John Sweetman

Yeah, well, we would have been sent out as we were training, doing crime scenes, say, for burglaries and stuff like that.

We'd be out around the South City and the city centre, going to houses and premises that had been broken into and, you know, powdering for fingerprints and bringing back exhibits.

So we did a lot of that.

But then I remember the first ever...

suspicious debt that I went to was down in, it was in Roscommon, I think it was 1998.

And you get a lot of suspicious debts, you know, and most of them turn out to be not suspicious, you know, either through accident, natural causes, or maybe somebody, you know, taking their own life or something.

But this was a man that had shot himself in a house out in the middle of nowhere, like you wouldn't be able to find it on a map.

but he was there a few days and heating was on and stuff like that so it was a bit of a wake up for me because I had been to the morgue to print bodies before and that was fine but that's in a kind of sterile environment and air conditioning and what not but this was the real thing at somebody's house and they're there in the position they were when whatever happened.

It's a lot to take in you know because it's a shock to the senses not only obviously from the guts and the gore end of it but

It's a lot to take in, but very quickly I copped on that you're there to do the job.

And on that case, I was really just there to assist the fingerprint expert that was there.

But it just opened my eyes to what you had to do and what you're looking for.

You don't just concentrate on your end of things, like fingerprints or whatever it is.

If you see something that may be of interest to the ballistics person or the mapper or the photographer,

So you work together as a team.

That was my first trip out.

And then later on, I went to my first murder and that type of stuff.

But it's the same.

You get over the first initial shock of what you see, and then you just get down to business.

Because more often than not, if it does turn out to be