13 Reasons Why
“There. Stop. Go back. Okay, timestamp one forty-three am.” Homicide Detective Lisa Brannan noted the time on her pad, her long brown hair gently brushing the edges of the paper.
I was sitting at the computer of the victim’s mother, controlling the playback. The family room of the house, neat and orderly, flashed on the screen in infrared black and white, and the victim had entered the frame, frozen in time.
“Okay, play it through again.”
I hit play on the viewer. Lisa, Troy (another homicide detective), and Michelle (a forensic evidence technician), crowded in closer around me to watch the scene unfold.
The victim, a fourteen-year-old girl, casually walked over to a bin filled with prescription bottles. One by one, she opened each bottle and gulped pills like they were candy. This went on for three minutes. After she was done, she walked back out of the frame toward her bedroom.
The evidence here was clear, and we had hard proof of the How that led to the death of the teenager lying in a pool of vomit on her bed but only thirty feet away in the next room. Her recovered diary lent us some clues as to the Why. Recent entries recounted incidents of bullying at school, and there were lines of emotion and despair, attempting to emulate the themes found in 13 Reasons Why, a book written by Jay Asher, made into a Netflix teen drama series revolving around the suicide of its lead character, Hannah Baker. Tragically, our teenager became the victim of suicide in reality.
The year was 2017, and I was working with the San Diego County Sheriff’s Department as a crime scene investigator with the Regional Crime Laboratory. It was my fourth year in this assignment, and as such, this was not my first suicide call. This was, however, the first suicide I responded to in which we recovered footage of the actual event. It happened with a stroke of luck, or maybe it was keen observation skills. You need both in this job, though much more of the latter.
I was in the middle of taking measurements of the house for a scale diagram on my notepad. To get room dimension and evidence position measurements, I used a Leica DISTO, which is a tool that looks a bit like a thin, bulky calculator with a glass lens on one end. This lens is where the laser shoots out, hits the target surface, and reflects back to the DISTO for a distance calculation. It is a laser tape measure and a CSI’s best friend.
Michelle, the forensic evidence technician, or FET, who responded to the call with me, was in another part of the house, taking photographs and tagging evidence while I did the measurements. When I got to the family room, I was already in a good flow, my DISTO beeping with a steady rhythm. Measure–*Beep*, note, draw; measure–*Beep*, note, draw. During the process of diagramming, I tended to let my eyes wander to see things from every perspective. I looked at the ceiling, behind plants and furniture, and areas where evidence might be hiding in plain sight. That’s when I saw it. In the far upper corner of the family room was a video camera. An exposed beam partially obscured it, so you couldn’t make it out when entering the room unless you were specifically looking for it. I was on the far side of the beam, so when I looked up, it was obvious. And it was pointing right at the bin of prescription bottles.
I called out to Lisa and pointed at the camera. She gasped, smiled, and grabbed my shoulders. Without another word, she got on her cell to contact the victim’s mother. After we received the login credentials, I offered to help her download the footage and manage the playback.
Here I was, a seasoned CSI doing work that satisfied my natural curiosity about people and life itself. The job was a perfect marriage between my interests in public service, problem-solving, and science. It played an important role in the criminal justice system, helped victims and their families get answers to some of the worst events of their lives, continually tested the limits of my knowledge, and expanded my perspective of the world I lived in.
Moments in the field like these made me think, This is the best job ever. How did I get here?
