Crime Scenes

During a blizzard, a homeless man was murdered and dumped on the sidewalk outside the homeless shelter in my story. By the time my protagonist finds him, the body is starting to freeze solid at the extremities, but there's blood on the concrete and snow.

My question is: how long before the police release the scene back to the public?

 

I’m not police but medical (UK) and have attended loads of crime scenes, so I am not an expert but here are my thoughts. If the body was dumped here then it is not the primary crime scene (they will want to find this and, would likely spend much more time there).

It would probably be released within a day. Forensics would come in a few hours and do their thing. Police don’t want a crime scene in a public place for long because they have to use officers on the cordons and they want to get the area back to its normal use quickly (don’t want a gristly murder scene laying there for the public to fret over).

They may well use a tent to cover the body to keep it from the public eye and to try and preserve any evidence.

 

Thank you. I took a few criminal justice courses in college, but none of them got into the particulars of crime scene procedures. It makes sense they'd want to get done with the scene as quickly as possible.

I don't think there'd be a ton of evidence they could gather, given the body is dumped during a blizzard that's lasted several days. There would be blood on the snow from where the victim died, but he doesn't have ID and his fingerprints aren't in the system, so he's not easily identified. I see it as one of those unfortunate circumstances where it's unlikely to be solved.

At any rate, if they can release the scene within 12 hours, great. Within 24, okay. Longer than that, and my story runs into issues.

 

Your story won’t run into trouble. Local police cover the body with a tent, forensics turn up an hour later, scoop up the blood from the snow etc., area search through the snow for evidence (weapon, more blood, items of clothing, bullet casings etc.) and the body gets sent off to where ever it goes in the US (I am assuming your story is US based). I don’t know the US specifics, but I think 12 hours and the tape coming down is entirely believable.

 

Sadly, in many large cities in the US, the fact that the person was homeless may mean that the scene returns to "normal" pretty fast because some people may consider homeless people less important than traffic flow.

Years ago, a friend of mine was driving home on a freeway at rush hour and saw the body of what looked like a homeless person on the side of a highly trafficked off-ramp. Traffic was slow enough that my friend was positive of what they were seeing and called 911. Grammar be damned, I'm wording it this way intentionally: Some people's idea of investigating such a scene to figure out what happened to that person would require partial closure of the freeway (one lane for sure), as well as the busy offramp. At the time I lived nearby and friend was so haunted, friend asked me to get in the car with them and go back to the offramp to see if authorities were there. No closures, and it was like it had never happened, and perhaps only an hour had passed. Friend was so haunted, friend ended up doing a lot of volunteer work for homeless organizations.

 

It is based in the U.S., in Colorado Springs. It's a relatively minor plot point, but one I wanted to get correct. With no weapon on site (it was a knife to the liver) and tire tracks melted away (my world uses melters instead of plows to clear roads), there's really nothing to go on.

What I have found is there's a lot of similarities in police work across the world, especially when it comes to forensics. The international forensic investigative community tends to share notes on what works and what doesn't.

It is sad, I agree. Investigations can be influenced by politics, and it's true that people care more about what happens to a well-respected member of the community than what happens to Joe Nobody. I'm happy to say my community has a team of officers specifically to work with homeless people. They don't just kick the homeless folks out of an area, but they work to establish trust with them and try to help them.

 

(This is really testing my "skill" as a "writer"...) Logical question @Homer Potvin ,and one that friend may or may not have attempted to find out. Ahem. Most logical people would say that for a murder of a homeless person to have taken place, or for an overdose of a homeless person to have taken place, or for death by natural causes of a homeless person to take place would logically require an acknowledgment that a homeless person was ever there. What may or may not have happened, however, is that when friend may or may not have tried to follow up, someone may or may not have tried to convince friend that the body friend saw was never a person at all and was just a pile of blankets. Because we all know a pile of blankets has a head with describable hair and feet with describable shoes and legs in describable pants, and carries a backpack, right? Who knows, maybe friend doesn't know much about blankets?

It was like it never happened.

I should add Friend is the most sane, calm, "normal," reliable person I know and is not given to jumping to conclusions or over reaction to anything, ever (that would be me). Friend is the calm,logical, reasoner you want when shit's going down.

So, for the OP, there may be something in there (or not?) to work with.

That's really cool to hear, and, IMHO, a really good investment.

 

The reason for the dead homeless person in my story is this:

My MC is the custodian for a homeless shelter. He tends to drink alcohol throughout his day. He's never shitfaced during work hours, but alcohol is a borderline problem for him. At the end of his workday, he goes out to shovel snow off the sidewalk, and finds the victim at the front door, dead. When the police come to take his statement, they notice the smell of alcohol on my MC.

It becomes an issue that brings my MC's credibility into question, and brings his deeper issues (the regrets of his past) to the surface. His boss/mentor/friend gives him the simple task of taking a self-driving car to pick up the boss's daughter from the bus stop the next morning. Even though my MC lives in a world with self-driving cars, it's still illegal to be intoxicated in a vehicle.

Translation: my MC has to skip his drinks the next day, at least until the boss's daughter is brought back to the shelter. When my MC realizes he functions well enough without alcohol, he gets the beginnings of inspiration to kick his habit. Later, he'll have to deal with stressful memories without alcohol as well.

The dead person on the doorstep also foreshadows the attack on the shelter by the antagonists. The attack begins and ends where the homeless person died, so that doorstep will become another regret my MC has to contend with.

 

If it's any help at all, I remember one of my forensics lecturers telling us if we were to go to a standard crime scene we'd maybes get 1-3 hours tops to investigate (which we were all quite surprised about) - though this would depend on the complexity of the scene. Like @Midge23 said, this wouldn't be the primary scene if the body was dumped there. They'd really want to find where that primary scene is as the majority of the evidence would be located there.

In any case, time spent at the scene would include photographing the area, collecting any evidence, etc (again depending on what the scene is like). Forensic investigations are also limited like most things by money, so they wouldn't necessarily be doing every single test available. On another note, in this case it's going to be very useful to look closely at the cadaver for evidence to lead to the primary scene, this could be fibres, bodily fluids, debris etc so they're going to want to take the cadaver away to be looked at by pathology pretty much as soon as evidence has been collected and the scene documented. I'd say you'd be safe having it wrapped up within the day for sure.

Sorry if that's a bit rambly, I could go on and on when it comes to forensic science!

 

Thanks. I figured this could be an all-encompassing thread about crime scenes, not just something specific to my question. I've been at only a few crime scenes, and it's never been like on any TV show. Granted, I've never seen any murder scenes. The cases I've seen were vandalism and/or theft (in a school and church, respectively). No one dusted for prints. About all they did was take note of the vandalism, snap a few pictures, and collect a footprint.

 

They would take the body for forensics, and an autopsy. Also try to identify him and notify any family.