Guide to Forensics

Your Equipment

Every investigator gets access to the crime scene kit, which has fourteen slots waiting to be filled to the brim with crime-solving gear. Some of these slots are already filled by the following:

• DNA Swab Kits: These are for swabbing for gunshot residue(can be found on clothes or one's hands), or just about anything covered in blood.
• Fingerprint Cards: Allows you to manually take an individual's fingerprints. Can be used to double-check the identity of a cadaver or a suspect using the records console. Click in hand or target someone else's hands to use.
• Bottle of Luminol: Luminol is a chemical that reacts with haemoglobin in bloodstains and triggers a light-producing chemical reaction. This reaction can only be seen under UV light.
• UV Light: Reveals all sorts of bodily fluids, but mostly used to find blood. Luminol-affected stains will not be visible without turning it on.
• Magnifying Glass and Tweezers: For gathering of fibre samples from objects. These will magically create a tiny evidence bag when used and such samples are usually analysed under a microscope.
• Fingerprinting Powder and Duster: For gathering fingerprints. Use it on an object and if there are prints, a fingerprint card will magically appear. Not too effective if the suspect was wearing gloves.
• Mass Spectrometer: For analysing the chemical content of blood, can be used on the living and dead alike. You must take a sample of their blood and inject it into the mass spectrometer to get a readout.
• Reagent Scanner: This allows you to see the chemical composition of anything you scan with it, from drinks to medication, and is particularly useful in the cases of poisonings.
• Box of Evidence Cards: Plastic cards from 1 to 7, used to mark evidence when taking photographs of a crime scene.

In addition, around your lab you may also find:

• Forensic Gloves: WEAR THESE AT ALL TIMES. They are one of a kind and necessary to ensuring your prints don't contaminate the evidence.
• Evidence Bags: If you don't have these on you, you're fired. Necessary to ensure evidence is not cross-contaminated or otherwise further fouled by unga security officers.
• Camera and Film: Taking photos of crime scenes and bodies prior to autopsy is intensely recommended. If the scene is tampered with, this can mean all the difference.
• Syringes: Basically necessary for blood testing of any kind. Be sure to place them in the bright red sharps disposal box when done.
• Security Tape: Keeps people out of the crime scene, or at least delays them long enough for you to react.
• Microscope: Advanced and stationary machinery for looking really hard at really small things. Stick GSR swabs, fingerprint cards or fibers into it for full analysis. Attack with sample to put it in, empty hand to start scan. Drag machine sprite on yourself to remove sample.
• DNA Scanner: Machine for figuring out the DNA of sticky icky things you put in it. Accepts swabs with blood or saliva. If your blood sample is in a syringe, simply run a swab over it. Attack with sample to put it in, empty hand to start scan. Drag machine sprite on yourself to remove sample.

Handling Evidence

It's quite simple. If you touch something - you get stuff on it. Fingerprints if you didn't even bother to wear gloves, fibres if you're wearing clothes (please do), or blood if you're a blood-drenched axe murderer. If that's not what you want, use Evidence Bags to put things in for safe handling, and cordon crime scenes to prevent pesky onlookers from contaminating it.

Types of Evidence

Fingerprints

Most straightforward thing - people have fingers, and fingers have very specific patters on the tips. And since they tend to leave greasy imprints of them everywhere, these can be used to find out who touched what.

Problem with these is that more often than not people only leave a fragment of whole print, so you'd need to collect enough of those before you can with any degree conclude what the actual print is.

Upside is that once you got past that, it's a matter of simple search in Security Records to connect the name to the print. Assuming no one tampered with those of course...

Fibres

Less telling, but much more often encountered cousin of fingerprints. What happens is whenever you touch something, tiny bits of fabric from your clothing might fall off and stick to the items. It's nearly impossible to prevent it aside from not wearing any clothes (but then you'd have to worry about fingerprints) or wearing fullbody sealed suit (suit would still leave fibres).

