Crime Stories with Nancy Grace - Body Bags with Joseph Scott Morgan: Frozen in Time, Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School

Episode Date: August 21, 2022

On February 14, 2018, a 19-year-old named Nikolas Cruz opens fire on students and teachers at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, murdering 17 people and injuring 17 more. It is the deadliest high school shooting in United States history, surpassing even the Columbine shooting, in 1999, which ended with 15 people dead. Nikolas Cruz arrives at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School via an Uber, constructs his firearm, and then begins his assault on his former classmates.  In this episode of Body Bags, forensics expert Joseph Scott Morgan and Jackie Howard discuss the details of the shooting, the weapon used in the attack, how the crime scene remains untouched after all these years, the reasons behind preserving the high school in this way, and the significance of the date of the shooting.  Subscribe to Body Bags with Joseph Scott Morgan : Apple Podcasts Spotify iHeart Show Notes: 0:00 - Intro 0:45 - Joseph Scott and Jackie discuss the details of the shooting itself 7:45 - Did Cruz pull the fire alarm or could it have been triggered by smoke from the gun?  9:23 - Explanation of the layout of the building, crime scene, and how investigators would go about analyzing it  12:23 - The evolution of crime scene investigations 14:56 - The duration of the shooting and how hurricane proof glass ended up saving lives 19:01 - Nikolas Cruz’s background and how he blended in with students to escape the scene  20:29 - Cruz’s arrest and recovery of the weapon  21:30 - Joe talks about the weapon used in the attack 22:51 - The fear that teachers and students experienced seeing and hearing the gunshots 24:44 - Joe explains the Big Black Gun Theory  27:18 -  Joe and Jackie discuss the crime scene remaining untouched since the shooting 28:50 - As evidence is collected, it’s sealed - how do you seal an entire building? 31:05 - Why would you want to leave a crime scene untouched for this long? 33:14 - Joe talks about the importance of chain of custody in forensics 35:34 - The reasons for preserving the high school in its condition  39:22 - Joe talks about the significance of this occurring on Valentine’s Day See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is an iHeart Podcast. Body Bags with Joseph Scott Morgan When most people think about going to school, they think of it as kind of a safe haven. A harbor, if you will, from the rest of the world. It's a place where you go, hopefully, to develop and learn, to begin to prepare yourself for the world outside of that environment. Back on Valentine's Day, 2018. for the world outside of that environment. Back on Valentine's Day, 2018, at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School,

it became a killing ground. Today, we're going to talk about a place frozen in time. The scene of a mass murder. I'm Joseph Scott Morgan, and this is Body Bags. Jackie Howard, executive producer of Crime Stories with Nancy Grace. I've got to tell you, I think in all of my years, all the cases that I've covered, I've never heard, at least in my recent memory, of a crime scene that has been locked down and literally frozen in time like this particular scene has been over all of these years. I sit there and I think, you know, what's the purpose of this? And it's quite fascinating when you begin to think

about a crime scene that has not been touched by anyone since those moments when it was processed. And then essentially locks were put on the door and the waiting began. This scene, Joe, as you say, has not been touched in nearly five years and that is a great discussion and i can't wait to talk to you about that but let's go back and look at what happened and discuss the forensics there first in 2018 as you said 19 year old nicholas cruz opened fire on the students and staff of marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida. 17 people were killed, 17 people were injured, and Cruz was a former student at the school. He arrived, surprisingly, by Uber. He was dressed in an unassuming way when he arrived. Yet, his destruction is massive. In fact, it was bigger and surpassed

the Columbine High School massacre. 15 people were killed in that Colorado mass shooting. So, when Nicholas Cruz opened fire, he really set it up. He knew what he was doing, Joe. He entered the school dressed in a certain way, carrying a backpack, and then he set off a fire alarm. And at that point, everybody's going to head out into the hallways. He knew what he was doing. When Cruz entered this school, he was purposed to do this mass shooting. And it appears to be almost as if he was chameleon-like. He blended in with the environment. It was an environment that he was familiar with because he had attended school there.

