LAPD Probing What Went Wrong With Ballistics Tests on Ross’ Gun

When Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Deputy Rickey Ross was arrested in February by the Los Angeles Police Department in the murders of three prostitutes, police forensic experts were confident that, after examining his gun, they had the right man.

“We wouldn’t put an active-duty sheriff’s deputy in jail for homicide on an ‘iffy’ make,” said one officer at the time.

But that, apparently, is precisely what happened.

On Monday, as the district attorney’s office dropped homicide charges against Ross, police administrators began an internal inquiry to determine why their forensic findings against Ross were so definitive when other forensic examiners found just the opposite while examining the same evidence.

Experts in Accord

“We all agree, all of (our) experts agree now . . . that the original conclusions should have been inconclusive,” said Cmdr. William Booth, the Police Department spokesman.

One of three forensic experts who conducted independent testing of Ross’ gun, insisted Monday that the evidence “overwhelmingly excludes” the possibility that it was used in the murders of prostitutes.

Criminologist Charles Morton of the private Institute of Forensic Sciences in Oakland, who has been conducting firearms examinations since 1962, also indirectly criticized the Police Department, saying that “this is not the first time” it has erred in interpreting scientific evidence that he later reviewed.

If anything, Monday’s episode illustrates that firearms examination--the process of matching a spent bullet with the gun from which it may have been fired--is not the most definitive of sciences. In fact, the results of such examinations are often greatly interpretive.

After it is fired, a bullet is forced to spin by a spiral groove tooled into the length of barrel. This groove enables the bullet to be fired with greater accuracy.

The groove and the “lands” found around it--tiny ridges of steel left when the groove is carved into the barrel--leave scars on the bullet as it passes through. No two guns leave identical sets of scars, called “compound striation,” which examiners study to determine whether a particular gun fired a particular bullet.

In the Los Angeles Police Department, such examinations are made by any one of eight detectives assigned to the firearms and explosives unit of the department’s Scientific Investigations Division.

Located in an innocuous, two-story building on Figueroa Street in Northeast Los Angeles, the firearms unit each year conducts thousands of examinations. In each case, the weapon is test-fired into an 8-foot-long, stainless steel water tank. The bullet is taken from the water, placed under a special microscope and compared side-by-side to the bullet that has been recovered from a victim or a crime scene.

In the Ross investigation, the forensic examination of the alleged murder weapon was conducted by Officer Jim Fountain and Detective Jimmy L. Trahin. Fountain could not be reached Monday. However, Trahin said: “I’m not at liberty to discuss this right at the moment.”

It is not the first time that Trahin has found himself amid controversy. Regarded as an expert on machine guns, Trahin in 1987 was accused of illegally possessing a machine gun and a stolen television set. A department tribunal later cleared him of those charges. In 1980, he was cleared of charges that he fired a pellet pistol and BB rifle at passers-by from his office window.

Meanwhile, Morton, the criminologist who was paid by Ross’ attorney to review Trahin and Fountain’s findings, said that in his tests, he compared three silver-tipped, hollow-point bullets taken from the murder victims and nine bullets fired by the Los Angeles Police Department under laboratory conditions. Morton also test-fired five bullets of his own and examined a shell casing found at one of the slayings.

Morton said he found that all three of the bullets removed from the victims had been fired from the same weapon and all bore a “very strong mark” similar to marks left on the 14 test-fired rounds. However, he said, the marks left on the bullets taken from the three victims aligned differently from the test-fired bullets.

Different Marks

Further, he said, the “ejector” of Ross’ Smith & Wesson pistol left distinctly different marks on shell casings than the marks that were on the casing that was recovered from one of the murder scenes.

After Morton’s examination, the prosecution agreed to a second series of tests, which were conducted May 10-12 by two other noted experts in the field of firearms examination--Al Biasotti of the California Department of Justice and John Murdock of the Contra Costa County Sheriff’s Department.

Murdock said Monday that he and Biasotti “generally agreed” with Morton’s findings, but declined further comment on the testing, explaining that he had not yet forwarded his final report to the proper authorities.

He said he could not remember when two different interpretations of ballistics evidence resulted in the freeing of an accused killer. It didn’t matter, he said, that in this case, the accused was a fellow lawman.

“Speaking as a layman, any time the right thing happens, you’re happy,” he said. “Speaking from a forensic standpoint, the outcome of the case, or who is accused, is of no significance.”