Dave McKay, Program Coordinator for our Forensic Science program, has recently been featured in news articles in the Vancouver Province and National newspapers, and also appeared on TV for CTV and Daily Planet.
You might have heard in the news about the hang glider pilot, William Jonathan Orders, who was taken into custody on obstruction of justice charges. Orders was conducting a tandem flight with 27-year-old Lemani Godinez when she fell to her death last Saturday outside of Agassiz. Orders swallowed a memory card from a digital camera that was mounted on the glider that police deemed as evidence. The police are holding the pilot with the hope that he can “produce” the evidence (ie. the memory card) related to the fatal flight.
In the Vancouver Province article, Dave talks about whether data can be salvaged from the memory card:
“The nice thing about the storage cards that were probably used . . . is that they don’t have a lot of moving parts, like a memory drive, so there is less likelihood of mechanical destruction that would void recovery of any information from the card itself.”
He also appeared via remote on the Daily Planet show on Discovery, talking about the likelihood of recovering the data on the memory card. You can view the clip if you’d like see him explain the forensic recovery process more closely (although I can’t guarantee how long the clip will remain online).