7.Jason Costello — Direct

JASON COSTELLO: Special Agent Jason Costello, C-O-S-T-E-L-L-O.

JASON COSTELLO: I work for the FBI.

JASON COSTELLO: Since July 2004.

JASON COSTELLO: I received a bachelor of science in engineering.

JASON COSTELLO: From Tulane University in New Orleans.

JASON COSTELLO: Yes. I was an Army officer for four years on active duty, and then I worked in the engineering sector as a project manager before coming in to the FBI.

JASON COSTELLO: I'm assigned as an investigator on the Organized Crime Task Force. As a collateral duty, I'm a member of the Evidence Response Team.

JASON COSTELLO: I do both the ballistics reconstruction work and also the total station operator for the team.

JASON COSTELLO: Total station is -- it's essentially survey equipment. We use it to electronically diagram a crime scene. Any crime scene, we sketch and we measure and we record where evidence lies within the crime scene. A total station allows us on larger, more complex crime scenes, to electronically diagram that, where manual measurements and sketching would just be too cumbersome.

JASON COSTELLO: Well, the survey equipment -- if you've ever driven by a construction site, you've seen it. It's equipment that sits on top of a tripod and, you know, men operate it to, you know, either lay things out or record where things are. Essentially it measures angles, and it can measure distance through a range finder. So from a reference point that we establish, we take measurements to all of the various items of evidence as well as objects within the crime scene, fixed objects for point of reference, or other objects that have significance. We can simply measure where they are. That creates a data set and essentially a CAD or computer-aided drafting diagram that our laboratory can then turn into a more user-friendly depiction of the crime scene. Essentially, an electronic sketch is what the end product typically is.

JASON COSTELLO: I did.

JASON COSTELLO: I've been assigned the total station operators for about five years. Generally speaking, every year we train. So my initial training was about five years ago. We receive in-service training every year, so, to keep our skills fresh and to, you know, train on the latest equipment or to just work best practices with other operators throughout the FBI.

JASON COSTELLO: It can. We do on-the-job training here in Boston. I have people that assist me with it, so we do trainings here. But we train all over the country. We've trained down in Fredericksburg, Virginia, where we have a facility. We've also trained at other off-site locations.

JASON COSTELLO: I do.

JASON COSTELLO: I was.

JASON COSTELLO: Yes.

JASON COSTELLO: Paula is now the unit chief for our Operational Projects Unit at the laboratory. We have -- the total station program has a close working relationship with that unit because they're the ones who would take my data collected in the field and translate it to generally an exhibit or something we can actually display the crime scene or depict it.

JASON COSTELLO: Yes.

JASON COSTELLO: Yes.

JASON COSTELLO: Well, my data, when I produce it, it -- the equipment that I use, it creates essentially a very crude drawing or a sketch. It's a lined drawing. We see points and lines. And when they produce their diagram or their product, we -- I can simply compare it side by side to make sure it accurately represents what I produced in the field, that it's been translated. Often there's a back-and-forth, and if they have questions on the work I did, they'll ask me, and there's an exchange of information. But at the end, we verify that it actually transferred from what I saw in the field to how they're presenting it.

JASON COSTELLO: Uh-huh.

JASON COSTELLO: Computer-aided drafting. It's an engineering program. I'm by no means familiar with using it. I haven't used it in years. But it's essentially -- it's how things are designed and drawn. But the soft -- the equipment we use, that's how it represents the data. It's a three-dimensional drawing, if you will. It's appropriate and -- again, in a complex scene where we have evidence located, you know, in a lot of different places and where elevation is a key thing, it helps because, again, it can represent things in a three-dimensional way that a two-dimensional sketch drawing just can't.

JASON COSTELLO: Yes, I was.

JASON COSTELLO: I responded to the Boylston Street scene and I began documenting the scene on Tuesday morning, the 16th, until it was complete, the following Sunday or Monday.

JASON COSTELLO: I was working on the Scene B side, which was the Forum side.

JASON COSTELLO: Well, when I first went out to the street, I just initially take a look around to get an appreciation for the scope and scale of what I'll be shooting and to try to have an initial understanding of where we expect to find evidence. Sometimes we see it, sometimes, you know, we have to search for it.

JASON COSTELLO: Well, we coordinate with the team leader on that scene because it's a coordinated approach that we use. So the team leader is managing the searchers. My job is a very unique job, so I know what my responsibilities are. So once it's agreed who's going to be working where, I work quasi independently at that point, although I'm staying in communication with the team leader as we document things working through.

