Pinal County Deputy Sheriff Apparently Vindicated

For those who haven’t heard about this story, a while back a Sheriff Deputy in south­ern Arizona reported he had been shot by a graz­ing wound on his side. The shooter used an AK/SKS type rifle. The shooter was part of a larger group of indi­vid­u­als car­ry­ing what appeared to be large bun­dles of mar­i­juana into the coun­try from Mexico — an all too com­mon sce­nario for the area.

What drew national atten­tion to the case was of course the ongo­ing debate regard­ing the open bor­ders in the US Southwest, the recently passed Arizona Law “S.B. 1070 “, and the con­tin­u­ing inva­sion of drugs and ille­gals across the US/Mexican bor­der. The inci­dent obvi­ously bol­stered pro­po­nents of tighter con­trols of the bor­der, while detracted from those who espouse the only peo­ple cross­ing the bor­der are only those who come into the US to “do the jobs Americans refuse to do” (Except Stephen Colbert for one day apparently).

It didn’t take long, but “experts” from back east looked at pho­tographs of the deputies wounds, and pon­tif­i­cated that the wounds were from very close range, and there­for self-inflicted, in an attempt to fur­ther a polit­i­cal agenda.

What is out of the ordi­nary is an expert mak­ing such bold claims based solely on photographs.

Prudent experts don’t make such claims. Generally experts rely on “best evi­dence”, or the actual evidence.

Case in point, I was con­tacted roughly a half-dozen times by var­i­ous local news orga­ni­za­tions to com­ment on the shoot­ing, and specif­i­cally offer opin­ions as to if the wound was self-inflicted or a dis­tance shot, based on the photographs.

I said the pho­tos of the wounds would be bet­ter dis­cussed by a med­ical exam­iner (coro­ner), and sug­gested a spe­cific indi­vid­ual here in Arizona. The reporter said they were sched­uled to talk with that per­son in just a few minutes.

The call back indi­cated that expert said the best evi­dence was the shirt in ques­tion, and not the photographs.

I told the reporter that I’ve looked at the pho­tographs, and I didn’t see any­thing in the pho­to­graph that would sug­gest a “close shot”, thus indi­cat­ing a self-inflicted wound. But I wasn’t will­ing to go on the record, in print or on video, based on photographs.

Well just a short while later, the shirt was ana­lyzed by the Arizona Department of Public Safety crime lab. And their report included the statement:

“A hole was located on the back left side of the t-shirt. The area around the hole was micro­scop­i­cally and chem­i­cally processed for the pres­ence of gun­shot residues. Bullet wipe was found which is con­sis­tent with the pas­sage of a bul­let; how­ever, no gun pow­der was detected.”

The impor­tant part of the story is that the shirt was exam­ined both micro­scop­i­cally, as well as chem­i­cally. You can’t per­form chem­i­cal test­ing on a photograph.

The lack of gun pow­der really isn’t shock­ing. A rifle has a much higher prob­a­bil­ity of com­pletely burn­ing the smoke­less gun pow­der par­ti­cles. The phrase “bul­let wipe”, means that there were trace metal residues trans­ferred onto the shirt from the pas­sage of the bul­let. This might be traces of cop­per, lead, or both. This isn’t uncom­mon when a bul­let per­fo­rates cloth­ing material.

What isn’t detailed in the report, and would have to be obtained from either the firearm examiner’s notes, or fur­ther test­ing, was if there was any soot­ing, char­ring, or burnt fibers. This would indi­cate a close range shot, and there­for pos­si­bly a “self-inflicted wound”. The fibers being burnt from the jet of flame leav­ing the muz­zle of the bar­rel. This event would not occur from a dis­tance shot.

So based on the verbage of the report, it’s really unclear as to if the shoot­ing occured up-close, or at a dis­tance. But more likely from a distance.