Criminal Justice-DCI Crime Scene Investigation Competition
The Criminal Justice Studies program partnered with the South Dakota Department of Criminal Investigation (DCI) to host a crime scene investigation competition and the event was a rousing success.
Students gathered early on Friday morning for a session with Special Agents Tyler Neuharth and Tyler Heine. During the session, students learned basic crime scene processing skills, such as bagging and tagging evidence, collecting biological evidence and creating casts of shoe prints.
After they learned the basics, the students observed a polygraph examination and then selected their teams to process the mock murder scenes.
The crime scenes were created by DCI agents and volunteers from the Criminal Justice Club. The scenes consisted of “murdered” mannequins, biological evidence (including fake blood), murder weapons and evidence left by the perpetrator.
Officers from local, state and federal agencies volunteered to observe the competition and scored the students’ performances.
The winning team included Brianna Waltner, Reed Solberg, Kia Schmitke, Jordan Hunt and Becca Goth.
