SAN ANTONIO — When gunshots rang through the RIM Shopping Center on Dec. 8, police said the deadly shooting was targeted. According to authorities, Savawn Kyle, 26, was in the car with his 8-year-old son, driving through the shopping center when someone in another car pulled up and opened fire.
Kyle was rushed to the hospital with life-threatening injuries and later died. His son was uninjured.
Ten days later, another shooting occurred – this time at South Park Mall. Four people were shot, all of which survived, according to court records.
And on Dec. 22, police announced two arrests in the latter shooting, noting in arrest affidavits that one of the firearms used in the deadly RIM Shopping Center shooting, was also used in the South Park Mall shooting.
The link was made possibly by a ballistics database headed by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms called NIBIN.
“NIBIN compares shell casings from crime scenes to one another and determines that the same firearm was used at two different crime scenes or multiple crime scenes,” said Allen Darilek, special agent in charge of San Antonio, group one.
The acronym stands for National Integrated Ballistic Information Network. The initiative is headed by ATF, though the federal agency partners with state and local law enforcement groups, including the San Antonio Police Department, to build its database of shell casings.
“When the San Antonio Police Department goes to a crime scene, a shooting, and they pick up the shell casings, those shell casings are entered into the NIBIN system,” Darilek explained. “Those 3-D images are then transmitted to the ATF National Correlation Center in Huntsville, Alabama, where there is a correlation done.
“And if that if that firearm has been used in any other crime where there was a shell casing found, there is a lead generated and that is sent out to the field for investigation.”
While the database doesn’t tell authorities who pulled the trigger, it allows for law enforcement to generate leads in crimes that otherwise would go cold. Since 2017, the ATF’s San Antonio office has generated more than 1,000 leads using NIBIN. Darilek said in the calendar year of 2019, local NIBIN leads helped solve around 130 shootings and helped police arrest around 120 suspects.
RELATED: 'It's a horrible waste,' mother of murder victim says after man, 21, arrested in son's killing
“There are numerous shootings and robberies and violent crimes that occur, that there are no suspects, no witnesses, no video, no nothing,” Darilek said. “And then when the NIBIN lead comes out, that gives us a place to start.”
While charges have not been filed in connection to Kyle’s death, the system has allowed authorities to file charges in a number of other cases, including in the 2018 death of Brandon Cornelius. Authorities were able to charge Jamarque Washington, 21, with Cornelius’ death after they got a hit from NIBIN, coupled with DNA evidence. