OCEAN CITY, Md. — Exterior: trailer park, afternoon. Ocean City police are looking for evidence in a rash of burglaries from the night before. Uniforms are everywhere, rolling out the yellow tape. Neighbors are rubbernecking at 24th Street. The late-day sunlight burns orange across Coastal Highway.
As they exit the vehicle, Luckett turns to say, "Fifteen trailers broken into — where do we start?"
Schultz dramatically yanks off her sunglasses, and says, "With the evidence!"
Roll opening credits.
OK, so it's not a television show, but Ocean City really does have its own team of crime scene investigators, and they're called out to cases like this one all the time. Luckett and Schultz aren't actors; they're real people. Along with co-worker Nicole Ruggiero, they make up the police department's Forensics Services Unit.
And that burglary? It wasn't fiction — it was a real case they cracked using evidence recovered at the scene.
With years of field work, training and education between them, Chief Bernadette DiPino said the team brings a new level of professionalism to the job, having replaced a now-retired detective who basically taught himself the job over 20 years.
Though they've only been working together a few months, DiPino said her patrol officers are "ecstatic" to have bona-fide crime scene investigators available.
"They're the real CSI," she said. "The people in this office are amazing."
The burglary investigation took several days. Some can take weeks, and others may never be solved, said police spokesman Barry Neeb.
"Most of our cases aren't solved in an hour," he said. "We've not LensCrafters. When you watch police on TV, do you ever see them in front of a computer doing reports? Ninety-five percent of police work has nothing to do with crime. A lot of it's just problem-solving."
Luckett said at a crime scene, they only get one shot to document everything. That's why most of what they do revolves around taking photos of any object, from every angle. Then paperwork, and lots of it.
"We write about every single thing that we do," he said. "Detail, detail, detail. If they made a TV show about what we do, you wouldn't watch it, because it's that boring."
Thanks to CBS's hugely popular "CSI: Crime Scene Investigation," now with three different series based in Las Vegas, Miami and New York, the term "CSI" essentially a household name.
But that's TV, and this is real life. Sometimes when she testifies as a witness, Schultz said, a jury can't always see the difference. Because of the show, "they expect a lot of us, and some things we just can't do."
When they run a fingerprint, it doesn't instantly flash a mugshot on a computer monitor. In fact, getting fingerprint results from national registries takes weeks. DNA results? Those take even longer, usually months — not hours.
And it's certainly not a nine-to-five job. Schultz said each of them sometimes work seven days a week, with a grueling shift schedule that changes from days to nights to overnights on a regular basis. That's because there always has to be a crime scene technician on duty, 24-7.
Luckett and Schultz were hired less than a year ago to replace detective Clint Chamberlain, a man who worked more than 20 years for the Ocean City Police as the department's sole forensics investigator.
When police posted job openings in their forensic unit, 240 people applied, a number they attribute to the sheer popularity of the TV show.
Shari Schultz came to Ocean City from the Baltimore City Police Department, where she worked crime scenes at hundreds of robberies, shootings and murders. As the lead investigator on the Ocean City team, she said she's "bringing a big-city attitude" where every crime scene is significance, no matter the case.
"I worked in a big agency in a very destructive city," she said with a sigh. "To come down here, and be able to take a step back is amazing."
Schultz is also an accomplished fingerprinter. Not impressed? You should be — the national average for getting a "hit," or identifying a suspect, from any fingerprint is 28 per year. Last year, Shari nailed 44 of them.
Bob Luckett brings decades of expertise in fire investigations, thanks to a former career as assistant deputy fire marshal in Alexandria, Va. For him, this post-retirement job hardly feels like work. "I would do it for free," he said.
Nicole Ruggiero is the youngest and newest member of the team. A recent college graduate, she began as an intern before going full-time last November.
Ruggiero has already earned her master's degree in forensic science; Luckett and Schultz said her training already exceeds theirs. It paid off recently when her first-ever fingerprint hit was the key to solving a Boardwalk burglary. Detectives said without her find, they wouldn't have cracked the case.
The future of Ocean City's forensics team is tied into technology — specifically, digital video processing. Their AVID video editing software is used as another investigative tool, for identifying and tracking down suspects caught on camera. In fact, they'll soon have an entirely new space just for video-based investigations, once renovations to the police station are complete later this year. It all supplements the department's plan to someday have video cameras in every patrol car.
But it wasn't anything high-tech that solved the burglaries at the Isle of Wight Trailer Park.
When officers responded to what they thought was a single burglary on March 4, they found 15 other break-ins. During their search, Schultz found a cinnamon-colored vest on the ground near one trailer. Inside another, Luckett found a metal clasp still attached to a swatch of black fabric. The vest had a bar code with one word: "Sarno."
Back at the police station, detectives Googled the name Sarno. Search results showed that Sarno & Sons is a tuxedo manufacturer out of Scranton, Pa. The owners told police the vest in question was sold to an Ocean City tuxedo rental store.
Checking with the store, police learned that somebody rented a tuxedo for a wedding occurring the day before the burglaries — one with a cinnamon-colored vest — and hadn't returned it. The clasp they found matched the pants.
Using the rental voucher and driving records, detectives tracked down the suspect and his accomplice, whom they arrested. Police said Mr. Cinnamon Vest, however, is still on the run, possibly hiding out in Florida.
It's not a Hollywood ending. But like their TV counterparts, these true-life crime scene investigators are just relying on the evidence to help them crack the case.
"What we're doing is, we're starting at the end of the puzzle, and we're working our way back to the beginning," Schultz said. "We're just trying to get to the root, and let the evidence say exactly what's going on."
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