North Louisiana Crime Lab celebrating 50 years by looking forward

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    SHREVEPORT, La. (KTBS) — The North Louisiana Criminalistics Laboratory is celebrating 50 years in existence. There’s a lot of great history over that time period, but the future could see some of the biggest advancements for scientific crime-fighting North Louisiana has ever seen.

“In this room, you can see that we have the ability to house up to 100 bodies here. Our goal in working with the LSU Business Unit is to be able to have pathology here, this quarter before the end of the year,” said Joey Jones, North Louisiana Crime Lab system director.

That’s a huge accomplishment the crime lab staff has been working on since KTBS toured the facility at its opening three years ago. The ability to do autopsies opens up a world of possibilities for the crime lab.

“Right now, at this time outside of this parish, a lot of coroners typically elect to send it outside of the state, whether that’s to Little Rock or Mississippi. To be able to have them operating here and working is going to allow us to centralize things and really serve the entire state,” said Jones.

Also new for 2020 is a specialized forensics lab.

“The type of testing that we are bringing to North Louisiana has never been done in this area,” said Steven Fleming, forensics lab supervisor.

The testing is being done on “a liquid chromatography quadropoe gubaltua timafly maspectrometer,” Fleming said with a laugh.

Translation: “This separates the drugs and this acts as a weight, so it measures the weight of the drug. So, we’re able to determine their presence by the weight of each molecule,” said Fleming.

Since the crime lab cranked up this section in March the staff has worked on about 75 cases. Many of them were DUI’s or DWI’s where blood and urine are tested for substances.

Down the hall in the chemistry lab is Randall Robillard, chemistry supervisor. “This is possibly crack cocaine. It, it’s powdered cocaine. It would turn blue right away.”

“We process about 40 to 50 samples every single day. We get about 5,000 drug cases in this lab every year,” said Robillard.

The 40 forensic scientists in the North Louisiana Crime Lab system serve the 29 parishes in the northern part of the state. With these updated, advanced and new systems, that means more cases solved and the ability to help law enforcement get things done quicker.

And, it’s no secret that there’s no shortage of gun crimes for them to work on.

“We can strap the gun right into here and it will discharge on its own. This is our ballistic recovery box. It’s stuffed with cotton and cardboard about every 12 inches to slow the bullet down and keep it in pristine condition,” said Summer Johnson, coordinator and firearms examiner.

“This is our water recovery tank. You shoot into the water and it will slow the bullet down. This we use more for pistols,” said Johnson.

“The work that we do, there’s a heavy burden. This isn’t a low crime area. This isn’t a place where evidence doesn’t exist. It exists in volumes,” said Jones, who took over the Shreveport lab in January. He became the system director a few months ago when longtime director Jimmy Barnhill retired after leading the crime lab for 50 years.

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