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Crime & Safety

CSI Holmdel: Summer Camp Unit

St. John Vianney School in Holmdel offered kids ages 11-14 hands-on instruction into criminal investigation.

Ah, the idylls of summer camp: bullet casings, DNA swabs, and blood splatters.

Welcome to CSI Lab & Investigation camp at St. John Vianney Institute of Learning, at St. John's High School in Holmdel, where teacher Kathleen Donohue spent a week teaching 14 campers the science and not-for-the-squeamish details of criminal detective work.

Students got a good overview of the myriad disciplines that encompass criminal investigation, like human biology and the function of DNA in determining suspects, and the chemistry behind testing unknown substances. You need solid communication and meticulous observation skills to conduct proper crime scene protocol, she told them -- contaminated evidence or a shoddy police report will get your case thrown out at trial. And there's an entire sub-specialty dedicated to identifying the bugs that set up shop in a dead body:  forensic entomology.  You need to know that bottle flies arrive sooner than maggots in determining time of death, she said.

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“We always start with instruction,” said Donohue, who teaches middle school science in Marlboro, “and follow up with hands-on activities where the students are actively engaged to apply that knowledge.”

Thus the students got to drop artificial "blood" from different heights to see how it landed, dust for "latent", that is, unseen, fingerprints and bootprints, and conduct a virtual autopsy (after lunch) on the CSI website www.forensics.rice.edu.

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"These kids were excellent," she said, "really smart and ready to learn. It wish that they were my students during the school year."

On the fifth and final day of camp, Detectives Louis Torres and Eric Hernando from the Holmdel Police department gave a PowerPoint lecture, shared first-hand experiences of detective work in the field, and staged a mock crime scene where the students got to use what they'd learned throughout the week to solve the case. At the end, the detectives held a de-briefing session to assess the performance of the student-detectives.

Check out the Viewfinder and find out whether they solved the crime.

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