He knew where all the points of access were. He knew where stairwells were, for instance. And when he entered building 12 they refer to it also as building 1200 you can actually hear that in the police transmissions over the radio when he showed up he showed up with this what they refer to as a weapon bag it's like a gun bag. And he is first witnessed getting access to the building by kind of a safety patrol person that's part of the staff. And I don't know at that moment in time if they really thought too much of it, but he entered through one of the access doors that's immediately adjacent to an internal stairwell. The first point along this storyline is that he met a student that is entering the stairwell right after he does. And in a chilling remark, he looks at this kid, because it was a kid, a teenager, looks at him and says,

you better get out of here. Things are about to get messy. And it's at that moment, Tom, he unzips his bag, and he takes out a Smith & Wesson M&P AR-15 style rifle, and he begins to assemble it. So he's got this thing disassembled. It's kind of broken down into its component parts at that moment in time. But before he goes out the door and begins to shoot, he takes out what could be termed as a tactical vest, but it doesn't have like plates in it, like ballistic plates that prevent you from being shot or being injured as a result of being shot.

It's a vest, however, that contains multiple pockets where you can put magazines in. These magazines that feed into the weapon. These are not contrary to what you hear. People always use the term clip. There are very few weapons in the world that actually use clips. Famously, the M1 Grand from World War II, that used a clip. These are not clips. These are magazines, and they hold multiple rounds.

He had a variety of these. Some had 30-round capacity. I think there were a couple that may have been a 40-round capacity. And it's a semi-automatic weapon. So that means that every time you pull the trigger and you have to pull it, it's not fully automatic. You have to engage that trigger in order for it to fire. It automatically ejects the round and then seeds a new round into the chamber. So he assembles this thing and then exits in another kind of moment in time that you see it's

this frozen segment that door opens and he goes into what would be termed as a tactical stance where he's kind of leaned forward into the weapon and he is now moving down the hallway and it's at that point time he begins to fire rounds. And that's like within, I don't know, probably a minute after he has arrived through those doors. Now, this has happened very quickly. Can you imagine engaging with somebody, talking to them, warning them, then assembling a weapon, putting on a tactical vest and exiting exiting out the door, and all of a sudden, you're popping off rounds. And some people have stated that he had pulled the fire alarm and then started firing. That's not what happened. He started firing, and then after about 45 seconds,

the fire alarm is engaged, and people believe the investigators believe, that this was kind of like drawing the students out. Because we can all identify with this, can't we? You know, like fire drills that we went through in school. What do they do? They tell you to line up at the door. We're going to march you out of the building and we're going to go out on the playground or the adjacent grounds so that we're clear of the building that's actually i think probably what his purpose was and when you get people contained in this small space in the hallways there's not too many places

you can go do we know joe whether or not Cruz actually pulled the fire alarm or if the fire suppression system was triggered by the smoke that would have come from these rounds being fired? The authorities have stated on several occasions that they believe that he initiated a fire alarm. It was at that point in time that these children were drawn out into the hallway and these rounds are continuing to be fired. Now, this creates a panic at this point in time because you've got the fire alarm going off and many people can identify with that sound. I mean, it just rings in your ears. It's meant to do that because it's trying to get your attention that there's danger and it was initiated and the people flood the hallway and then the rounds are being popped off and suddenly they have an

awareness that there's gunfire and they flee back into the classrooms so you've got this kind of panicked environment that's going on and it kind of from a psychological standpoint it's kind of panicked environment that's going on and it kind of from a psychological standpoint it's kind of fascinating because you know if you get people in fear many times like this they're easily controlled think about gunfire people are terrified at that moment time so they're going to you know kind of clutch together if you will and one of the first rooms that crews fired into no one was actually hit but he fired through the glass window of the door it was at that point in time that people knew that there was something horrible afoot i think the size of the building would make for a forensic nightmare on top of the already nightmarish scene of seeing bodies and blood and dispelled brass and so many things. This was a three-story