You will encounter these most often, but the problem with them is that unless you're very lucky, they only help to lessen the number of suspects, as many jobs on station wear same uniform and there is no way to tell the specific one that left this fibre.

Gunshot Residue (GSR)

Guns are messy. Their results are messy, and their workings are messy. When gun fires, it creates a cloud of tiny burnt-up particles, that stick to just about everything - especially your hands. By swabbing hands (or gloves) for said residue, you can find out if owner of said gloves (or hands) fired a gun recently, and even what type of bullet it was.

DNA samples

Nature was kind enough to make your job easier by sticking an unique identifier on all bits of humans - DNA. In this line of work, you'll find it in body liquids - swabs of either blood or saliva from a victim's mouth(unsurprisingly, you will need to target the mouth) if you need it.

Thinking Like A Detective

While most cases will be incredibly clear-cut because the average SS13 player does not understand subtlety, others may take some effort to figure out. This is where the role really shines, and you can fully indulge in your fantasies of being a hard-boiled detective. Here are some pointers for getting on the right track.

• Interview any witness you can find, and record their statement. The fewer witnesses there are, the more imperfect the picture may be.
  • Even if they were not there, crew members who regularly interact with the persons involved in the case can shed further insight on whereabouts and motive.
• Collecting fibres and prints will be more difficult in densely populated spaces.
• Were any doors tampered with? If not, the suspect may have had access to the department. As far as you know, the only way that is possible is if someone's card was stolen from them, or if the suspect is a member of that very department.
• Pay attention to what suspects and victims were wearing.
• Blood dries over time.
• If someone was shot, the direction the blood sprays go can indicate where the perpetrator shot from.
  • You can tell a lot about the weapon used without directly seeing it. Suspect covered in burns? Likely an energy weapon. What if there's no burn damage, but there's no bullet casings? Might be a weapon that fires caseless ammo or otherwise does not automatically eject cases.
• Don't take every claim of exotic devices or phenomena at face value. Dig deeper and find a reasonable explanation.
• Document everything.

Cadavers

Autopsy Surgery

Before anything else is done, take a body scan of the corpse using the scanner in the autopsy room and print it. You want to see what condition the body is in before you start poking and prodding it, in case anything should change as a result of your investigation. Take blood samples from the body and run them through your advanced mass spectrometer to see if there's anything in their bloodstream, keep the results. Scrub and sterilize the autopsy lab using sterilizine. Once that is done, it is time to move onto the actual autopsy.

1. Place cadaver onto the operating table.
2. Scan the cadaver with a health analyzer to find injured locations.
3. Aim for the patient's affected area in the Damage Zone.
4. Cut the skin with your scalpel.
   • Vaurca will require using a surgical drill instead of scalpel to pierce the exoskeleton that wrap vaurca.
5. Use the autopsy scanner to scan the area.
6. Repeat for all injured body parts.
7. Using the previous full body scan, remove any foreign objects from the body. Bag and label them.
8. Remove all organs besides eyes and brain before bagging and storing them in the break room refrigerator cooler in the morgue (this is purely for roleplay purposes, and thus optional).
9. Make sure you have everything you want from the autopsy before washing off and handing over the body to medical so they may make the body presentable, before carrying out whatever the victim's postmortem wishes are.

Autopsy Reports

Right clicking on the autopsy scanner will let you print out an autopsy report. This will have some basic information on it, such as:

• Time of Death
• Suspected MoI (Method of Injury) and a percentage chance - sometimes this will come up as something stupid, like "Yes, this man was hit 16 times in the chest by a fully organic armblade from a species that is not known to exist". When this happens, just ignore it and go for the next best thing, I.E Armblade turns into "Large Bladed Weapon with trace organic elements?".
• Times struck by method of injury.
• Trace Chemicals

However, this is not a piece of paper you will need. In fact, you'll need a whole bundle: in the forums database accessible at the requests console (the big blue TV looking machine on the wall) there will be several pieces of paperwork you should fill out. Firstly among them is the coroner's report, where you will write down your findings and conclusions of the autopsy, including cause of death. Following this should be your blood work form, the data from which you got from the spectrometer earlier, then identity confirmation if the victim's identity is in doubt, followed by the data you just gathered, including that full body scan done at the start. This will be the entirety of your autopsy paperwork, and will go into the case files.

