Riverhead High sleuths win CSI challenge

Mariah Messina, a Riverhead High School junior from Calverton, had to analyze a large bone. A pelvis, to be precise.

"I had to figure out the age and the sex," she said. "We had pelvises to compare it [with], and it was easy to see if it was a man or a woman. The age was harder."

The 16-year-old was part of a team of a dozen forensic investigators from her high school who were competing with 35 other high school teams from Long Island, New York City, Massachusetts and Connecticut investigating a mock crime scene, collecting and examining clues, and identifying the killer. The annual CSI challenge, in its 11th year at the State University at Stony Brook, took place this week over 10 hours.

Mariah decided the bone was from a man who was between 20 and 25 years old. Then there were fingerprints to take and compare -- fingerprints which, as with a real crime scene, were not limited to just the victim and the criminal. "That was definitely the hardest part. We've done it in class, but we were on our own . . . some of the prints were unidentifiable."

After investigators from each team -- no more than two at a time -- went to the crime scene and back to their labs, they compared notes, wrote reports and made presentations. Riverhead named the criminal and beat out its closest rival, Brooklyn Tech, by a point to win the first-place trophy.

The only thing missing was an arrest. "That would have been fun," Messina said.

The crime scene was carefully prepared with fingerprints, hair, fibers, impressions from feet and teeth, and bullets. Students also were read a murder scenario, and there were actors in costume to question. And no commercials.

There was one part of the day's mystery that Messina could not solve. No one on her team of students found out the final score.

"Each lab you do, you hand in answers. Mine was the height and the age and the gender of the bones...they evaluate you at every step, they watch you collect evidence," she said. "We had a final presentation, one girl made a little power point. There are almost a hundred questions about it [the scene] the fingerprints, the soda bottle, who killed who," she said.