Dying to learn

STANWOOD - At 7:30 a.m. on Dec. 18th North Cedar science teacher Jay Fetzer was murdered in his classroom.

It was up to his eighth hour Biotech class to determine who was responsible for his untimely death on his son's sixth birthday.

This, of course, wasn't an actual murder. Fetzer craftily staged his own assassination to help his students practice homicide detective skills. Fetzer used fake blood, shattered glass, human and dog hair to set the scene. He got lots of teachers involved to play the suspects.

Biotech student Allison Blake said 'It is a really good class and Fetzer is a great teacher.”

The students felt like they were working in a real lab. They interviewed the suspects and asked them about their blood type, their arrival and departure time from the high school, and lastly any motive they would have to take Fetzer's life.

'I like the hands on, not just working on a computer all the time,” said student Trever Greene.

After about a week of investigation and months of learning about blood splatters, hair, blood types and fingerprints, the students came to a conclusion. Using a three-pronged hoe, chemistry teacher Kris Brown murdered Fetzer. She was not the students' first choice because Fetzer had led them all to believe it was math teacher Scott Kasik.

This is the second year Fetzer has created this project. He spent considerable time gauging staff interest in participating, determining what their role would or wouldn't be in the crime and then forming a plausible scenario. Physically creating the scene took around two hours.

The goals were to put into practice some of the skills the class developed earlier in the unit on forensics and to sharpen their deductive reasoning skills.