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Digest

Technology, police work lead to arrest

By TIMES WIRES
Published December 31, 2006

In the past several weeks, there have been nearly 25 daytime residential burglaries on the west side of St. Petersburg.

The suspects are now in custody, thanks to human ingenuity and police technology.

Two days before Thanksgiving, burglars went to one of these homes and applied duct tape to a bathroom window, presumably to reduce the noise when they shattered the glass to get inside.

Forensic Services Technician Brannon Douglas looked for fingerprints at the scene. He found one on the sticky side of a piece of duct tape used on the broken glass, and successfully "lifted" it for comparison.

Later, Latent Fingerprint Examiner Rebecca Wolf looked at the print and found a sufficient number of points for comparison to qualify it for a search in AFIS, or the Automated Fingerprint Identification System.

Unlike the television show CSI, where the computer instantly reveals the identity of a criminal from a fingerprint, an AFIS search produces possible matches for an examiner to review before rendering a court-defensible comparison.

On Dec. 8, detectives arrested Craig Scott Noe on armed burglary and dealing in stolen property charges and recovered a large amount of property. The next day, investigators executed two search warrants and recovered more stolen goods, including several handguns, jewelry and coins.

On Dec. 14, Noe's alleged accomplice, Robert Allen Engel, was arrested in Clearwater as he was preparing to leave the area.

Cases closed - thanks to a tiny fingerprint and some nifty police work.

William Proffitt, spokesman for St. Petersburg Police Department

[Last modified December 30, 2006, 21:56:41]