Crime scenes often unite investigators from different agencies, for example the Ohio Attorney General’s Bureau of Criminal Investigation (BCI) and the State Fire Marshal’s Office.
Investigators for the State Fire Marshal focus on the origin and cause of fires and explosions, said Chad Wissinger, chief of the Fire Marshal’s forensic Lab. But often, arsons and explosions are intertwined with other crimes — such as homicides and illegal drug manufacturing, which concern BCI.
Evidence collected by Fire Marshal’s investigators is sent to the State Fire Marshal’s Forensic laboratory in Reynoldsburg. The lab also accepts, and processes, at no cost to the requesting agency, fire and explosion evidence collected by fire departments, law enforcement, government agencies, and coroners.
The Fire Marshal’s Forensic Lab is accredited by ASCLD-LAB International Program in the disciplines of trace evidence, which includes fire debris, explosives, and unknown chemicals; latent print processing; and video and audio analysis.
It receives evidence from 70 to 90 cases a month, which is between 800 and 1,000 cases a year.
“That’s not a very good indication of how busy we are because if each case came in with one piece of evidence, we wouldn’t be very busy, but we track 3,000 to 4,000 pieces of evidence a year,” Wissinger said. To top it off, each piece of evidence is examined multiple times for a total of 5,000 to 6,000 examinations per year.
A few of the devices that the lab uses to examine evidence include:
- A scanning electron microscope. “We use this for elemental analyses of explosives and chemicals from meth labs,” Wissinger said.
- A gas chromatograph-mass spectrometer (GC-MS) for detecting and identifying ignitable liquids in fire debris.
- Two hand-held chemical identification devices, which have 11,000 chemicals in their databases and can identify a sample in 30 seconds.
- A portable trace explosives detector, which can identify residue from a swab in seconds.
For more information on the fire marshal’s forensic laboratory, visit
www.com.ohio.gov/fire/.