CSI Point Park: Mt. Lebanon resident leads university’s forensic science program
If anything deserves an acronym, it’s deoxyribonucleic acid.
That’s DNA, of course. And it’s become common knowledge that even more than fingerprints, the uniqueness of every person’s DNA can go a long way toward solving crimes.
“Everybody knows the science,” Dr. Edward Strimlan observed. “But it’s been extremely exaggerated on television.”
The South Park Township native and current Mt. Lebanon resident started working as a forensic investigator for the Allegheny County Coroner’s office in 1990, half a decade before O.J. Simpson’s murder trial made “DNA” a household sort-of word.
Strimlan’s line of work gained further attention through an increasing number of TV shows focusing on the previously little-known facet of solving crimes.
“They came up with what was called the CSI Effect,” he said, referencing the original CBS series “Crime Scene Investigation” and its multiple spinoffs. “Unfortunately, it makes a forensic investigator look omnipotent, because on TV, they’re always right.”
And that often is because relevant DNA evidence becomes available posthaste, which generally does not represent the most accurate scenario.
In Strimlan’s opinion, the fictional portrayals tend to put added pressure on prosecutors to go beyond circumstantial arguments when bringing criminal cases to the courtroom.
“Now, they have to show evidence,” he said. “If they don’t have that fingerprint or DNA, the juries want to know why.”
To help set the record straight among students who are aiming for careers in forensic science, Strimlan started instructing in the early 2000s at some Pittsburgh institutions of higher learning.
By 2010, his courses at Point Park University had become so popular that the powers that be decided to launch an entire program dedicated to the subject.
“When they asked me to develop the program, I told them that I wanted to make it science-based,” Strimlan recalled. “The new people we were hiring for forensics had to understand anatomy, physiology, chemistry.
“But the whole idea is the evidence,” he continued. “I try to explain to everybody that the greatest lab in the world is useless unless somebody finds the evidence. It could be the local police. It could be anybody walking by who picks up something. If they don’t recognize it as evidence, it can’t be tested.”
Another of his requests was for a “crime scene house” as a space for staging simulations:
“I said, ‘I need that.’ And they said, ‘Wait a minute. We’re in the middle of the city of Pittsburgh. We don’t have a house for you.’ So they actually took over a huge room that was for photography, on the fifth floor of Academic Hall. They tore down the walls, and they actually made it into a combination living room, bedroom, study and classroom.”
The space primarily is intended for first-year students, who generally approach it with quite a bit of enthusiasm.
“They go crazy,” Strimlan reported. “Everything is evidence. Everything means something. I put an acorn in the room one time. They were fascinated, that somehow that mattered in the death.”
Eventually, students learn how to tell the difference between a red herring and the real thing.
“And what’s even more important for students to learn from this is what is not there. They’ll find a suicide note but no pen. They’ll think a person overdosed on drugs, but no water,” Strimlan explained. “So the very first year, they learn what is evidence, what is not.”
The forensic science program has second-year students learning to process what they find, and the following year, they work with actual investigations. As seniors, they focus on ethical considerations.
The crime scene house also has been made available for members of other organizations – such as police departments, Scouts and citizens’ watch groups – to visit and learn.
That, of course, applies under normal circumstances. COVID-19 closed Point Park in mid-March, but because the forensic science program already had a robust online component, students who attended in person were able to finish the semester with no significant issues.
While the pandemic has caused any number of disruptions to everyday life, the folks in Strimlan’s profession have continued to do what they need to do.
“Probably the most unspoken heroes of the first responders are forensic investigators because only the coroner or medical examiner can remove a body from a scene,” he said, referring to employees of such offices. “So they still go, and they respond to 1,200 cases a year.
While working for Allegheny County – the office was changed from elected coroner to appointed medical examiner in 2005 – Strimlan rose to the position of chief forensic investigator before retiring to focus on education.
“When you see how many ways people have died and the number of investigations that I’ve been on, it’s fascinating,” he reflected. “You won’t love it, but it is fascinating.”
The toughest aspect, he said, is dealing with the families of victims.
“You can’t turn them off. You have to be able to relate to them, because for them, this is the worst-case scenario,” he explained. “I had to learn, and this is not what they teach you in med school. I actually learned from the funeral directors I worked with when I first started, how to deal with death and deal with people.”
As for why the discipline of forensic science was relatively unknown before O.J. and “CSI,” Strimlan and his colleagues had a theory:
“We must be doing a good job, because if we screwed up, everybody would know it.”