern, but it's a good surface to collect DNA from.

Valot: And to get those fingerprints, when traditional dusting doesn't work, the scientists turn to super glue. The lab's Dean Gialamas calls the technique a "mainstay of forensic science." It's been around more than a decade. Gialamas describes the process as a lab tech works with evidence set inside a container that looks like a fish tank.

Gialamas: What she's doing is she's taking a heat block, a block that's been heated on a hot plate, adding the super glue to it, along with some water in there that's been heated. And you'll see it fume immediately. And those fumes are gonna adhere to the fingerprints that are invisible on that knife, and turn into a permanent white substance on the top of the knife.

Valot: The print's then lifted from that. And if that doesn't work, the sample's sent on to a room glowing with lasers. Seriously! This is one room that looks exactly like something out of CSI. A couple of soda cans and a fake ransom note glow like kryptonite under a fluorescent laser, behind orange Plexiglas.

A chemical process and the laser bring out fingerprints you otherwise wouldn't see. It's all part of technology that didn't exist when the lab opened in 1948. It may not be exactly what you see on TV, but it's what helps detectives catch criminals and crack cold cases in Orange County.