Dead people, blood and police tape.

The forensics classes worked to recreate crime scenes in the form of dioramas. There were groups of two to four people that worked together and made crime scenes from fake blood, paint, cardboard boxes and whatever else they could find. The project was a test grade and competition between the groups.

“We basically had to see who could make the best mini crime scene,” junior Tana Cleveland said. “We set up two crime scenes per table and walked around the classroom, evaluating each box and writing down the evidence we saw and what we thought happened.”

The groups had three weeks to work on these projects.

“The majority of our time was spent figuring out what we wanted to do our crime scene over,” Cleveland said. “I was in a group with Andrea and our crime scene showed a basement with blood everywhere. The background story was a guy that wasn’t mentally stable and he would kidnap girls and fall in love with them, but when they didn’t love him back he killed them.”

A few of the groups used barbie dolls as fake people.

“We used barbie and ken in ours,” senior Nadia Garcia said. “Barbie stabbed Ken 68 times in the chest because he was abusive.”

Garcia said the actual creating of the crime scene only took a week to complete.

“Nearly everyone made their crime scene the last week of the project,” Garcia said. “It wasn’t a hard project, but it was just hard for most of us to write our background story out and decide what we wanted our crime scene to look like.”

Junior Sheri Donaldson said she used the story of Charles Lindbergh for her crime scene.

“We used a story about a baby being kidnapped by his father,” Donaldson said. “I got really creative with our project and left a little note in my room from the kidnapper. He wanted $50,000 in exchange for giving his own child back to the mother.”

Donaldson said she practically did the project by herself even though she was in a group of three.

“I had two other people in my group, but I was clearly more interested in it than they were,” Donaldson said. “I had fun making it on my own, so I’m not complaining. When they saw it they thought it was really cool and said I did a good job. I can’t wait to see who wins though.”