building which normally contained about 900 students, 30 classrooms. What kind of a scene would have greeted them? What would they have seen? Over the course of my career, I worked several mass fatality events. And there's a way that you go about this and you have to purpose yourself in it. It's not like a single investigator goes out to the scene and directs maybe a crime scene photographer, maybe a crime scene investigator that would collect physical evidence at the scene and document it and pull measurements and all that. No, that's not the way it happens. You have to call in when you have all of these elements to the crime scene, which the building itself is going to be the primary scene. And then for that building, you will have individual spots that have to be focused on.

And the only way you can accomplish that is to form up into teams. And generally, they're three-person teams or maybe four-person teams. And you'll have a primary lead detective. You'll have a crime scene investigator as i mentioned and you'll have a photographer and then you might have what's referred to as a scribe which is an individual that is literally taking notes they'll take measurements many times along with the crime scene investigator who is separate from the detective so that all of this data can be compiled because as you mentioned it's overwhelming i remember on any number of cases where i've walked in and i've got multiple deaths at a scene where somebody has just gone in and

just you know wiped out i remember one case in particular where I had a family of nine that were completely decimated. And it was a very tiny, tiny house, maybe 1,000 to 1,100 square feet, had three bedrooms in it. And there were dead bodies everywhere. There was blood everywhere. You have to be very aware of your surroundings. You have to be very familiar with the people that you're working with. It's not a good idea to pair or group individuals that everything is documented. Keep in mind, one of the ways that I like to describe crime scene investigators and detectives, I describe them as historians. And people kind of scoff at that. Sometimes I'll mention that to my students. But you are a historian because there's no one else in this environment that is going to go back and specifically document these events that occurred on that date, on that February day, and that it will be studied for years and years and years to come. And you look back in the historical record and you can see this. And there's been actually kind of a neat evolution with crime scene

investigation over the years relative to this. In the early years, you could see how vague and nonspecific many crime scene reports are. I remember years ago, I was given the report that was generated from Bonnie and Clyde's deaths in North Louisiana. Actually, they were handed to me by the coroner of that particular parish at that time. And I remember reading over that and thinking, well, it's really neat reading the clothing descriptions and some of the injuries that were documented, but it lacked a lot of specificity. That's not the case today. There are a lot of specifics that go into this and i think that when you look back at this historically it's something that is fantastic that it has been

documented but also the most important thing is that it memorializes the dead and what occurred that day and it's not something that's just know, they just kind of died and then vanished and there's no record of it. It's something solid that you can kind of look at scientifically and analytically and go back and begin to understand the measure of a good report, the measure of a great documentation on any case like this is that with measurements and photographs, I want to be able to take a case file and go back out to the scene. And when I begin to read that and look at the environment, I can go back in time to that day and I can see precisely where everything is. And there have been

many cases where we've had to go out and reconstruct crime scenes. And those reconstructions are completely dependent upon what you did at that one moment in time as an investigator. Well, that is certainly going to come in handy with what we're going to talk about in just a minute, Joe. But there's one more point that I want to bring up about this case. Investigators tell us, and what we see from the surveillance video from the school and other things this attack only lasted six minutes i mean and that is from the beginning when he walks in the school till he exits the actual shootings themselves were done in less than four minutes. When you think about the horror that befell the staff and these children, these lives that had been lived up to this point

are completely changed and altered in almost the twinkling of an eye. That these kids are gone. Or these kids are so damaged now, not just physically, but emotionally, that the course of their lives have been changed. And then you kind of extend that out peripherally to everybody they're connected to in their circle. That's a moment in time that will last forever and ever. And the fact that he was able to perpetrate this crime, and he, I mean, Nicholas Cruz,

