by Joe Wilhelm Jr.
Staff Writer
Forensic science has been popularized by a number of television shows that detail the efforts of Crime Scene Investigation (CSI) units, but where do people go who want a second opinion when the CSI investigation is complete or expert analysis in a civil case?
The answer to that question is the forensic investigation industry. One of the members of that industry is CED Investigative Technologies Inc. located on Southpoint Parkway in Jacksonville.
“There are a bunch of companies out there involved with forensic engineering, and some, like us, are solely involved with it,” said Tom Destafney, an engineer with CED. “We investigate things that have broken, gone wrong or failed and injured people or property. A vast majority of the time that’s what we are doing, typically for lawyers who are involved with a case where something like that has happened.”
The company has been serving the public’s need for expertise in a wide range of engineering fields since 1987 when it was founded in Annapolis, Md., by a group of U.S. Naval Academy professors. The company has grown from that group to a staff of 30 in six locations across the nation.
The Jacksonville office is staffed by Destafney, who is a senior civil engineer, Tom Baker, a mechanical engineer with expertise in nine different fields, Grant Bevill, a biomechanical engineer/mechanical engineer and Peter McCawley, director of business development.
“We are mainly East coast-based with offices also in Chicago and Cleveland,” said McCawley. “The reason for the Jacksonville office was because of the amount of clients we were serving in the area. We operate like lawyers billing by the hour and that made it tough on clients when we had to travel down from Maryland, so we moved the business to them.”
The Jacksonville office opened in 2003. It offers experts in the field of marine, consumer product, biomechanical, vehicular, heavy machinery, manufacturing, fire and explosion, slip and fall, civil, aerial work platform and construction safety engineering. Customers also benefit from the Jacksonville office when the company has to fly in an expert that is stationed at another office.
“Even if we do have to bring in an expert from, say our Connecticut office,” said McCawley. “We will bill from our Jacksonville office for that expert to help our clients.”
A lot of those clients are created because of rules regulating court procedure, Baker said.
“The reason this business even exists is in order for an attorney to get a technical idea admitted to the court he has to hire an expert because he is not technically based,” said Baker. “Because that technically-based witness gives some credibility to it.”
Potential clients need to understand that CED is not a collection of “yes” men.
“Lots of times we get hired by someone and we can’t support the way they are thinking about a case,” said Baker. “If they are saying, ‘This is the way it happened. Now go prove it.’ That’s not the way it works. Our testimony sits on a foundation of science, and if things being said to have occurred doesn’t make sense scientifically then we can’t support it.”
The company’s work doesn’t only take place on a computer or by studying models, they get out to the scene to try to recreate what happened. They inspect the vehicles involved in the accident, if possible, and the scene where the accident happened, and also check to see what information is available in the “black box.”
The “black box” isn’t just for airplanes anymore, but it performs the same functions. The automobile version can give experts the information about what happened before, during and after the crash. The information can be downloaded from the vehicle’s computer to one of the company’s computers and examined.
“In a crash where a driver is stating that the brakes didn’t work during the accident,” said Baker, “we can find out if they did or not with the help of the black box. The problem with the computers is that each manufacturer has their own language, so we can’t download information from every car.”
Through the practices of accident reconstruction and investigative engineering, CED has assisted on both plaintiff and defense cases. The company has represented manufacturers and insurance companies in product liability cases, but has also assist in claims of personal injury caused by disregard for product design.
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