The Jeffco's office shows new forensic ballistics technology | Crimes and justice

The new ballistic 3D rendering machine of the sheriff of the sheriff of Jefferson County helps the County to solve crimes in connection with weapons a little faster.

“This is a great success if this machine is available. The citizens will therefore be safer,” said Brent Beavers, who was responsible for the office for alcohol, tobacco, firearms and explosives (ATF) Denver Field Division, told the media during a tour of the district's laboratory on Monday morning.

In June 2024, the Sheriff's Office acquired a Brassstrax Machine for integrated ballistic information networks (NIBIN) after it was awarded 368.866 USD in September 2023 by the Bureau of Justic Assistance (BJA) as part of the local integration initiative of the Bureau of Justice (BJA).

The machine absorbs detailed images of ammunition patron housings and loads it up to the nibin database, so that the law enforcement authorities can quickly compare the housings with other housings across the country.

While the Colorado Nibin quickly accesses the state and the surrounding area within 20 minutes to an hour, it may be uploaded to the national database.

In contrast to the actual balls, the housings are not damaged during burning and are often left behind by semi -automatic handguns and rifles. Then you have your own texture and marking on the back due to different shot needles and manufacturing techniques, which give you a unique “fingerprint”, which can then be identified and connected to different incidents.

“If our law enforcement authorities have incidents in their cities and receive this evidence in us, they can be associated with other incidents in other areas and exchanged information,” said Jefferson County Regional Lab, forensic scientist Erin Mulligan, during a demonstration.

While the technology has been around since 2003, according to Mulligan, the only Brassstrax machines in the region in the Colorado Bureau of Investigation and in Denver were in Arvada. Several agencies in the entire Metro-Denver with two machines caused a considerable amount of slowdown, whereby the fast-acting information lost that were necessary to catch criminals.

Now law enforcement agencies in the district can quickly access results at the Jefferson County location and accelerate processes.

While new cartridges that were uploaded to the system could help investigators find leads in previous crimes, the laboratory mainly focuses on current incidents.

“It is important to have these leads at the beginning of the examination,” he said. “But it can work conversely and deliver solutions for older crimes that are excellent.”

In 2024, 13,213 evidence was submitted to the Nibin database in Colorado, which led 60.1% leads in the event of criminal investigations.

From January to May 2025, 48.8% of the cases were submitted, according to ATF 48.8%.

In April, Jefferson County's laboratory achieved the results times in four and a half days, when neck had to be brought to another laboratory beforehand, which, according to Mulligan, achieved slower results.

During their history, more than 5 million evidence was uploaded to the national database.

The Arvada Police Department, for example, has already seen success when using the Brassstrax machine.

In 2022, a suspect followed a victim in her car and shot on the victim's vehicle in the 57th Avenue. One of the balls came close to the victim's head into the headrest of the car.

According to the public information officer of the department, Dave Snelling, the police authority never found a weapon, but the housing was placed in the Nibin database.

Then the police authority answered an incident from Denver in 2023, in which a suspect shot at a bar on the Sheridan Boulevard. The housing at the crime scene was also led by the database, which connected the housings directly to the shootings in Arvada.

In the first incident, a witness identified the vehicle. In the second, the balls matched. The investigators were then able to connect the leads and arrested 24-year-old Michael Esardcida, who later owed himself to make a first degree first degree and was sentenced to 16 years in prison in February 2025.

While the Arvada police department did not use the Brassstrax machine from Jefferson County in this incident, you can now and faster results.

“This technology is absolutely astonishing; able to keep up one to one,” said Snelling. “We get a lot more calls than, for example, 10 to 15 years ago. It was only this weekend that we fired many rounds at a house party, and we collect this shell and we will probably submit it the next day or so.”