he was able to perpetrate this. This goes to a big issue when you begin to kind of put together the facts around the case and you think about how much thought went into this. How much time would it take to execute this? Now, I'm not saying he walked around with a stopwatch, but the efficiency and time, that short amount of time goes to efficiency. The efficiency that he executed this with is quite striking. That it could all occur. And then, not just that, but the fact that he was able to almost literally dump everything that he had. Remember we talked about early on that gun bag and the tack vest that he had and, of course, the weapon. You dump that and you exit out away from where the police are congregating

and you make your way out into the children that are now just absolutely fleeing for their lives and you begin to blend in at that moment time he's like a phantom. He can't be seen. One of the more striking things about this, you know, we talked about the fire alarm and all of this. He went to, I think it was the third floor teacher's lounge that was up there. You know, we're talking about Florida. So they've got hurricane-proof glass in these buildings. That is the external windows. The way he had the setup that he had for this rifle that he was using, he actually had what's called a deployable bipod,

which are two little legs that can drop down and extend on the front of this weapon. And it gives you stability. You think about an old-fashioned machine gun, you know, like you see in World War II pictures where, you know, it takes a team of guys to put the thing up on a tripod. Well, this is a bipod, and it gives you the ability to steady the weapon. He tried to fire through the glass with his high-velocity rounds, and he would have been targeting the police officers.

These defects in the window were actually pointed toward where the cops were egressing on the building. He was going to mow down everybody that was going to approach. So he's drawing them in. And again, this is, I think it goes to kind of this idea that he had, form and function, right? That I'm going to take as many people as I can. It was only the fact that that glass was made the way it was, that it was resistant, at least to a certain point, ballistically, that saved more people's lives.

It's at that point that he fled out another stairwell and made his way into the crowd and disappeared. you have to think a little bit about nicholas cruz's home environment because you know he's got all of this gear at his house. He's living with people that have essentially adopted him. He's got a gun bag. He's got a rifle. He's got an assault vest. And all of the magazines and ammunition that goes along with it. Joe, you said that Nicholas Cruz intended and planned and did, in fact, blend in with the students to make his escape, which, again, sets up planning.

But actually, how did he? Because we all know what teenagers dress like. They wear hoodies and T-shirts and jeans. Is that what he did? One interesting little side note about Nicholas Cruz was that he was, had been at at least involved in the junior rtc program at the high school he was part of the rifle team you call it rifle team but they use pellet guns and they would do practice and they'd be in competitions and all those sorts of things so he he actually had clothing that married up with the clothing that you see the kids wear that are

in ROTC and it's not a common military uniform that you might think of like camos or anything like that it was actually kind of a maroon pullover that had a crest on it and just a pair kind of nondescript slacks and lace-up shoes he did actually blend in very well so after Cruz left the building he went to a couple of fast food restaurants, was on his way to the mall, and that's where police arrested him. They stopped him in a neighborhood of the Wyndham Lakes neighborhood of Coral Springs, and that's where he was arrested. Did he have with him at the time the backpack that he took into the school carrying the guns? Were police able to recover that yeah they were able to recover everything you know including the weapon where was it did he hide it did he drop everything i mean i guess if i had shot a lot of people i

wouldn't want my weapon to be recovered so i would have tried to hide it no he just he dropped it right there because he he knew you know after he had attempted to fire through that window he knew the game was up at that point in time okay he'd already been spotted going into the school people could easily identify him i think he was lucid enough to understand that and i also think that you know if he is seen outside the grounds of that school carrying that weapon and being dressed like he's set up to go and assault a position in the military he's going to have eyes on him and he didn't he just literally dropped it right there and in its pristine state and pristine meaning from an investigative standpoint from a a forensic standpoint, it tracks his movement.

