RE: Crimes Scene Management Basics
By Dorcas Sarkozy
There are two pictures in the October 23rd issue of “The Star” online paper showing several individuals – two men in the first picture and four men & two women in the second – handling debris from the helicopter that crashed in Lake Nakuru about one (1) month ago.
The persons in the article titled “Chopper crash: One body retrieved from Lake Nakuru, four missing”, presumably accident scene investigators, are handling the chopper’s debris with their bare ungloved hands. In so doing, they are probably transferring body oils and other contaminants onto the potential evidence effectively contaminating and potentially invalidating any evidence gathered from the debris.
The two pictures underscore the incompetence of the various investigating agencies in Kenya.
Not all the bodies of the October 21, 2017 crash victims have been recovered and I am yet to hear whether the ‘copter’s “black box” has been recovered.
Effectively, the area around where the aircraft crashed is still an accident and possibly crime scene.
The wanton disregard for and of basics crime scene management protocols shown on the pictures should be shocking to most.
It is not.
This country – Kenya – has such a frivolous, flippant and dismissive relationship with accidents that I fully expect but will never understand.
I have previously written about the “Body Farm” at the University of Tennessee’s Anthropological Research Facility. The facility does research on the human body on a myriad of post-death scenarios and circumstances.
Specific to the recently recovered body of Ms. Veronica Muthoni, research methods and technics gleaned from the “body farm” and from failure analysis research would prove and/or disprove so many theories and hypotheses that the victims’ loved ones would at a minimum, have some modicum of closure re: what happened to their loved one.
As it stands right now, Kenyans are yet to be told what happened to Robert Ouko who was murdered in 1990, Jacob Juma who was shot in 2016 or Chris Msando who met his gruesome end approximately three months ago.
https://www.the-star.co.ke/news/2017/10/23/chopper-crash-one-body-retrieved-from-lake-nakuru-four-missing_c1657156
