ERIE, Pa. - Just after 10 a.m. Saturday, Nov. 7, a Mercyhurst College forensic anthropology team arrives at the scene of an abandoned mobile home in Franklin Center, burned to the ground two days earlier, and discovers what appear to be pieces of burned bone in the ashes.
Their charge in this mock exercise is to retrieve the remains (in this case, culled pig cadavers from area breeders used to simulate human fire victims), while conducting and documenting the most effective methodologies for optimal scene recovery and subsequent laboratory analysis.
Thursday's controlled burn and Saturday's excavation are among a series of ongoing mock fire events staged by the Mercyhurst College Department of Applied Forensic Sciences to enhance protocols for recovering and interpreting burned human remains from fatal fire scenes. The project is one of three Mercyhurst forensic research initiatives for which the National Institute of Justice (NIJ) allocated nearly $1 million in 2008.
Recovering burned human remains and analyzing them for evidence of trauma is a daunting forensic task, but one that is crucial to determining whether a fatal fire scene is consistent with an accident, a suicide, or, as all too commonly happens, a cover-up for murder, explained Dr. Dennis Dirkmaat, chair of applied forensic sciences at Mercyhurst.
Victim remains at fatal fire scenes are typically difficult to detect, recover and handle, he said. Bones, in particular, become discolored, brittle and fragmented. So, the remains are often missed, disturbed or even destroyed during scene processing with the existing protocols.
In an effort to strengthen those protocols, particularly in assessing the remains for trauma of forensic significance, Dirkmaat's team of faculty and graduate students already have collaborated with fire authorities in Canada on two controlled burns as part of their research. This weekend's simulation represents the first in Erie County.
Dirkmaat said his team is being assisted locally by representatives of Mercyhurst's Public Safety Institute and the Franklin Township and Albion fire departments. He said Saturday's exercise will start with fire personnel entering the site to attempt to recover remains and related evidence, followed by his team's excavation, which will employ strict archaeological recovery protocols. Subsequently, the remains will be returned to Mercyhurst's laboratories for analysis.