Fire Fatality Investigations
Wednesday, September 27, 2023
136 Drury Inn & Suites St. Louis Forest Park
2111 Sulphur
Saint Louis, MO 63139
Check in/Breakfast 7am - 8am
Class begins at 8am
Registration closes at 5pm Eastern, Sunday, September 24, 2023.
Dr. Elayne Pope, Ph. D is a Forensic Anthropologist who researches how the human body burns with applications to fatal fire casework. She received her doctorate from the University of Arkansas in 2007 for “The Effects of Fire on Human Remains.” Dr. Pope has been a researcher and instructor for the San Luis Obispo Fire Investigation Strike Team (SLO FIST) Fatal Fire Death Investigation Course since 2008 where human cadavers are utilized to recreate fatal fire scenes using structures, vehicles, and outdoor fire environments. Dr. Pope specializes in the analysis of traumatic injury and its implications for fatal fire investigations along with examining burn patterns of individual casework. Her training courses examine how the human body is an important type of physical evidence from fatal fire scenes and the value of evidence preservation for fatal fire casework.
The Fatal Fire Investigation Training Course is a scientific approach to how the human body burns in different types of fire scenes (structures, vehicles, confined space, and outdoors) for Law Enforcement, Fire Investigators, and Medicolegal Investigators. Training is derived from over a decade of experimental burn research with human cadavers in a variety of fire environments that are routinely encountered in forensic casework. The heat-related changes of the human body (burn damage and pugilistic positioning) are presented along with the types of physical evidence that survives for investigators at the fatal fire scene.
Fatal Fire Investigation Training Course Topics:
•Introduction to normal burn patterns and heat related changes of the body during a fire.
•Normal heat-related changes for the arms, legs, torso, and head (natural stages of burning to full cremation) and their appearance/condition after the fire.
•Heat-related changes of preexisting traumatic injury from gunshot wounds, blunt force trauma, and sharp force trauma in burned human remains.
•Experimental case examples of vehicle fires, structure fires, outdoor fires, the use of ignitable liquids, and criminal attempts to destroy physical evidence of the body.
•Effects of suppression, post-fire changes to the body, and problems with improper handling of fragile burned human remains/evidence from the scene.
•Fatal fire scene documentation, evidence handling, the autopsy, and methods of victim identification from bodies that were ‘burned beyond recognition’.
Fees:
IAAI Member Price $285.00
Non-IAAI Member Price $425.00
Credit / Debit Card payments only, if you must use a check or use other means:
Please contact: IAAI-Training@firearson.com
Any questions? IAAI-Training@firearson.com
Registration for this event is closed.