TAMPA, Fla. — The Hillsborough County Sheriff's Office opened a new firearms identification lab in January. It's been described as a "game changer" and an "express lane on the highway for our own evidence."
Before the lab opened, all the shell casings, bullets and guns taken into evidence were sent to the Florida Department of Law Enforcement. Cases took weeks or longer to process and turn around.
With an in-house forensics team and a dedicated lab, evidence can be processed in a few hours or days.
According to numbers provided to ABC Action News by the FDLE from Jan. 1, 2022, to present day, the FDLE processed 25,531 items. Those items included guns (8,748), ammunition (3,515) and shell casings (13,268).
According to Dana Kelly, Communications Coordinator for FDLE, "this data is only for FDLE and does not include the entire state as some local law enforcement agencies perform their own firearms examinations.”
Please note that the case total doesn’t add up correctly because cases that are worked across more than one year will only count once in the overall total of cases (so if a case is opened in 2022 and the case is still being actively examined in the FDLE lab system in 2023—even when new evidence is submitted in 2023 for the 2022 case—the case will only be captured as a unique case in the 2022 calendar year).
It's also important to remember that multiple pieces of evidence may be submitted for a single/distinct case, so the number of items submitted will be greater than the number of distinct cases.
"Now we can go from the crime scene straight back to the firearms lab and examine things immediately," John Romeo, Firearms Manager, said. "I supervise four talented forensic scientists that are extremely highly trained. And it's a very unique specialty. What you see here is the specialty of firearms identification, forensically identifying bullets and cartridge cases as having been fired in a specific firearm."
Unfortunately, gun violence is a common problem in all aspects of society, and Romeo said recent cases highlight the need to get guns and criminals off the streets.
"A lot of the shooters are repetitively committing crime, so a lot of the guns are used more than once. To break that cycle and prevent the next shooting, the timeliness of examination forensically is important," Romeo said. "You're trying to prevent that next shooting by examining your evidence as quickly as you can."
The bullet recovery tank is one of the most significant items in the lab. Forensic experts demonstrated how they fire a bullet into the tank and pull it out entirely intact. It's then off to the lab to be put under a high-powered microscope.
Romeo said every firearm leaves "unique markings."
"We often make the analogy of a mechanical fingerprint, just the firearm marking the components fired within it. And then, of course, those results must be testified to in the court of law," Romeo said. "It's not like what you see on TV and CSI where you're doing it in minutes, and then the screen is, you know, dinging at you that the identification has been made. It's much like matching a puzzle; you have to do a lot of comparative work under the microscope, it takes a lot of patience and it takes a lot of tenacity to continue to look under the microscope until you find that identification or elimination."
Romeo added that since January when they first began operations, they've worked about 800 cases.
The lab also has a gun library, which is a room full of different types of weapons.
"We use them as a reference library," Donna Wallace, Director of Forensic Services, said. "When we have a case, maybe the guns are not functioning, or we're trying to do a serial number, we can come here."
"If we have a gun that's similar or the same as what's in the case, we can look at it and know what the serial number is supposed to be, alphas, numbers, whatever it might be," Wallace added. "Or if a part of the gun is missing from ours, and it's not functional, we can take it from there and make that gun functional so that we can fire it and do the analysis we need to do."
All of the guns in the library were used during a crime. Those cases have been adjudicated, and the guns are now helping solve future cases.
"And it's just big for the whole county, it's for all the citizens to try to help get some of this, these guns off the streets and the gun crime reduced. It's very big. And it's a really good feeling when you know, you've had a part of that," Wallace said.
The reference library, according to Wallace, has 800 guns so far, a small example of what they've been able to take off the streets.
"There are thousands more that we've been able to take off the street to do the analysis that we needed to do, and they're in our evidence room whether waiting for trial or waiting for destruction," she said.
"Being part of forensics for as long as I've been doing it, I won't say you get numb to it, but you know those things happen. You see it every day," Wallace added. "It's a lot of guns. I'm glad they're in here and not on the street."
