A dead body, a bag of cocaine, two guns, multiple wads of cash and a killer to catch. Moorpark College student Daniel Rathaus and his team of detectives drew yellow police tape around the scene, photographed the evidence and began questioning the victim’s distraught wife and other witnesses. Thirty minutes later, there were three individuals in handcuffs one suspected of murder.

This was the seventh out of eight mock murder scenes that the criminal investigation class, CJ M11, ran on Thursday, March 31, afternoon in front of the Administration Building. The goal was for students to use what they’ve learned outside of the classroom. The students acted as members of police departments as they processed the crime scenes and attempted to solve the case.

Nicholas Zingo, criminal justice faculty member and 38-year veteran of the Los Angeles Police Department, ran the scene and said there was a definite spike in the students’ learning after the exercise.

“You see a great change,” said Zingo. “One of the things I do when we get back to the classroom is I say, ‘Ok now that you’ve done this and you’ve processed it, now tell me what did you learn and what do you still need to know?…’ The key to learning is there a change in behavior.”

Zingo kept the scene as real as possible and had his students adhere to real-life practices, such as having theater arts students act as media and bystanders and having his students write up reports of the scene.

“They’ve got to interview the witnesses,” said Zingo. “Then they’ve got to figure out what happened, who murdered this guy. This [the scene] is just the first part, they’ve got a lot of writing to do after this.”

Rathaus, a philosophy major in his last year at Moorpark, experienced this exercise for the first time and said certain elements surprised him.

“No plan survives first contact,” He said, “We weren’t expecting as many witnesses as there were and we didn’t have time to interview every single person, and some of the actors were very disruptive and they wouldn’t let us continue our investigation.”

After Rathaus’s group finished the final group began their scene, wrapping up the series of field exercises that began on Tuesday.