Manner of Death

This is what your corporate instructors would have told you is the most important part of your job, and they'd be partially right. Manner of death is a regulations/contractual determination, and therefore Manner of Death can be the deciding factor in something like your victims life insurance being paid out to remaining family members. Deciding which category your victim fits into can be difficult, but here we will go over a few common signs of each category of Manner of Death.

Natural

The most common type of death in the spur, but the type you will probably go your entire career onboard the Horizon never seeing. Because it's so uncommon on the Horizon, signs will not be touched upon here.

Accidental

Accidental deaths come in 2 sub-categories aboard the Horizon.

The first is Industrial Accidents, which are most common in departments such as engineering and science, who handle dangerous tasks and materials. Deaths that are a result of Industrial Accidents have several common signs. Firstly, they will occur in the victims place of work, that is, if an engineer dies as a result of an Industrial Accident, their corpse will most likely be found in Engineering. Second, they will have occurred doing something related to their job, such as an engineer dying from radiation exposure due to setting up the Supermatter unprotected. It is important to note, if someone dies as a result of an accident while doing something outside their job (such as a doctor found dead from radiation exposure in the Supermatter chamber), their death may instead be ruled as a Suicide.

The second type of accidental death is manslaughter. Very uncommon, manslaughter is when a person's death is accidentally caused by another. Circumstances such as excessive force resulting in death and medical malpractice fall under this section. The common signs of manslaughter are very different from those of Industrial Accidents. Firstly, it is usually the perpetrator who calls first responders to the scene, should it happen outside of medical itself. Secondly, the perpetrator usually comes clean without very much effort once they realize what exactly they have done, racked with guilt. They still must be arrested, as manslaughter is a charge under Protectorate Regulations. Medical Malpractice is somewhat harder to detect, as the doctor may believe themselves doing what is right for the patient, or may be stressed and mix up two medications, or two blood bags.

Homicide

Homicide is probably the easiest manner of death to determine: if it doesn't fit any of the previous categories, it was probably a homicide. Common signs also include signs of a struggle on the body, the victim will normally have multiple purposefully inflicted wounds, such as multiple gunshots, lacerations, stabs, or plain trauma. Homicides will eventually lead you more to establishing things like motive and means, but where manner of death is important for everything else, the most important thing in a homicide is cause of death, which we'll talk about here.

Causes of Death

Cause of Death, different from Manner of Death, is defined as what killed someone - hence the name -, and tends to be the "final nail in the coffin". For example, if someone were to be shot one time through the heart, and then 7 times in the right foot, the cause of death would not be the gunshots to the foot, but rather the gunshot through the heart even though the shots to the foot happened afterwards. Determining what exactly killed someone can be difficult, especially as a newer player, so here's a few types of damages and their causes.

Due to how Brainmed works, nearly all "causes of death" could be defined as deprivation of oxygen to the brain, or it's removal, but that'd be boring to write for everything, so go with what caused that oxygen deprivation for cause of death.

In order to be better organized, we will group some more specific and easy to overlook causes of death under their overarching manner of death, as well as give signs that point to that specific cause of death. By now in this guide, you should be able to pretty easily deduce if someone died via gunshots or stabbing. Remember that for all of these, the rest of your case files and investigations matter as well! You can sometimes figure out a general cause of death before even starting the autopsy and getting specific.

