Criminalist finds clues in bloody situations/ Identifying corpses

Jeff Saviano identifies corpses, photographs autopsies and studies bloodstain patterns at crime scenes to piece together what happened.

But the 44-year-old doesn't think he could work in a hospital emergency room.

"People there are feeling pain," he said. "My patients don't feel pain. They're dead. The blood and the gore stuff doesn't bother me, but the pain would."

Saviano is a criminalist with the Metro Crime Lab, a joint operation of the Colorado Springs Police Department and the El Paso County Sheriff's Office.

The Metro Crime Lab responds to major crimes such as homicides and suspicious suicides.

"It almost has to be somebody who dies before we get called out," Saviano said. "It's not good if you see me."

The job can appear gruesome to outsiders. But some of those in the field see it a different way.

"The idea here is to collect and analyze evidence that supports the investigation," said Colorado Springs police Sgt. Larry Herbert, supervisor of the Metro Crime Lab.

Part of the reward for Saviano is helping police find a suspect.

Saviano, who has been a criminalist for 15 years, has a way of coping with the aftermath of the crime he sees first-hand.

"It's probably unfortunate, but I've become relatively cynical and callous over the years because of it. But it's a necessity," he said. "You end up first of all with a rather morbid, bizarre sense of humor. There are very few people who understand. But it's a defense mechanism we have to come up with."

Saviano, who was born in Chicago and grew up in Caon City, became a criminalist after spending seven years as a radio disc jockey. He didn't think the radio market was stable and wanted out. He considered social work, but crime lab work sounded more interesting.

He got a degree in criminology and joined the Sheriff's Office. In 1993, the police and sheriff's crime labs combined.

Saviano is the lab's only shoeprint examiner.

He's also a crime scene technician, which includes taking photographs, collecting evidence and checking for fingerprints.

He typically spends the bulk of his time working with fingerprints. He can use fingerprints to identify people who have been dead for weeks or months. Sometimes the simple ink technique won't work, because the bodies mummify in the dry climate.

In those cases, he'll work on the severed hands at the lab in the Police Operations Center on South Nevada Avenue to reconstruct the pattern of each finger to produce a legible print.

"Some are easy, some hard," he said. "Some take days, some weeks."

Saviano helped identify victims of United Flight 585 that crashed in Widefield in March 1991, killing all 25 people aboard.

"We just did autopsies for two days," he said. "I basically just had a table in one corner of the room. Two pathologists were doing autopsies and the hands were brought over to my table. I did the fingerprints. It was almost like an assembly-line type thing."

That mentality is required for the job, said Elinor McGarry, a former crime scene technician and now a forensic chemist at the lab.

"The first time I saw a dead body, I was a little apprehensive, but you kind of detach," she said. "I mean, you're sorry. It's sad. But you can't afford to get emotionally involved in cases."

In TV shows and books, Saviano prefers fiction to nonfiction. He sees too much of the real stuff at work. Because of that, he avoids local TV news and newspapers.

He has a pet peeve about crime shows that are inaccurate. He likes "a good murder mystery," and he's writing "a couple of novels."

Saviano, who has a 13-year-old daughter and 15-year-old son, doesn't spend much time at home talking about his work with his wife, a schoolteacher.

"It's not that she's not interested in what I do. She is, but she's squeamish when it comes to gore and guts," he said. "I can just gloss over things a little bit and give the bare minimum, and that's pretty much all I can get away with."

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