Charlie Kirk, 31-year-old founder of the conservative nonprofit organization Turning Point USA, was shot on Wednesday while speaking outdoors at Utah Valley University. He was pronounced dead later that day. Officials say the single shot may have been fired from a nearby rooftop. On Friday morning, with a massive manhunt still underway, President Donald Trump has announced that a suspect is in custody.
Crime scenes can change quickly. Chairs, tables, cars—whatever was in the space—may be moved, or people may lose track of them. And future discoveries about the crime may be difficult to connect to the scene. One of the best ways to immediately preserve a crime scene is with three-dimensional laser scans, which use light to map every object present. Today this technique is routinely used at major crime scenes. And experts say it’s likely to be important in the investigation of Kirk’s death.
Among the first crime scene investigators to use this technique in the early 2000s was Michael Haag, a shooting‑incident reconstructionist and co‑author of the textbook Shooting Incident Reconstruction. After majoring in chemistry and minoring in mathematics and physics at the University of Arizona, Haag spent nearly 25 years at New Mexico’s Albuquerque Police Department, where he worked as a forensic scientist on a team that handled major crime scenes ranging from homicides to officer-involved shootings. He also now owns a private company that conducts many of the same services and provides training in shooting incident reconstruction worldwide.
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For more than two decades, Haag has worked on complex cases, taught investigators across the U.S. and testified in court on how 3D laser scans of crime scenes can be used. In a conversation with Scientific American, he explained how this technique would likely be used on the scene linked to Kirk’s death. In plain language, he walked us through how a laser scanner captures millions of measurements to map rooftops and sightlines and how trajectory analysis checks whether impacts line up with a single shooter location.
[An edited transcript of the interview follows.]
Can you walk me through every step of what 3D laser scanning of a crime scene looks…
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