In the News

Local firearms unit proves its mettle in solving gun crimes

By CAROL ROBINSON, The Birmingham News © September 8, 2007

BIRMINGHAM - Shortly after 19-year-old Eulin Matthews was found shot to death in Birmingham's Civil Rights District in July, police thought they'd caught a break: the recovery of a gun nearby within hours after the slaying.

Since Matthews was one of three people killed within 70 minutes that night, Birmingham investigators were relieved to have such a crucial piece of evidence so quickly, especially when time is rarely on the side of the good guys in murder investigations.

But the respite was short-lived.

Ballistics testing showed the spent cartridge cases found at the scene of the fatal shooting were not from the gun that police had in hand. It was a blow to detectives.

"It put us at a dead end," said Birmingham homicide Sgt. Cory Hardiman.

That's where the case might have stayed if not for the Birmingham Police Department's firearms examiners unit.

While most departments send their ballistics to state forensic laboratories - where the amount of evidence in line to be tested is mountainous and the wait for results can sometimes be measured in years - Birmingham six years ago launched its own ballistics testing program.

Birmingham has the only police department in the state with it's own firearms unit. It is among just a handful in the Southeast, investigators said, and the unit is invaluable.

"We get our results back faster, we get our shell cases and projectiles (into a national database) sooner," said homicide Detective Phillip Russell. "If we need it, we can get it in a week's time."

"There's no comparison," Hardiman said.

Lab began in 2001:

Mitch Rector, 45, heads the unit. With undergraduate degrees in geology and chemistry, and a master's degree in criminal justice, Rector started work with the Alabama Department of Forensic Sciences in 1987.

He joined the Birmingham Police Department in 2001 to start the firearms lab. Now, he also teaches in UAB's master's program and is an instructor at the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives national firearms academy. Later this month Rector will attend the inaugural Forensic Management Academy as one of 20 forensic scientists chosen from more than 100 applicants.

Rector said he had heard rumblings for some time that such a unit was in the works because of the volume of firearms-related evidence. Probably 40 percent to 50 percent of the firearms cases in the state lab came from Birmingham alone while he was at the state lab, he said.

"What I realized when I came to Birmingham is that they were only submitting probably 25 percent of what came in," Rector said. "I was really floored when I found how much work here there is to do. The numbers are just incredible."

The unit, tucked in a tiny room without windows in the basement of police headquarters, started with the Integrated Ballistics Information System, a national imaging system used to compare firearms-related evidence stored in a database.

There are 230 IBIS systems in the U.S., including five in Alabama: four in the ADFS labs in Birmingham, Montgomery, Huntsville and Mobile, and the fifth at the Birmingham Police Department.

The machine digitally captures the images of fired bullets and fired cartridge cases from crime scenes and test firings from recovered guns. The bore of each gun leaves its own unique set of markings. When a new image is entered, the system searches the existing database for a match.

When a possible match is detected, a firearms examiner must compare the actual evidence, using a microscope. Once an identification has been made by the examination of the actual evidence, a "hit" is noted in the system.

A "hit" is defined as a linkage of at least two crime investigations where there previously had been no known connection.

"Birmingham wanted to use that to see if it could help with their gun crimes," Rector said. So far, he said, there have been about 60 hits. "Some have been really valuable; others have come after the fact."

One of the major values is the ability to prioritize cases, whereas the state lab serves 22 counties with more than 100 law enforcement agencies.

"When something comes in (to the state lab), it has to be worked as it comes in," Rector said. "When you're doing it in-house, if we have a homicide in the city, homicide detectives can say `Hey, will you look at this in the morning?'"

"We have the ability to do that," he said. "We are able to turn things around for them faster simply because they don't have to compete with other cases for a spot in the lineup."

Rector is joined in the unit by Wayne Burrows, who retired from ADFS, and Birmingham Officer Perry Gordon. Their focus is on the evidence recovered from the crime scene - to analyze and interpret what it all means, whether it's a gun found propped up against a lamp post or a bullet removed from a dead body.

Threefold mission:

The mission is threefold. The examiners take all guns found or seized, test fire them, and enter bullet markings into the IBIS system to search for a match of evidence from crimes scenes. Second, they work at the request of the detectives. They also initiate their own examinations, keeping up with evidence brought into the property room.

Every day they get a list of guns seized from the previous night, whether it was taken from a crime scene for found in a car during a traffic stop. On a recent Monday, they received a list of 29 guns taken in by police over the weekend.

They identify the guns that are prime candidates to be used in crimes - such as 9 mm pistols - and focus on those. "We want to look at all of them, but it's impossible," Rector said. "We generally will report out around 700 cases a year, but that doesn't reflect the amount of evidence that comes in. We get almost 2,000 guns a year in property. But 700 a year, that's not too shabby for our operation."

Since 2001, the unit has examined 4,232 cartridge cases, 1,203 bullets and 3,047 firearms.

"This is no reflection on how much work is out there to do," Rector said, "it's a reflection of how much we can get to."

There may be 16 or 18 guns in their office on any given day, but there are about 6,000 in the property room. "I believe there are a lot of firearms sitting in the property room right now that could be linked to cases that are still open but we just can't get to them," he said.

Crucial to building cases:

Tests performed by the unit helped build the case pending against Derrol Shaw, who is charged in the triple slaying of John and Evelyn Martin, and their grandson Ryan Evans. And when three Birmingham police officers were fatally gunned down in 2004, Rector spent a solid two months working the 180 pieces of ballistics evidence in that case.

But the Matthews slaying, they said, is the ultimate example of why the unit exists.

Matthews, who had just left a party, was found lying in the street about 11 p.m. July 20 by officers patrolling in the area of Kelly Ingram Park near downtown. The officers, responding to a "shots fired" call, discovered Matthews at Sixth Avenue North and 16th Street. Paramedics pronounced him dead at the scene.

Witnesses gave police the description of the vehicle involved in the shooting, and officers later stopped that car.

"In the midst of all of that, we recovered a gun believed to be the murder weapon," Hardiman said.

The gun was checked into the department's evidence unit, joining thousands of others taken from criminals or simply found on the street. Detective Herman Harris sent a request to the firearms unit to look at the gun and three fired cartridge cases, penciling in the word "RUSH" at the top of his paperwork.

Two weeks later on Aug. 8, which in the world of forensics testing is actually quick, firearms investigators examined the evidence and delivered the bad news. "Our exam showed that was not the gun," Rector said. "This was a dead case."

Or so they thought.

Five days after Matthews had been killed, police had responded to another shooting, though not fatal. They found a gun inside the victim's car. The car had been towed into police custody as evidence.

Burrows test fired the seized gun and entered into the ballistics database the characteristics of the bullets fired from that gun.

That was on Aug. 13. Several hours later, as they reviewed their input from that day, the computer alerted them to evidence marked as "high confidence," meaning there were strong similarities in the gun from one case and the fired cartridge cases from the other.

Investigators pulled the cartridge cases from the Matthews' crime scene and compared them to the test fire cartridge cases from the later shooting. "It was a match," Rector said.

Detectives now had another avenue to pursue, Hardiman said. "We were able to backtrack the gun to the people we believe were responsible in the Matthews case," Hardiman said.

No one has yet been charged, but detectives will soon present their evidence to the district attorney's office seeking an arrest warrant.

"Everything fell right into place," Rector said. "It was the perfect storm of evidence. To me, it proves the viability of a unit like this in a police department that has a lot of gun crimes."

E-mail: crobinson@bhamnews.com

© 2007 The Birmingham News

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