CENTER FOR APPLIED FORENSICS ASSISTS ALABAMA POLICE IN SOLVING HOMICIDES

BY BRETT BUCKNER

Mark Hopwood, who has spent his career helping law enforcement catch bad guys, has created a monster. “But it’s the good kind,” he said. “It’s helping a lot of people”

The metaphorical beast is the Jax State Center for Applied them for processing evidence.

Over dinner with the nowretired university president and provost, Dr. Bill Meehan and Dr. Rebecca Turner, Hopwood recommended that Jax State

In 2012, the new Center for Applied Forensics moved into the space at Jax State McClellan once occupied by the state lab and began providing Northeast Alabama law enforcement agencies crime scene assistance and training in the collection and documentation of evidence. Grants from the Alabama Department of Economic and Community Affairs supported its early efforts.

“It’s taken off more than we could have ever

Forensics (CFAF), which provides rural law enforcement agencies the tools they need to unmask society’s real-life monsters. What started as a regional endeavor has grown into a statewide initiative embraced at every level of government.

The center got its start in late 2011, when budget cuts at the Alabama Department of Forensic Sciences led to the closure of three offices – including one housed at Jax State McClellan – creating a void for agencies that depended on assist local, underserved law enforcement agencies with crime scene investigations and training.

“Dr. Meehan asked me what my business plan was,” said Hopwood, CFAF director. “I told him plain and simple, my business plan is to put us out of business. When we teach and train these agencies to do their own stuff, we’ll stop getting these 2 a.m. calls to come out and look at a blood spatter or bullet wounds. When we’ve trained them, we’ve done our job.” imagined, because nobody has anything like it,” Hopwood said. “We pretty much stand alone. All employees at the center have a law enforcement and a forensics background.”

The center provides education, technical expertise and investigative services to law enforcement agencies across the state, training more than 4,000 officers, processing more than 400 crime scenes and solving 324 cases to date. It also supports the university’s Bachelor of Science in Forensic Investigations, which has grown into one of the university’s most popular majors since its establishment in 2017. established a Cold Case Program. for more of those big poster boards. It would drive me crazy going through those files, but he loves it.”

The center leads more than 100 classes a year in forensics techniques for law enforcement professionals and Jax State students. Those enrolled have learned to check their email before commuting to class each day, to see whether their instructors have been called out to a crime scene.

Led by part-time investigator Brent Thomas, a retired Alabama Bureau of Investigation agent, the program assists local agencies with cold case investigations and officer-involved shootings.

Thomas is the epitome of the old-school cop. His desk is often cluttered with yellow legal pads and musty evidence folders pulled from decades-old banker’s boxes.

After graduating from Jax State in 1984 with a degree in production management, Thomas started his career in law enforcement as an Alabama State Trooper. In 2003, he was hired by the Jacksonville office of the ABI, where he served as a sergeant until his retirement.

“That’s where the name came from – the Center for Applied Forensics,” Hopwood said. “Chemistry and biology classes can teach how to run toxicology screens and DNA, but we want to create the missing link. We teach them what it’s like to be out there in the middle of the night as a field mouse, collecting evidence with the most probative value, packaging it and getting it to the lab so the white coats – the lab rats – can work on it.”

To assist law enforcement agencies in closing unsolved homicide cases, the center has also

The walls are covered with homicide timelines and the names of potential suspects.

“I’ve bought him computers and laptops,” Hopwood said, “But every time I go in his office, he’s sitting there with a legal pad and pencils. Then he’ll stop and ask me

“This is not a job, it’s a calling,” Thomas said. “And if this is your calling, there’s nothing else like it. But if it’s not, you won’t last very long. The hours are bad. The money’s not that great. The sacrifices never end. But if this is what you love, it will never really feel like work. If you want to help people at the lowest, worst point in their lives, this is it.”

The reward for years of hard work and sleepless nights is finally finding justice for victims like Monica and Dalton Rollins. The Heflin, Ala., woman and her sixyear-old son were stabbed to death in their home in 2002, shaking the small community. Thomas, who first worked on the case for the ABI in 2003, was able to help Heflin police solve it 20 years later. A suspect was taken into custody in June 2023 and, according to investigators, has confessed to both murders.

“A good investigator is always searching for answers,” Thomas said. “You never quit. You never give up. It’s always there with you.”

The center continues to grow and embrace technology to aid law enforcement. In January, its Automated Biometric Identification System (ABIS) went live –identifying latent fingerprints at crime scenes ranging from property crimes to homicide. The ABIS unit provides Northeast Alabama investigators access to local and federal fingerprint databases.

The center is also evaluating Augmented Reality headsets, which will allow an officer to communicate directly from a crime scene with CFAF in real time. Essentially, CFAF personnel will be able to see the same thing that the officer is looking at and provide guidance on the best way to document, process or collect an item of evidence.

CFAF works in partnership with the university’s Center for Best Practices in Law Enforcement, Alabama Investigator Academy and Southeastern Leadership Command College to support the continuing education and training of law enforcement across the state. It’s all part of a strategy to make Jax State the law enforcement training capital of Alabama.

“Jacksonville State has a long and established history in law enforcement training,” said Randy Jones, chair of the Board of Trustees. “We look forward to serving the state and serving citizens with the best law enforcement training in the country.”

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