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MARQUETTE — CODIS, AFIS and IBIS. They’re not acronyms for terrorist extremist groups. The letters stand for database systems used by the Michigan State Police during criminal investigations and other casework.

Trooper Brian Muladore, evidence technician at the MSP Negaunee Post, led a discussion Wednesday on criminal investigations as part of this week’s Citizens’ Academy, a multiweek informational program hosted by the MSP.

Muladore said his job includes collecting evidence and is “kind of an extension of the crime lab.” The MSP has several crime labs throughout the state, with the only Upper Peninsula lab located in Marquette.

“With their expertise and combined with evidence techs from the post, we’ll go out and process that scene, which will let the troops that are actually handling the case have more time to actually do the investigation while we’re gathering up the evidence for them that they’ll use later on,” he explained.

And evidence can be anything from weapons and bullet casings, to footprints, fingerprints, hair, clothing fibers or saliva.

“Lick a stamp, smoke a cigarette, drink from a can — I’ve got DNA on this cup just from touching it, and plus putting it to my mouth and drinking from it. There’s DNA from all of us in this room right now,” Muladore said to the group. “Had there been a crime in here and we suspected something at a certain table, we could swab that area for a DNA sample, send it off to the right lab and they could get a profile … to compare against the profiles that exist from convicted offenders. Or if I get a suspect, … I could compare their DNA that we would obtain with the DNA that we found and hopefully get a match then.”

The known samples are all archived in one of those aforementioned acronyms, CODIS, the Combined DNA Indexing System.

Fingerprints are another piece of evidence that’s collected and stored in a database known as the Automated Fingerprint Identification System, or AFIS for short.

“So, somebody is arrested for a charge years ago, and all of a sudden now we get a suspect fingerprint,” Muladore said. “Hopefully, the computer system, … or AFIS, would have that person’s print in there. So, if you search this unknown print from a break-in scene, I might get a hit just from that right there.”

If a fingerprint is found at the scene, an expert analyzes it and uses AFIS to determine whether a match exists by comparing unique points and patterns.

There are different surfaces on which fingerprints are more easily collected, glass being an “excellent” material, Muladore said, and multiple ways to collect the evidence, with powder being a popular choice.

Much like fingerprints, firearms also have distinguishing characteristics that identify them from other types of guns, like lands and grooves, which run along the inside of a barrel and cause the bullet to spiral, creating unique patterns on the projectile itself.

“Some guns have a … right twist, some makes and different firearms have a left twist, some of them have five lands and grooves, some of them have six; so it helps to narrow down this unknown .45 caliber round to a certain group of guns,” Muladore explained.

If a weapon is seized, its information — including bullet characteristics and other “toolmarks,” such as impressions left on the shell casing — is entered into IBIS, the Integrated Ballistic Identification System.

And guns aren’t the only things that leave toolmarks, Muladore said.

“Pry bars, bolt cutters, pliers, hammers; those things leave definite toolmarks,” he explained. “If you take your hammer and you strike a … metal surface on an angle. Well, your hammer is imperfect. It’s got marks all by itself. It’s like a fingerprint.”

Aside from providing a DNA sample, bloodstain evidence can also help investigators learn other important case information.

“When a blood drop hits a table straight down, it’s going to be nice and round, and it may just have little spikes on it, but it’s going to be pretty much round,” Muladore said. “If I … take an eyedropper of blood and kind of throw it on this table at an angle, it’s going … to be nice and round where it first strikes, but it’s going to tail off. It’s going to point in the direction, basically like a tear drop, … in which it was heading.”

By measuring the width and length of the drop, investigators can determine the angle at which the blood was thrown, while multiple blood drops can help investigators determine where individuals may have been located when the crime occurred by mapping out the spatter patterns using pieces of string.

“You can get pretty darn close where these string pieces meet in the middle,” he said.

Every piece of evidence is collected, analyzed and archived so that it can be useful to investigators in the current case, or potentially in a future one.

“Maybe Flint Police Department has an open shooting where they pulled a bullet out of somebody,” Muladore said. “And they had that bullet checked, and now all of a sudden we get a match, and the gun up here in Marquette taken out of a car matches the shooting they had in Flint or Detroit or wherever else.”

Ryan Jarvi can be reached at 906-228-2500, ext. 270. His email address is rjarvi@miningjournal.net.