Dr. Thomas Coyne

And then I can sometimes give you range of fire.

So as a bullet leaves a gun, with it,

The bullet comes gas, comes spent gunpowder particles, and those will strike the skin if the handgun is within three feet of the body.

So if there are marks of close-range fire, I can tell law enforcement that I see that I'm a body.

Then, of course, I can track where the bullet goes through the body, from how it enters to where it exits.

Physical characteristics of the wound itself.

So when a bullet comes out of a gun, you know, the rifling of the gun, whether it's a rifle or a handgun, imparts a spin upon the bullet.

So oftentimes, when a bullet enters a body without striking another target first, it will have a very well-circumscribed entrance wound.

And then as it travels through the body... Smooth.

Yeah, well circumscribed.

Yeah, exactly.

And then when a bullet hits tissue, it wobbles and has an irregular path through the body.

So the exit wound is often more irregular.

And as it comes out, it'll pull tissue with it.

So there's characteristics that you can see in bone and tissue that allow me to say which way a bullet traveled through the body.

So from the autopsy, I can tell you where a bullet passes through the body.

So whether it entered in the back or the front or the left or the right side, if it traveled upward or downward, and you can piece that information together with information on scene to try to figure out where a shooter may have been standing at the time the gun was fired.

So it allows you to somehow figure out- You know when this really came to the forefront, Dr. Coyne?

Sure.

So, I mean, if an eyewitness says they saw the shooter standing behind the person who was shot firing the weapon, and I'm doing the autopsy and I show that the bullet entered the back of the head, you know, traveled back to front with a slight, you know, left to right trajectory, you can piece that together with the eyewitness account of where they say the shooter was standing.