As doctors contemplate additional surgery to remove the bullet from the Psycho Sniper’s latest victim, ballistics experts are hoping to verify the caliber of the round while it is still in the victim.
There is little doubt among law-enforcement personnel that Saturday’s attack is the work of the Beltway sniper, but investigators will be unable to link the shooting conclusively without ballistic evidence.
Removal of the round will require additional surgery on the 37-year- old victim, who was in critical condition yesterday after having been operated on by Dr. Rao Ivatury, director of trauma and critical care at Medical College of Virginia Hospital in Richmond.
Unless the bullet is taken out, investigators will be unable to determine its ballistic fingerprint to link it to the rifle used in the 11 previous Capital-area assaults – nine of them fatal – in Maryland, Virginia and Washington.
However, it may be possible at least to determine whether the bullet is the same size, .223-caliber, that was used in the earlier attacks, said Dr. Paul B. Ferrara, director of Virginia’s Division of Forensic Science.
“It depends on the condition of the bullet and how badly fragmented it is,” Ferrara said. “Sometimes a firearms expert can assess or approximate the caliber of weapon by looking at X-rays from different angles and get an idea of the dimensions of the bullet without it being removed.”
When a bullet is fired, it picks up marks from the grooves scribed inside the gun’s barrel.
Each gun produces a unique set of striations, which allow experts to link bullets to the same gun – without identifying the specific weapon. With Post Wire Services