A Bloody Good Time

The Vancouver Police Museum is holding a very cool trio of forensic workshops. I missed the first one, pathology, last week because I was working the opera.

The police museum used to be the city morgue and autopsy facility. Between 1932-1980, almost 15,000 autopsies were performed

But I got to go to blood spatter class last night.

Instructor Chris Mathiesen showing us his bloody knife.

Things I learned in blood spatter class:

*blood contracts when it hit a surface due to its cohesiveness

*blood drops are spherical and not tearshaped

*the diameter of bloodstains increases with height

Measuring length and width of a droplet will tell you angle of impact: angle formed between the direction of the blood drop and the plane of the surface it strikes

**Cast-off is when blood is flicked from a blood-bearing object

**Spatter is divided into 3 categories:
1. Low velocity spatter, such as dripping blood from a stab wound
2. Medium velocity spatter, caused by blunt force trauma. Can result in projected blood as the heart continues to pump
3. High velocity spatter usually due to being shot. Blood will spray like a fine mist

Medium velocity: hammering on the coconut/brain.

The coconut, acting as the brain on mannequin Betty, was filled with fake blood.

Course, this was just 1 hour class (with a lot of playtime), so we were far from being blood spatter analysts, but it gave us a taste of channeling the Dexter Morgans inside us all.

For more pics, check my Flickr.

Next week’s class: ballistics.