Cleveland police detective James Raynard is a real-life crime scene investigator, but his job isn’t exactly like that of his TV counterparts, says the Cleveland Plain Dealer. “People watch CSI and they say, ‘Cool,’ ” he says. “You see the real thing, you have nightmares.” Raynard and his 15 fellow investigators in the Crime Scene and Records Unit have worked about 4,000 cases so far this year as they sift through the remains of broken lives.
In a feature on what it’s like to be a forensics investigator, the paper says that when Raynard went out to dinner with a woman, something in the smell of the food resurrected the stench of decomposing flesh in a recent case. He couldn’t eat. The woman asked what was wrong. He said he would tell her some other time. She coaxed it out of him, then she wished he hadn’t told her.
Link: http://www.cleveland.com/cuyahoga/plaindealer/index.ssf?/base/cuyahoga/1157445063170380.xml&coll=2