A couple of things to note:

• Burn damage will remove blood from the body with no bleeding.
• Any injuries done by Simplemobs (slimes, hivebots, carp) won't show up on the Autopsy Scanner.
• Broken ribcages may be a result of EMTs or bystanders attempting CPR before the person is declared dead, and not a result of whatever killed your victim.
• Dextrotoxin, a powerful paralytic, won't show up when running blood tests on your spectrometer.

These signs and causes of death aren't all encompassing, there is a lot that isn't here and up to you and your investigative skills to figure out!

The following lists display some of the possible causes of death you may encounter on the Horizon.

Industrial - Inhalation of Dangerous Gasses.

• • Most common in Engineers and Phoron Researchers.
  • Damage to the Lungs.
  • Other signs of Suffocation.
  • Trace Chemicals in the body, if phoron.

Industrial - Electrocution.

• • Massive Burns.
  • Significant loss of blood, but no bloodstains.
  • Heart Damage.

Manslaughter - Poisoning.

• • Massive Toxin damage.
  • Victim consumed something not fit for their consumption (ex. Unathi consuming alcohol).
  • Victim was injected with something not fit for their biology (ex. Vaurca getting injected with Dexalin).
  • Victim consumed something hazardous (ex. dranking liquid phoron).

Manslaughter - Excessive/Unnecessary Force.

• • Little physical damage.
  • Victim went into cardiac arrest.
  • Died while being detained, or while sparring.
  • Witness statements saying that someone continued to apply force once it was no longer necessary.

Malpractice - Surgery Mishaps.

• • Visible inflamed wounds, or open incisions
  • Infection shows up on a health analyser scan.
  • Victim had undergone surgery before death.
  • Simple procedure that had little risk of failure resulting in death.

Malpractice - Blood Rejection.

• • Toxin damage with no clear source.
  • Suffocation with no clear source.
  • Victim had received a blood transfusion before death.

Malpractice - Improper Transport.

• • Does not show up on any scans.
  • Best indicator is large trails of blood where the cadaver had previously been.
  • Witness testimonies will also be helpful.

Malpractice - Medication Overdose.

• • Heavy toxin damage.
  • Toxin report shows no harmful chemicals in the system.
  • Using an advanced mass spectrometer will show amounts of chemicals in the blood stream.

Malpractice - Failure to Respond

• • The victim was called out over the radio while still alive.
  • Victim expired after the call.
  • Responders did not respond to call.

Suicide via Gunshot.

• • Only injury is on the head, and is a gunshot.
  • Gun is very close to the corpse when found.
  • Only the victims fingerprints are on the gun.

Suicide via Hanging.

• • Victim is found dead hanging from the ceiling.
  • Noose only has victims fingerprints on it.
  • Victim is found alone, without signs of a struggle.

Homicide via illegal Cyborgification.

• • Victim has no brain.
  • You notice a new cyborg on the station.
  • No paperwork and Command approval has been given for cyborgification that shift.

Homicide via blood removal

• • No blood remaining in the body
  • No wounds at all.
  • Very few ways this could be caused. Perhaps the Chaplain might know something about this?

Sneaky stuff

Sometimes, people will try to fake being dead, and it's up to you to figure out if they're faking! There are 2 main ways death can be faked:

1. Zombie Powder - slows all bodily functions to near zero, and won't show up when you run the blood test with your basic spectrometer. The only way to detect is when the effects wear off and they get back up, or by begging science for an Advanced Spectrometer and running the test on that. You can tell if someone might be using zombie powder if they appear dead but have no wounds on them at all, even when doing a full body scan.
2. Changeling Resurrections - only available to changelings, it makes the body appear dead, while it is healing. If your responders are worth their salt however, they will detect this easily as using a stethoscope on the faking changeling will show that they are still breathing. Besides that, there is no way to detect this until they start talking to you while your arm deep in them.

Making The Arrest

While you, The detective or forensic investigator do not have the power to make arrests, you're a pretty helpful hand in the process. If you have enough evidence, please present it to your fellow security team and hope they're competent enough to believe you if you figure out who the primary suspect is for the case (If you have any)