We know where he dropped it. We know where he dropped the vest. And you go back and you can analyze that. And that goes back to the movement. And they've spent a lot of time, the investigators have over the years, going back and kind of tracking his movement with every single shot that he took. I cannot imagine, thankfully, but I cannot imagine that as these 900-odd students and teachers poured out into the hallway, the image of seeing this guy holding a gun coming

towards you, pointing it at you, how frightening that would have been. Yeah, it would have been terrifying. I think for a moment, and many of us can identify on a certain level where you're thinking, you have an event that occurs in your life and you're sitting there thinking, this can't really be happening. I'm having a visual hallucination here or something. This can't be accurate. And then all of a sudden maybe you see

a muzzle flash which is the little flame that shoots out of the weapon you hear the report because you see the flash before you hear the report remember we're talking about something that is going faster than the speed of sound and then you hear the crack of the weapon and you look next to you and somebody that maybe you started off school with in elementary school is lying dead on the floor next to you or is bleeding out or is moaning in pain because they've been shot in the leg and suddenly it becomes real and that's when the adrenaline starts to flow and panic sets in it would have absolutely been horrendous and going back we were talking about the fire alarms and systems and all that sort of thing.

There would have been smoke, that smoke that is actually initiated and generated from that weapon being fired. And it has a very distinctive odor to it for those that have never smelt gun smoke. Literally, the burning of that powder has very distinctive smell. So that would have filled the environment as well. So you're being impacted by sight, by smell, by sound, everything. You're being assaulted by screams as well. And it would have been just a complete horror show. You mentioned to me before we started our conversation off air,

something called the big black gun theory. And as long as I have been doing this it is something that i had never heard of before it made perfect sense when you explained it to me but i had never heard of it what is the big black gun theory the bbg big black gun theory it's been something that's kind of been kicked around for years and this idea that when you see a platform like this weapon, it immediately draws the eye. And people understand it. They look at it and they say, well, that's a weapon that I've seen in movies or I've seen on the news. And it's scary.

All right. Right. The reason that comes into play in this particular case is, you know, we've talked about it before with with Nicholas Cruz, how he's kind of a chameleon that he blended in in this environment. And he knew probably that if he presents with this weapon, when he initially makes his way, you know, think about that first person that saw him, the safety monitor that's kind of riding around in this golf cart. If that person at that moment in time saw him, as the military says, all kitted out, that means with the tack vest on and the weapon worn on his chest, that would have raised the alarm at that moment in time. Oh, my God, we've got an active shooter before he ever pops off around. But in this case like he had awareness of that but yet he wanted the power of that weapon because it is powerful weapon i mean it's used you know by our military or a platform similar to that not that specific weapon but it's firing ammunition that's very similar to what our military uses. And he knew what he was going to descend on all of these students with and the faculty

with at that moment in time. So he had to keep it hidden. Because with the big black gun theory, if people see you with that, you're going to scare the hell out of them, you know, when they see it. And so he had to keep it concealed. Wouldn't that be the purpose? I don't think so. No, the purpose is not to scare people, Jackie.

Not to scare people. He wanted to eradicate people. That's what this was all about. And he wanted to make sure that he could insert himself into that environment as passively as possible. Go into that stairwell where he would be concealed. And get all of this equipment together, and then he'll follow it after. On all the crime scenes I've ever been on, death scenes, with a few exceptions, there's been a few that we have kind of held for, I don't know, I can think of maybe one or two for a two-week period. Okay.

Never, never in my experience, my individual little slice of the pie, have I seen, been a party to, or heard of a scene like this, that is this large, being frozen in time for below these many years and no one and i mean no one has been through there it really creates an environment that i think in this particular case where juror members can actually go back and begin to experience and get a taste for what actually occurred on that date the idea of going back to this scene five years later and things are as you said frozen in time but joe we know the importance of forensics being unchanged as forensic evidence is collected now it is placed inside a bag of some kind. Usually, depending on the investigator, a lot say they like paper because it doesn't leave any other kind of residue. It'll always say plastic because it preserves it better. I'm not an investigator. I don't know.

