3D Printed Beer Bottle Helps Convict Murder Suspect

[Brian_Krassenstein]

A UK learning institution, Plymouth City College, was called on for the use of their Cubex 3D printer, as well as their making skills for the re-creation of a jagged, broken bottle used in the 2014 attack on and subsequent murder of 17-year-old Alex Peguero Sosa. The 3D printed evidence helped to convict the attacker, Lee Dent, who would ultimately receive at least 22 years in prison. Check out how the 3D printed evidence helped detectives in the full story: http://3dprint.com/59380/3d-printed-evidence-for-trial/


Below is a photo of the bottle being 3D printed:

[curious aardvark]

That's pretty neat.

Although all they actually did was make a plastic newky brown bottle.

Probably a 30 minute job with digital calipers and openscad :-)

Newky brown is pretty offensive with out the surrounding glass bottle.

But more exposure for 3d printing - which is always a good thing

[Wolfie]

Just wondering...why didn't they just use a real bottle? Just pour out the crap inside and, well, its a beer bottle. Not like you can't find them in every liqueur store. Then make a simple mold and pour yourself a sugar glass copy. You could have a dozen sugar glass copies in a couple hours. To spend 28hrs and all the actual man-hours reproducing a common beer bottle when you can buy 6 at a time for a couple bucks. Well, just seems a silly use of the technology. What am I missing here?

I could see the whole 3D printing thing if it was a unique item that was disposed of or otherwise not available. This wasn't.

[awerby]

You didn't read the whole story: “We needed an exact replica but you cannot hand a potential weapon like a glass bottle to a person suspected of a violent offence while they are giving evidence in the dock,” said senior investigating officer, Detective Inspector Ian Ringrose, of the Major Crimes Investigation Team.

It doesn't seem likely that a bottle would break when you hit someone in the neck with it accidentally (apparently the jury didn't believe it either). The bottle was probably broken before it hit the victim's neck. It was also easier to get the students to print a bottle than to go through all the trouble of molding one and casting a replica in sugar-glass.

Andrew Werby
www.computersculpture.com

[Wolfie]

I did read the story. No I wouldn't give him a real bottle either...but I wonder...did they give him a glass of water on the desk as is customary at trials?

Anyway, casting a mold and pouring a sugar glass bottle of such a simple object is way easy and doesn't take very much time at all. And they would be perfectly safe to handle as they are used as movie props all the time. I speak from experience here. I have made molds and I have made glasses (not a beer bottle though) and I did it with my then 12 and 10yr (now 16 and 14) old granddaughters. We made two dozen glasses for one of their birthday parties in an afternoon at home.

The easy stuff cures in about 10 minutes and since this is a simple object you can use the kneedable non-liquid silicone mold compound. In less than a half hour you can produce a mold and then cast a sugar beer bottle. Most of that time spent boiling isomalt then waiting for it to cool in the mold. In 28 hours, you could have a complete brewery in sugar for heaven's sake. You can do it with supplies from an craft store and isomalt from a restaurant supply store. If I can do it in my common household kitchen with two pre-teen girls, they can do it in a police lab with educated technicians.

I think its neat that 3D printing got a positive spotlight here. But, I don't think its "lawless" as the article put it, and I don't think this was the best solution to the problem.