I'm waiting for them to do a "special report" on how the killer would already be in jail if we only had a national database of "gun fingerprints" for every gun sold in this country.http://www.cnn.com/2001/LAW/01/21/atlanta.sheriff/index.html
Gun 'fingerprints' found in Georgia lawman's murder
January 21, 2001
Web posted at: 9:48 p.m. EST (0248 GMT)
From Art Harris
CNN Correspondent
DECATUR, Georgia (CNN) -- A Georgia Bureau of Investigation crime lab expert tells CNN how -- using bullets from the victim and shell casings from the crime scene -- she was able to identify the type of gun the killer used in December to ambush DeKalb County sheriff-elect Derwin Brown.
In a red brick office building outside Atlanta, a tall woman in a Georgia Tech sweatshirt saunters down the hall. In one hand, she's carrying a 9 mm Tec 9 machine pistol, in the other, a clip full of bullets. No one blinks. They know Bernadette Davy is a crack firearms examiner with the GBI, and this is her turf, the crime lab.
That is where she examined the bullets from the murder of sheriff-elect Brown and determined they all came from the same gun, a 9 mm semiautomatic like the one she is packing.
A few weeks ago, Davy advised the DeKalb County homicide task force working on the case to be on the lookout for that particular type of gun as the murder weapon.
Bullet 'fingerprints'
She turns a corner and enters a room the size of a small broom closet. The walls are padded. She hands out earplugs, then snaps the 32-cartridge magazine into the gun, aims into a barrel full of water and fires. Blam, blam, blam.
The water slows the bullets so they are not damaged, and Davy fishes them out. What she is looking for are so-called fingerprints on the slugs, marks etched into each bullet as it travels down the barrel of the gun. Every bullet fired by the same gun has identical markings, she says.
This is how she has tested several semiautomatics submitted to her for examination in the Brown case. She compares markings from the slugs that killed the victim to markings on the slugs from other guns she tests.
"We look at the whole surface of the bullet; the individual lines are basically the fingerprint of the particular barrel, and you can see the lines are identical from one test fire to the other," Davy says.
Emotional distance
How did she conclude all 11 bullets that hit Brown were fired from the same gun?
To demonstrate, she plops down onto a chair in the lab. Then, she takes a "test bullet" as she would from any crime scene and plugs it into a slot in her microscope. The image of the bullet is magnified and projected onto a TV monitor. A second bullet is placed into another slot, and its image appears on the left side of the TV monitor. She turns the bullets until lines and ridges match up, then explains:
"Two bullets are on the same alignment, and we'll go from one line impression to eventually all (of them) and see if the individual characteristics or the lines match from one bullet to the other," she says.
Far removed from the crime scene, and from the victims and their families, Davy says she is able to keep her emotional distance much more easily than police, who are directly involved with the case. "We just get a bullet or a cartridge case, and there's not a whole lot of emotional attachment to that," Davy says.
But her job is crucial, and she must perform it meticulously. One day soon, she hopes to be called to the stand in a Brown murder trial and testify that the bullets that killed him came from the gun the killer used. But so far, police have made no arrest nor found the murder weapon.
What sources say investigators know:
• Brown was shot at close range as he was walking down his driveway, but not close enough to leave powder burns. The killer or killers were waiting on a cold rainy night, December 15, when he came home from a party celebrating his completion of sheriff's training. It was his wife's birthday, and he had just given her roses earlier, as he had done every year during their 23-year marriage. She found him dead just a few feet from the front door.
• The killer used two different types of 9 mm bullets. Police theorize that before the shooting the killer loaded his clip with one type 9 mm bullet, then ran out and finished loading his clip with different bullets from another box.
"Either he ran out of bullets and just grabbed what was available or maybe he thought using two different types of bullets would confuse the medical examiner," said one investigator.
• Investigators also know that in his campaign for sheriff, Brown had stirred up a hornet's nest of anger.
He'd promised to clean up the DeKalb County Sheriff's Department, with its long history of corruption and scandal, to audit the books and fire as many as 50 employees. Even before he took office, Brown had sent out letters telling many employees they would soon be without jobs. So far, police say they have conducted more than 300 interviews, including employees of the DeKalb County department.
CNN also learned that investigators armed with a search warrant recently searched the home of one fired deputy who had doubled his $40,000 salary by working a lot of overtime. "We were looking for the murder weapon but didn't find anything," one source tells CNN. The former deputy's lawyer reportedly denied his client had anything to do with the murder.
Corruption probe
Many others stood to lose financially from the reform-minded sheriff elect. Brown had said he would review anyone doing business with the jail, which had a $50 million budget.
Among those targeted for review: food and medical service providers, and bail bondsmen hand-picked by previous sheriff Sid Dorsey. Bonding companies owed the county almost $500,000, according to sources.
In an August runoff, Brown won a surprise landslide victory over Dorsey, who had been county sheriff of the sprawling Atlanta suburb. District attorney J. Tom Morgan had announced he would investigate charges of alleged corruption and mismanagement under Dorsey.
Within weeks, Morgan will convene two grand juries, one to look into the unsolved murder, the other to investigate corruption allegations surrounding the jail.
"Until I saw the body and realized how many times he'd been shot ... (that) was when I realized this was someone who was a professional and wanted Derwin dead very badly," Morgan told CNN.
