HPD evidence technician helping solve crimes

Originally posted here.

Throw around the words “crime scene” and “evi­dence” these days and you’ll very likely get an image of some­one car­ry­ing a case full of fin­ger­print pow­ders and high tech ultra­vi­o­let lights into a dark house sur­rounded by crime scene tape. Then, moments later, an image of the same per­son, now hunched over a micro­scope in a state-of-the-art crime lab lit with greens and pur­ples and blues, solv­ing an unsolv­able mur­der sim­ply by play­ing with chem­i­cals for a few minutes.

In the real world, images like that are few and far between. Melinda Strange knows first­hand that the real world of crime scene inves­ti­ga­tion and evi­dence pro­cess­ing is far less glam­orous, but no less difficult.

Since 1993, Strange has been the Huntsville Police Department’s sole evi­dence and prop­erty tech­ni­cian, doc­u­ment­ing crime scenes and man­ag­ing more than 1,500 pieces of phys­i­cal evi­dence stored in the HPD prop­erty room.

A native of Houston, Strange came to Huntsville with her hus­band in the 1980s, ini­tially tak­ing a job as an office man­ager at a local depart­ment store. When the store ceased oper­a­tion, Strange began job-hunting, and even­tu­ally applied for a dis­patch job at both the Huntsville Police Department and the Walker County Sheriff’s Office.

After inter­view­ing for both posi­tions, Strange chose HPD.

“The main perk of work­ing for the police depart­ment was that if you worked for the sheriff’s depart­ment, you were prob­a­bly the only female on night shift and you got to dou­ble as a female jailer,” Strange said. “So, I chose the police department.”

In April 1986, Strange began work­ing for police dis­patch, a posi­tion she held until 1993. In the early 90s, her work­load swelled as she began attend­ing the Montgomery County Sheriff’s Academy to earn her police certification.

For two years, Strange took classes for five hours every night, worked the night shift at the police depart­ment, and still man­aged to find time to raise her three daughters.

“I didn’t do it because I wanted to be a gun toter,” she said. “I did it because if I wanted to go any­where other than com­mu­ni­ca­tions, I felt I needed it.”

In 1993, Strange applied for the newly vacant posi­tion of evi­dence tech­ni­cian at the police depart­ment. After get­ting the job, she went through a bat­tery of new train­ing pro­grams, includ­ing crime scene doc­u­men­ta­tion and fin­ger­print­ing training.

From the begin­ning, she found that her new respon­si­bil­i­ties were more than a lit­tle challenging.

“It was over­whelm­ing,” she said. “Learning which orders to file in what court, how to decide whether or not to keep the prop­erty room set up or to change it around, it was just a lot to handle.”

Today, Strange has set­tled into her job, but still finds new chal­lenges in the mas­sive work­load she faces every day.

“Not count­ing drugs, we have about 1,860 pieces of evi­dence here,” she said. “That’s not count­ing checks and film and video. That’s the evi­dence itself.”

With the rise and suc­cess of “CSI” sev­eral years ago, Strange found her­self with a new chal­lenge, dis­pelling mis­con­cep­tions about the work she does.

“People just need to know that those shows are there for enter­tain­ment,” she said. “I leave the foren­sics to the foren­sic sci­en­tists. All I do is try to help find pieces of the puz­zle and then take care of all the pieces when they get back here.”

Huntsville is not equipped with the kind of high tech crime labs you see on tele­vi­sion. Strange’s “lab” is merely a small room in the HPD base­ment, where the most sophis­ti­cated pro­ce­dure she can per­form is fin­ger­print­ing. Everything else, includ­ing blood, DNA and nar­cotics, must be sent to a crime lab in Austin or Houston for fur­ther processing.

“I’m not a chemist. I’m an evi­dence tech­ni­cian,” she said. “I’m trained to col­lect the evidence.”

Though her job is not as glam­orous or as high pro­file as the tele­vi­sion ver­sion, Strange still takes plea­sure in find­ing that one pieces of evi­dence that will either put some­one away or exon­er­ate them.

“As much as I would like to say that I helped put a bad guy, it would kill me to think that I helped con­vict some­one for some­thing they didn’t do,” she said. “We’re not Houston. We’re not New York. We’re not Las Vegas, never will be. We just have to make sure the evi­dence is preserved.”