The body of a young girl was recently found submerged in water for, what investigators believe to be, eight to ten hours. They began to investigate a homicide with the possibility of a sexual assault.
Initial swabbing of the girl's underwear and genital area provided no DNA.
The investigators then decided to try using the M-Vac System to vacuum up possible cells in areas on the underwear where they believed the perpetrator may have touched in order to pull the underwear down.
Surprise, surprise-- they obtained enough cells to make a DNA profile.
This has started to catch the attention of many facilities because the M-Vac System may prove to be a new, innovative way to collect DNA that would have never been possible to obtain in the past.
Interesting to see the direction technology has been heading towards in the Forensic field lately...
Link to Article:
Touch DNA on Clothing
More information on the M-Vac System as to what it looks like and how it works:
M-Vac | M-Vac Systems, Inc
What a cool technique. It seems so simple, yet I've never heard about this being done. What kind of vacuum was used?
ReplyDeleteIt's called an M-Vac. If you click the second link, it'll show you a picture of it.
DeleteOh that's really cool but how do they prevent contamination and will this be used for larger scale identification of patients?
DeleteI think contamination is inevitable; it's just a matter of ruling out the contamination sources maybe?
DeleteI'm not too sure what this will be useful for in the future, but it will be interesting to keep up with and find out!
I've heard about this before in my CSI Techniques class. The problem with this and similar techniques is the CSI effect from television. While this was greatly beneficial in this particular case, these types of methods aren't always applicable for all cases. But the media, oh the media, loves to rush out and describe these things, then the public (and jurors) begin to expect this to be used in any and every crime scene. Then when it doesn't work, they're dissatisfied and the forensic team looks bad. Which sucks because this is a really great tool that IS useful when applicable. Great informative post, just a bummer that this sort of information is often abused, making it harder on those of us going into forensics.
ReplyDeleteI completely agree, also being a person going into forensics. People that are not in this field don't understand the ways techniques work and why they don't work across the board for every case. So like you said, when one technique doesn't work for a particular case, it automatically sucks. Instead, people should realize that just because one technique doesn't work, doesn't mean that there is no hope for every other technique.
DeleteThis could be very useful to the field of Forensics if they could find a way to apply it to more cases. Being able to catch these people with this technology would be a great benefit for everyone.
ReplyDeleteYou're right. Hopefully it becomes a more common technique in the next couple of years.
DeleteWow...I would have been the person to think it was a lost cause, thinking that any true evidence was washed away. When reading more about the M-Vac, I now understand how it works. Interesting!
ReplyDeleteThat's what I automatically thought too, that all the DNA evidence would have been destroyed in the water.
DeleteM VACum! such a creative name lol. i like the idea but im a little surprised that no DNA was found on the spot ( you know !). I found this a little weird based on my forensics background. If he touched her, there must be marks of transfer of material to her body (Locard principle)
ReplyDeleteI was thinking the same thing, but the article was so short that it didn't go into much detail about it.
DeleteWow a vacuum, I knew the crime lab were using new technology but something so simple could be turned into something so useful.
ReplyDeleteI know! Seems so easy to just now be discovered!
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