Forensic Expert explains how 3D laser digitization could reconstruct the filming of Charlie Kirk

Charlie Kirk, founder of 31 years of the non -profit conservative organization Turning Point USA, was killed on Wednesday while he is expressed outside at the University of Utah Valley. He was declared dead later during the day. The officials say that the only shot may have been fired on a nearby roof. Friday morning, with a massive man hunting still underway, President Donald Trump announced that a suspect was in detention.

Crime scenes can change quickly. Chairs, tables, cars – anything in space – can be moved, or people can lose track of it. And future discoveries on crime can be difficult to connect to the scene. One of the best ways to immediately preserve a crime scene is with three -dimensional laser analyzes, which use light to map each object present. Today, this technique is systematically used in major crime scenes. And the experts say that he is probably important in the investigation into Kirk’s death.

Among the first investigators of the crime scene to use this technique in the early 2000s, there was Michael Haag, a reconstructionist and co-author of the shooting of the manual Reconstruction of shooting incident. After having specialized in chemistry and minors in mathematics and physics at the University of Arizona, Haag spent almost 25 years in the Albuquerque police department of the New Mexico, where he worked as a medical examiner in a team that managed major crime scenes ranging from homicide to shootings involved in officers. He also has a private company that leads many of the same services and offers training in the reconstruction of filming incidents worldwide.

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For more than two decades, HAAG worked on complex cases, taught investigators in the United States and testified before the courts on how 3D laser scans can be used. In a conversation with Scientific American, He explained how this technique would probably be used on the scene linked to the death of Kirk. In simple language, he explained to us how a laser scanner captures millions of measures to map the roofs and the lines of vision and how the analysis of the trajectory check if the impacts align with a single sniper location.

[An edited transcript of the interview follows.]

Can you guide me at each stage of what the 3D laser digitization of a crime scene looks like and how do you use this information afterwards?

The first thing to keep in mind is that with 3D laser digitization, the massive benefit is that you are very precisely documenting the spatial relationships of everything in this three -dimensional scene. This allows you to go back and work this scene over and over again. You can look at the measurements, the angles and the distances – everything that has to do with physical measure and relationships, you can redo. It is an excellent tool for all people involved in a prosecution or civil action.

It is an engineering tool that we have used in crime scenes since about 2004. These scanners were initially designed to make very precise measurements of construction sites, factories and bridges. It’s like a laser -range researcher but much more capable. A portable laser researcher draws a “ball” of light and, because the light moves at a predictable speed, it measures the time it takes to reflect and give you a distance.

A 3D laser scanner puts this same beach search device on a stable tripod platform which runs 360 degrees horizontally and also moves vertically. With today’s scanners, like the Leica RTC that I use, it literally draws millions of these light balls in a very short time. It is not only a question of obtaining the distance but also of associating this distance with a very specific horizontal and vertical angle. In any position, you build this three -dimensional world around you which is very precise – we are talking about data points with around three millimeters of precision within 20 meters from the scanner.

You then move the position scanner to the position, each time, building a three -dimensional sphere of data points, then you mix all these spheres. You get a massive data set. With a scene like this, with a courtyard, several buildings and roofs, you can build a scene that you can browse people to show a judge, a jury or investigators exactly where all these buildings are, what are the distances and what trajectories can be possible or not.

For example, I did a lot of work on the Kennedy assassination and scanned Dealey Plaza [the Dallas, Tex., site of President John F. Kennedy’s assassination on November 22, 1963]. You can very quickly put yourself in any position you want in this scene and watch the trajectories or are not possible. This is exactly what the 3D laser scanner brings to the Charlie Kirk shooting. The challenge is: it depends on where the ball went After He struck Mr. Kirk. We will see if the ball … continued to hit something else down.

When you said earlier that you could “browse people through” 3D reconstruction, what does that mean? Do they put a virtual reality headset? How does anyone do it?

You can use VR headsets, but more often you place it on a large computer screen. It is literally as a computer game where you can get up in the sky and fly through the scene. You can put yourself above the buildings in search directly. You can put yourself behind Windows in the buildings, looking in the courtyard. You could put yourself in Mr. Kirk’s position and look to see what he would have seen. It really allows you to move your point of view where you want in scanning data.

In this situation, where people have video sequences of a shooter and they know the basics, what would this 3D scan add? How would it be used once they have it?

If it turns out that some of the videos we have seen from a human form above the building are a viable shooting position, it can most often be used to put you in the position of this shooter so that you can see what this point of view would look like – and vice versa, from Mr. Kirk’s position in search of high -end.

This scene, in some respects, is not as complex as the other shots that we generally work where you have several blows from several pistols in several positions. In these scenarios, the 3D laser scan has more potential to shed light on the way shooting has dropped, especially when things move in the scene.

What other uses could 3D construction have been able to?

Preserving this scene for the future is the way that comes to mind. It will be a shoot that people will think, watch and reassess for the years to come. These 3D laser digitization data allow people like me and others who just have an interest in the case to review the scene in the condition that it is today-where the pop-up step was above Mr. Kirk, where chairs were, where the barricades were. These data will allow us to go back and look at the scene over and over again.

This is only a hypothetical question: a The firearm has been recovered Near the Kirk shooting site. If the recovered ball was shown not To come from this firearm, could we look at this 3D data and the images to see where the ball comes from? Is there a way to determine exactly what was the trajectory?

Probably not as precisely that you could expect from television. Take the gun and [the footage of a] Potential figure on [a nearby] roof out of the image. If we look at the ball injury to Mr. Kirk, and we have a video that shows his orientation and positioning of the general body, it looks like a neck. Let’s say that we get a report from a medical examiner who says that the entrance is the left -in -the -level area of ​​the neck, and the ball of the ball wound is from front to back, from left to right and slightly down, anatomically. If we look at this path, we can start looking from where in this scene the ball would come. In the example I just passed – from back to back, from left to right and down – it would include someone who drew it from his left while he was sitting in the scene, in the distance, above a building there. Again, it is not due to the measure that you could expect from television, where the investigators on the crime scene put a laser and say that the weapon was just along this laser beam. There are generally about or minus five degrees of precision, even on a good trajectory with ball wounds to the bodies. It’s a little more conservative than that, but you can have a general idea where it would go.