Brian Olahi (25:44)
I mean, a lot of the things I think that people miss are just, just being a police officer, you know, just looking at things and noticing things and watching things and being aware of things around you, you know, and kind of understanding crime and crime scenes from a, you know, just an officer standpoint, you know, responding, being a first responding officer, a lot of securing scenes, you know, because a patrol officer may be the first one there. And what he does or doesn't do can really lead to success at a crime scene. Finding evidence or preserving evidence. And so that, that's important. I think I had that knowledge in that experience. And then my time spent as a detective prepared me for kind of what the job would entail and the kinds of things I would need to obtain at crime scenes. And the. That increased my ability to work with the detectives. Jason Page was also a district detective before he was a crime scene investigator. You know, and I think that gives you a unique perspective. Rather than just going straight into crime scene work, you have a different perspective. You have an investigator's perspective. And, you know, we could talk about the, the CSI effect that you see on tv. And a lot of times on TV you see somebody in a really fancy suit collecting, with really nice shoes, collecting evidence. And I don't, you know, I like Merrell's personally, and I don't have any high heels or, or any patent leather shoes that I wear to crime scenes. But a lot of times on TV, you'll see a detective, and there are places where this is the norm, where a detective walks through a crime scene and tells the crime scene investigator, collect that, do this, you know, dust that, do this. And that's what you see on tv. And I think there are probably some places where it is kind of like that. And then the crime scene investigators, just a collector of stuff, like they don't have any thought into it. They're just doing what they're told. So, I mean, as far as my training with being an officer. All of that got me to the point where I had an idea of what to do and how to do it. But then the specific training is the Indiana Law Enforcement Academy runs a crime scene investigation school. At the time, it was a Lieutenant Kiefer who oversaw the school, but it was predominantly run by state police personnel and in particular Dean Marks. Dean is the. He was, you know, the QA person for state police at that point in time. He was one of the chief trainers, one of the chief reviewers. I think it's important to note that you know state police crime scene cases, the cases that the crime scene investigators write, every one of them is reviewed by a peer in some way, shape or form, whether that's your immediate supervisor or whether that's a randomly chosen set of cases done by the quality analysis team where they review cases. Just check your work and to make sure you're following practice and procedure. We operate at a high level of analysis and peer review within the state police. The school itself is about a four week. It's a four week long school, 40 hours a week. And I went through it with some other state police personnel and several local personnel, local law enforcement and county law enforcement. And then that school is basically a broad overview of almost every area of, of crime scene investigation that you can imagine. It doesn't in no way, shape or form make anyone an expert in any one area, nor does it make them an assertive expert in crime scene investigation in and of itself. What I would say is it makes you capable of documenting scenes and processing scenes in the manner which the state police want them done by policy, procedure and practice. And then you go out and you begin to work kind of with a mentor. Jason Page was my kind of my mentor. He's my working mentor. He started going to scenes with me. I started going to scenes and events with him. And then until such time as you kind of get released on your own to do property crimes by yourself, and then after a period of time when you've proven yourself, you get released to go and do death investigations on your own. So whether that's a suicide or whether that's a homicide or some other death related event, the state police goes to a lot of death events. I mean, I went to a lot of suicides just mainly to, you know, document them and go to a lot of autopsies as, as a crime scene investigator, I mean, a lot of autopsies. In my time in the state police, I probably went to more autopsies than anybody else. A out of the desire to Learn. I never went to an autopsy where I didn't learn something new, you know, and I've worked with pathologists, I've worked with forensic pathologists. You know, some of them are better than others, but, you know, so my training continues each and every day on the job. I mean, you never know what you're going to see or not see or learn or not learn from a scene. Again, it's, you know, it's really Reno911. You never know what kind of crazy stuff you're going to see and what you're going to have to, what trick you're going to have to pull out of the bag or what skill you're going to need to use or even what new skill you're going to have to develop. And what I would say that is not captured on television programs, movies, to the extent that it should be. The primary job of any crime scene investigator is to document what's there. And that documentation is predominantly done with photographs. And if you can't take good quality images of a scene, then you're really not very useful or successful as a crime scene investigator. You know, I was fortunate. Jason Page is, he has a fine arts degree and he was a professional photographer, literally like working with film. And so he has an artist perspective of taking photos. And I learned a lot from taking photos with Jason, just perspective and you know, overall and you know, trying to tie things in. And I always find irony in a lot of photos. Like, you know, sometimes we would take photos just for the irony. I'll give you, I'll give you an example. I had one where a woman was beaten by her niece and this woman was in her 90s. Matter of fact, the pathologist who did the autopsy said, this is the oldest person I've ever done an autopsy on because old people just usually die of natural causes or some, you know, extreme medical event. So they don't get a lot of autopsies on old people. She had been beaten by her 60 some year old niece and they shared a duplex residence. And the old woman had a hospital bed on her first floor where she slept now because she couldn't go up and down the stairs and she was kind of slumped over her bed where her body was found. And on the, it was just outside the kitchen. So in the kitchen was a Christmas photo of the woman who was convicted of her murder with her picture on it. You know, just one of those Christmas cards you send to your family with your picture on it. And I thought, well, that's unique. So I Ended up taking two photos. And I used the, you know, the focal length to put the picture of the woman who was the murder suspect. And that picture's hanging on the fridge in very clear view. And then in the background, grainy and blurry, is the. The deceased woman's body. And then I switched my focal length and I took that picture so that the old woman was now in clear focus and the suspect's picture up close was out of focus. And I thought, you know, those two pictures really tell a story. Like, that's, you know, and Jason taught me to think about things. You know, we present evidence to a court, and whether that court is a judge or whether that's a jury, we're going to present that evidence to them. And that photo, that's a photo that speaks to people, like, people remember those kind of things. So we want to capture things that capture the essence of what's the crime scene is. So, I mean, those are things we think about, you know, when taking pictures and documenting a crime scene. So, I mean, that's a really long answer to a really short question.
