On the Job 

Mud is enough to sink some criminals.

Suspects’ damp shoes leave shoe prints and their vehicles leave tire tracks — rich clues for the forensic scientists of the Trace Evidence Unit at the Ohio Attorney General’s Bureau of Criminal Investigation (BCI).
 
Suzanne Noffsinger, who has been a forensic scientist with BCI for about four years, can look at a shoe print pattern and map out the circles, lines, zigzags, and squiggles and enter what she finds into a footwear database — Shoeprint Image Capture and Retrieval (SICAR) — to try to determine what type of shoe made the impression.
 
Shoes are a constantly evolving product, she said. “We have 35,000 tread designs in SICAR and it keeps growing. Every three months, we get an update with a couple hundred new ones.”
 
Once a footwear brand is identified, the suspect’s shoes can be retrieved and compared directly to the print from the crime scene. Unique areas of damage on a shoe’s tread can cause the print to be like no other.
 
“If you have a shoe print, for example on paper or glass, you can see not only the pattern, but also the nicks and cuts on the tread,” she said.
 
In her office, Noffsinger keeps a piece of cardboard covered with shoe prints that became key evidence in a case involving men who broke into a warehouse to steal copper pipes. The discarded cardboard lying on the warehouse floor captured the suspects’ tracks.
 
“The cardboard showed every cut and divot,” she said. “I made test impressions of the suspects’ shoes. They pleaded guilty when faced with the evidence.”
 
While footwear is the most common type of evidence the unit handles, the scientists also examine a lot of tire tracks, which can place a certain car at the scene of a crime. “Tires are like shoes, but they are 7 feet long,” she said.
 
Small things like paint chips, glass shards, vehicle lamp filaments, fibers and gunshot residue are also among the unit’s specialties. 
 
For more information about the unit, visit
www.Ohio AttorneyGeneral.gov and search “Trace Evidence Unit.”