Virginia Casey

Crime Scene Technician Virginia Casey

Brevard County crime scene Agent Virginia Casey, left, and Detective Brenda Branham carry evidence out of the home of suspect Anthony Andy Welch on Thursday.

Last year, as fingerprinting techniques improved, Brevard Sheriff's crime scene technician Virginia Casey compared Barger's palm prints and fingerprints to those found at the crime scene on the window screen and a knife.

"It was a 'Eureka' moment," Casey said Wednesday.

The hope is that the 25 agents -- from Palm Bay, Melbourne and Titusville, along with Orange, Osceola and Polk counties -- learn to better decipher crime scenes by examining how blood pools, streaks or smudges, said Virginia Casey, the Brevard Sheriff's crime scene technician who organized the free event.

"Blood can sometimes tell us who did what through DNA but also it can show us how a crime was done through a sequence of events," Casey said.Casey, one of four Brevard crime technicians, completed a similar course with the same instructors from the National Forensic Science Institute at the University of Tennessee.

The science of analyzing bloodstains from various angles at murder scenes has been popularized for years on television court dramas and by national events such as the O.J. Simpson or Scott Peterson trials.

"Anything is potential evidence depending upon how it relates to the crime scene," said Virginia Casey, a crime scene technician and latent print examiner with the Brevard County Sheriff's Office Crime Scene Unit.But the investigators' and prosecutors' crime scene units require a significant amount of evidence to arrest suspects and produce convictions.

That's why Casey and others in her profession analyze and document every inch of major crime scenes.Numerous photographs are taken and diagrams sketched.Fingerprints, blood samples and other pieces of evidence are carefully collected.
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Casey, who has worked in crime scene investigation for 18 years, has seen tremendous advances in crime scene collection methods and technologies.She has also marveled over the increased capabilities of forensic laboratories, including those of FDLE, which analyzes evidence for law enforcement agencies across the state.

"Eighteen years ago there was no such thing as video or DNA (analysis)," Casey said.