Enhancing Scene Processing Protocols to Improve Victim Identification and Field Detection of Human Remains in Mass Fatality Scenes.

摘要

Considerable lessons have been learned in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks on the United States on September 11, 2001. Disaster management plans have been created adressing diverse issues such as pre-incident planning for first responders, forensic identification of the victims, or the need to keep victims families informed. However, the field processing of the mass fatality scene has received less attention. A position paper by Homeland Security (National Preparedness Guidelines, September 2007) provides two important directives for this task: 1) all of the human remains must be recovered from the scene, and 2) this must be accompanied of the complete documentation of the human remains and all other evidentiary items. The sheer volume of material present at the mass fatality scene often overwhelms investigators, who then tend to minimize the importance of proper and detailed documentation of the spatial distribution of the remains. It is assumed that the information to be gleaned by expending time and effort in the precise documentation of the location of items at the scene is negligible, and time costs for such effort are appreciable. The emphasis is instead placed on removing the evidence as quickly as possible, with little or no provenience (precise spatial location) documentation, in order to begin the process of identifying the victims, determining the cause of the crash and clearing the scene of all crash debris as soon as possible. The field documentation and recovery of physical evidence associated with mass fatality scenes is indeed a tremendously complicated task. This is due to three interrelated factors: (1) the sheer volume of fragmented, and often comingled, human remains and other physical evidence, densely concentrated and anisotropically distributed at the scene, (2) the large size of the debris field created, and (3) the accordingly large number of personnel, equipment and other resources required to process the scene.