Whats most challenging about being a forensic scientist?
Because I’m self-employed, I’m not the first at the scene, the state folks are. The challenge on my part as a defense criminalist is to go back and look at the photos, look at the write-ups, the lab notes, and decide if they actually collected all the evidence they needed. Why are the things in the crime scene the way they are? Are there problems in how they collected evidence? I see if there are unanswered questions or things that are being ignored. Also, a lot of what I do deals with the underbelly of society and it’s not necessarily fun to do that. I encounter bad stuff: mutilated bodies, child abuse, autopsies. Sometimes people say, “I can’t do this anymore, I don’t want to see any more dead bodies.