But I do know that the evidence that is collected is sealed. How do you seal a building? I've got to be a little clear about this because in the immediate when the teams went into this high school and began to work this scene, evidence was collected, you know, like the spent casings that would have been ejecting out of the port and striking the ground and bouncing all over the place. If there were projectiles that could be recovered, they were recovered. Okay. That's important for everybody to understand.

But, you know, there's a bigger thing at play here. When you have, like, for instance, large pools of blood, there's nothing you can do, okay, to collect a large pool of blood there's nothing you can do okay to collect a large pool of blood the blood is going to be there unless of course you have staff that comes in you know afterwards and begins to clean this and this does happen that's you know where this whole industry has kind of risen up crime scene cleanup companies and whatnot. I find it. Compelling in this particular case. That it was at that moment in time.

That after that initial. Processing of the scene. With the photographs and the measurements. And the collecting of the spent brass. The authorities. And probably at the behest. Of the DA. Made this incredible decision

that we're going to lock this thing down. We're going to lock it down. We're going to put up a fence around this place. We're going to seal it up. There's only going to be one person or maybe a couple people that actually have keys to this place where folks can actually go in

and have access to it. And that's quite interesting, you know, because there's still evidence there, but it's not evidence in the classic sense like we think of where we're collecting, you know, first off, we're collecting remains. We're collecting tufts of hair, which is kind of fascinating because one of the people that was out at the scene actually saw a tuft of hair that was still on the floor adjacent to a large pool of blood. That some items are still left behind. And I think that when you begin to think this out and you think, well, why in the world would they want to do that?

Joe, you read my mind. I was just waiting for a great point to jump in and say i don't understand why why would you want to do this because they had a suspect that they caught that day the day of the event that had survived many times when you have events that occur like this, you'll have a shooter that will take their own life or will be taken out by the police. Not in this case. Nicholas Cruz was arrested. I mean, and they processed him and it was so well documented in the media. And, you know, we had first court appearances, images from that. We had all manner of things that kind of we saw where this was going to their credit the prosecutors and and you know probably the state ag and all of the investigators

that were involved they they came to conclusion we need to lock this thing down because at some point in time unless something odd happens this is going to go to trial. And it turned out that it did. It did go to trial. They had this thing sealed up to the point where you were going to be able to go back and look at this from an evidentiary standpoint from an event standpoint and maybe from i don't know maybe from a history standpoint maybe some of these people on the jury didn't really have a full awareness of what had happened because they were selected for the jury maybe maybe they didn't know the extent, but when those jury members are eventually taken back out there, I can tell you this, it hit them full force in their chest. Okay, so I've got to go back to my original question.

How did they do this? We're not talking something being hermetically sealed. They didn't seal every crack and lock every door. They locked access from the outside? Is that all they did? They locked access from the outside. Obviously, the doors and everything were sealed, but then you've got this fencing that goes up around it. My suspicion is, and I can't necessarily confirm this right now, but is that there were probably cameras trained on this as well to document all the comings and goings over all these years.

Anybody that might have access, and I can tell you that probably defense would want to know that information. They would want to be able to, and this, what's really interesting is that one of the things we talk about in forensics is chain of custody. You talked about the bagging of evidence and all these sorts of things. When evidence is handed off, you have to be able to account for it and track it. Because if you don't, if anything enters that chain and breaks that chain at any point in time, not in every case, but in many cases, that evidence becomes invalidated because you can't attest to the

security of that evidence. Well, it's one thing to have bagged evidence that goes from the detective to the evidence custodian at the state crime lab, and it's passed on to the scientists who test it. That's one thing. Now we're talking about the security of a structure. Just imagine that, if you will. where it has to be accounted for from beginning to end. Because this building, this structure, actually is a big part of the case itself, the case in total. Because you're using this environment,

