By Catherine E. Shoichet @ Tampa Bay Times

On an autumn day in 2000, Erin Kimmerle drove a truck crammed with caskets down the cobblestone streets of a Kosovo village.
She had examined skeletal remains for months, interviewed family mem­bers, studied gunshot wounds and searched for signs of shrapnel buried with the bones of people whose last words were lost. Now the evidence was on her clipboard.

Survivors turned to her for an­swers. They wanted to know how their loved ones — among more than 2,000 victims exhumed and autop­sied by Kimmerle and her colleagues — spent their final hours.
“It’s so daunting. We say never again, but yet genocide is happening again in Africa right now. Even hav­ing trials doesn’t stop it,” she said in a recent interview. “But this is for that one person, searching for answers. That’s how you effect change, one per­son at a time.”

That day, she attended 11 funerals.

Seven years later and more than 5,500 miles away, Kimmerle stands in a wooded area behind USF’s Tampa campus.
  “We found more bones on this side,” a sheriff ’s deputy tells her as he sifts through buckets of dirt. The bones belong to fetal pigs, donated by USF’s medical school and buried by Kim­merle and colleagues six months ago.
  They are mock evidence for depu­ties and crime scene techs learning to find hidden graves, one of several classes for law enforcement officers that Kimmerle, a visiting assistant professor of anthropology, helped start last year. Professors and stu­dents at USF credit Kimmerle with inspiring students and revitalizing the school’s forensics program.

“Forensics is just exploding,” she says, in an era of increased media focus on crimes and such television shows as CSI and Without a Trace.
Kimmerle uses forensic science honed in more than a decade of field work and academic study around the world. Her report on a box full of bones in a Hyde Park attic — which dated back centuries — sent them to the state’s archaeology museum. Her analysis of bones at the Smithsonian helped return hundreds of Native American remains to their tribes.

On the walls of Kimmerle’s lab, photographs depict skulls pierced by bullets, slashed ribs and bones fractured by torture. Sitting at tables beside them, students learn how to identify bones, piece together skel­etons and analyze the cause of death.

Police asked Kimmerle’s team to help when they removed dirt from beneath a South Tampa home in their search for Sandra Prince.
“She’s dug up more bodies in a week than I have in 40 years of police work,” said Tampa police Sgt. Jack Waters, who heads the department’s forensic investigation unit.
Sometimes Kimmerle brings her 4-year-old son to the lab. He stares at shelves lined with skulls. “Mommy, the skeletons don’t talk,” he says.
But Kimmerle knows they do.