Down+the+Drain+KS

Drowned man autopsy – opened chest, drilled the rib cage, and took the plate off. Cut the neck to look at the trachea. Foam, suggests that cod was either blunt forced trauma or drowning. ^ The dead man is a lifeguard. He jumped into the sewer and hit his head. Eventually drowned.

Construction workers pulled bones out of the sewer. Flakey texture means that the bones are a couple years old (or so they think). They flushed the pipes in order to find more of the bones. CSI found a rib and some others. When Katherine opens a sewer, there are a ton of bones. ^ Femur measurements – height Defects on the ribs, may indicate stab wounds Age – Teeth indicate teenager 13-14 Bones are too degraded, meaning no DNA – But the condition of the bones helps determine how long the body has been dead, and therefore they can search for missing persons.

What is Grissom doing with the pigs? The chemicals in the sewer caused the body to decompose faster than usual, so he’s testing the pigs in chemicals in order to determine how fast it was decomposed. Discovers that decomposing is 20x faster in chemicals. Victim could be missing only 5 weeks.

Found pipe bombs, took the door off of the hinges in order to hold onto the blood evidence

Blood spatter on the walls by the stairs. Lowest point of spatter is 46” and the boy claims that the dogs were fighting and caused the blood. Basically, he’s lying.

Questions: When CSI searched the house, what chemicals did they use to test for blood? How do they test for DNA? How long does the process take? Is the autopsy at the beginning an accurate representation of a real autopsy? How long does it take to get a search warrant? It seems like CSI have new cases every day. Is that accurate? How long does it take on average to solve a case?

Summary: In the episode of CSI, “Down the Drain,” the investigators initially find a dead man who had been flushed down the sewer system in Las Vegas. However, later, construction workers present broken bones to the team, which they found while working in the sewers. After following the sewers up stream, the investigators discover multiple bones, and ultimately, the initial location of the dead body. Though the decomposition of the bones made it impossible to use DNA to id the victim, the investigators discovered that the body was a young teenage boy from the development of his teeth. They also discovered, through dents and groves in the ribs, that he was most likely stabbed. Something that I thought was interesting was how Grissom used pigs and other chemicals to simulate the conditions of the chemicals in the sewer. With this experiment, he learned that even though the boy’s body was thoroughly decomposed, he had only been dead around 5 weeks. After using this information, the team searched missing persons for teenage boys in the area of where the body was found. I’m not an expert, but it seemed a little bit too easy to find the boy they thought was the victim. After discovering the boy’s identity, the team learned that one of the bullies in the boy’s grade at school lived directly across from the sewer that the boy’s body was found in. When Jim used a search warrant for firearms, they found blood spatters all along the wall, plus multiple pipe bombs. While the bully claimed that the dogs were the cause of the blood spatters, Catherine learns that the lowest spatters were 46,” which was too high for any dogfight.