which in a weird way, the whole building becomes a piece of evidence. It's kind of odd when you think about it that you're going to walk through a piece of evidence. Isn't that interesting? You know, when you think about it from the perspective of the courts, you're going to walk through a piece of evidence that has already essentially been processed and documented. Now we're going to go back and enter this environment that has been sealed for all of this period of time. And we're going to give you the timeline that we have put forward as to how this thing went down and it's really hard for the defense i think in this case

to deny that it happened in any other manner they have to go through and see marked by tom and they have this thing marked by tom of his movements all the way from when he first got out of that uber to the moment time he exited out of the structure i'm still trying to wrap my mind around this a little bit so that i understand the point of sealing the building keeping everyone out is not necessarily to 100 preserve whatever evidence there is as you talked about the blood was going to be remaining the tuft of hair it's not necessarily to preserve that evidence for future collection because after this period of time it's going to degrade and be contaminated by dust, by settling from the building, by rodents, by insects that may have been able to get inside the building. So, the preservation

is for an entirely different reason. Yeah, it is. It tells a story. Let's go to blood specifically. Blood is not a standalone substance. It has multiple components. One of the chief components is that it's got water in it. There is water that is indwelling in the components of blood. And once that blood is outside of the body and it's on an open surface like this, and we're talking about a, I don't want to use it, I love Florida, I don't want to use the word hostile necessarily, but let's face it, environmentally, it's very, very hot, right? And we all know that heat causes things to degrade significantly. So the pools of blood that would have been left behind, for instance, are not there necessarily to be tested.

What remained of the blood, those components are simply there as an illustration of what had occurred at that environment. And it can be implied, at least, as the jurors and the court members of the court are walking through. They can see these spots. And how would they have looked? Well, since the water essentially is all gone, the other substances contained, you know, we have serum and we have red blood cells and whatnot. Those components now have become dried. And many people can identify with dried blood. If you've injured yourself at some point in time, you know that it has, and maybe you didn't clean up the blood afterwards,

you can see that it changes color. It doesn't look like that vibrant red, you know, from an immediate injury. And in this particular case, and what people have reported, I urge anybody that's within the sound of my voice to go and listen to what these reporters had to say that walk through this environment. The blood is essentially brown now and has begun to flake. And that's very common. We see this a lot at crime scenes, particularly where there has been a homicide and the body has been taken off from that location and disposed of. In another location, we go back and we find blood that gives us an indication that something violent happened. Well, there was a lot of violence here.

There was a lot of blood. But all of that collection of blood is going to be brown, cracked, flaked. It'll be peeling up. It almost looks like old, dried paint. And it's very, very fragile. There's another component to this as well you got bullet strikes where you have these areas say for instance in the floor that are notched out and you can see those you can see where the bullets actually struck and maybe ricocheted off of the floor you can see a defect in a wall or a door where a projectile actually

either embedded itself or passed through it. That's not something that you would normally see in a school when you walk through, but it marks that moment in time when all of this happened and you begin to get an appreciation. I think if you're the person that's tasked with judging all of this, because that's what the jurors do, right? You're given a sense of that time and place when this occurred. You know that there's been a certain level of violence here. And for me, one thing that really tugs at your heartstrings in this, not that there's

not so much other but this occurred on valentine's day one of the stories that is kind of you know put out there is that one of the things that one of these reporters a pool reporter i think is where the ap actually noticed is that he saw a teddy bear laying on the floor. And it had a heart. And you can imagine a youngster that receives some little token of love and affection from somebody that's interested in them on Valentine's Day. And now they're fleeing for their life. And suddenly that teddy bear is not as important. They drop it.

They leave it there. And the investigators didn't remove that. They talk about how there's unopened Valentine's cards lying about. One other thing are the flowers. There were roses in a lot of these places, and they're wilted and kind of drooping down and dried. Petals are falling off and this sort of thing. It's quite amazing that they were able to lock this down and keep it sealed up so that the jurors could go back and revisit the horror that took place there. I'm Joseph Scott Morgan, and this is Body Bags. This is an iHeart Podcast.