JASON COSTELLO: Well, I immediately started just mapping in fixed objects, sidewalks, building corners, things like that, so the drawing that I started creating had some relevance. We generally -- we don't document the evidence until the actual evidence collectors have a chance to go through, find it, collect it. And once they've marked the location where the evidence is, they bring it to my attention, and that's when we map it and memorialize where it was.

JASON COSTELLO: We started Tuesday morning. We worked 14-hour days. We wrapped up -- I believe it was either Sunday night or Monday night is when we finally wrapped up. So it was about six or seven days of straight shooting. You know, long days.

JASON COSTELLO: Scene B, between both physical evidence and human remains, I believe I mapped in approximately 407 items. But with the, you know, again, that's only part of it. We also map fixed features, other features that our OPU section would use to actually create the model. So we took probably 4,000 or so shots of -- just to accurately depict -- and that's what was there. And that was just on the Scene B side.

JASON COSTELLO: Yes.

JASON COSTELLO: Susan Garst, who is an agent out of our New York field division. She's the total station operator for New York. So we -- they arrived sometime late on Tuesday, and since I was already working the B side, her and her partner started working the side A.

JASON COSTELLO: Well, sometimes evidence has a little tent next to it just to give it an item number, and that's for us to keep track of through photography, through evidence logs. And it has a number. In the case of our side, at least on Scene B, because there were so many items, and tents weren't practical after a certain point, the evidence collectors would identify it and then someone would mark the actual number -- item number it was given on the street with chalk next to where the item was recovered.

JASON COSTELLO: Yes.

JASON COSTELLO: Well, two that I know of were actually doing detailed measurements and drawings of certain things that they would need later in their work. And there are a whole host of other individuals that were operating, you know, three-dimensional scanners doing spherical photography work as well as kind of collecting our data at the end of every day to kind of start putting it all together.

JASON COSTELLO: I'd give it to our Operational Projects Unit.

JASON COSTELLO: It gets downloaded. We work on a data collector. It's essentially a computer. We download the data onto a thumb drive because of the volume of it. And we provide it to them and they put it onto their system for further use.

JASON COSTELLO: Yes.

JASON COSTELLO: I do.

JASON COSTELLO: This is the Scene B. This is the area around the Forum restaurant.

JASON COSTELLO: Yes, I do.

JASON COSTELLO: They are the items of evidence that I mapped doing my total station work.

JASON COSTELLO: Yes.

JASON COSTELLO: I've compared their location with the work that I did.

JASON COSTELLO: Well, this is -- the Forum restaurant is located about in the center. The highest concentration of the multicolored dots exist right in front of the Forum restaurant. And those are not all of the evidence items that were there but that is a large amount of them and that's them being mapped. They're color-coded to differentiate different types of evidence.

JASON COSTELLO: Well, the search teams locate it through just an exhaustive, you know, line search process they conduct. Once they locate it, they call it to my attention. I -- we shoot -- or we say "shoot." It's a bad term. But we measure from a number of established control points that we set up. So from one spot I can't see all the pieces of evidence on the scene so I'll have to move several times throughout the course of my work to get everything. That particular blue dot was up on top of a bridge going between the Lord & Taylor building and the one next to it. Because it was up high, I actually was shooting from a rooftop across Boylston Street to get a lot of the evidence that was located both on top of the Lord & Taylor building, the Mandarin Oriental. Anything up high, essentially. So my partner who is holding a striped pole with a reflective prism on top, he goes and stands over the piece of -- where the evidence was marked, the location of it, and from my vantage point I take a measurement to the device that he's holding. And that's how we can accurately map where that is.

JASON COSTELLO: Yes.

JASON COSTELLO: Yes. We -- as an ongoing process, every day when we would, you know collect data -- our Operational Projects Unit would download our data every day. So we were always seeing an updated CAD drawing for the entire street scene. So I was seeing the New York team's data as we all worked, and I then recognize it from what's in front of me here, or the Scene A side.

JASON COSTELLO: Yes.

JASON COSTELLO: Yes. That shows the concentration of evidence around the first device near the finish line near Marathon Sports.

JASON COSTELLO: No.

JASON COSTELLO: Labeling each item? No, I don't.

JASON COSTELLO: No. It's my understanding that not all items were put onto this just due to the amount.