we do more than examine bomb debris and do bomb reconstruction here in PE these tools were seized from some burglary suspects in North Carolina who were arrested by the locals for breaking and entering we had several collection box burglaries in the same area and the inspectors suspected that these guys might be responsible the first step is in the area of trace evidence as you can see from the crime scene photos but collection boxes contain tiny flakes of paint near the tool impact sites those tiny bits of paint were collected at the scene and entered into evidence once we received the suspect tools the first thing we did was to look and see if any of the blue paint from our collection boxes might have been transferred to the tools in question if you look closely here you can see tiny bits of blue collected from the crowbar analysis of the paint chips can associate the suspects tools to the collection box and vice versa then our fingerprints unit process the tools for latent prints is the next step now we have them and we're looking to see if we can match these tools to the marks and impressions left on these pieces of evidence from the post office crime scene after the items have been processed for fingerprints I would create my test marks with items which I would use to compare under the comparison microscope