ISYS product:ISYS product: ISYS:desktop Organization: Miami Dade Police Department Benefit: Making fast and accurate conclusions to solve cases. Industry: Law Enforcement Data indexed: 50 years of historical data in 43,000+ files Document types: Word documents, spreadsheets and databases Available on: Local Area Network Used ISYS since: 2002

Miami Dade Police Department

Police Sergeant Gary Smith and the Homicide Bureau at the Miami Dade Police use several tools to refine their investigation process, including DNA, fingerprints and ISYS software. Sergeant Smith describes how ISYS helped the Department crack an unsolved murder.

A company that customized corporate jets won a major contract that involved working with new equipment, which required extra training. Four people were selected for the training, who would car-pool twice a week to Fort Lauderdale. One day, the four were returning from training when gunshots were fired through the roof and sides of the car. Three in the car were injured and one died on the scene. Sergeant Smith and his team began investigations.

A search returned a shotgun with a ground-off serial number. Eventually the serial number was raised and the registered owner traced - Gerardo Manso. Manso was an employee of the same company as the victims, but he had not been selected for extra training. He had positioned himself on the roof with a shotgun and when the four returned from training he opened fire on the car.

After hours of interrogation, Manso confessed to the homicide. Coincidentally, ISYS had come online at the Bureau for the first time. The first name Sergeant Smith entered into ISYS, Gerardo Manso, appeared in another report.

This case involved a drive-by shooting. The victim worked in a grocery store and was rumored to be having an affair with another employee - Manso's wife. When interviewed, Manso's wife denied the affair and mentioned her husband's name. This was recorded in the report, but because the affair was denied, the investigators were unable to find a motive or a suspect.

When confronted with this murder, Manso also confessed to the previous crime and was booked. "Without ISYS, this information would never have been accessed. Manso's name would never have been entered in the restricted fields of the database we were using, and the case would never have been solved," says Sergeant Smith.

The Homicide Bureau has records dating all the way back to the 1950's and currently indexes over 43,000 documents. "We use ISYS to search everything we do," says Sergeant Smith. "ISYS plays just as big a part as DNA, ballistics, fingerprints, video cameras, hidden cameras and other forensic tools in solving cases."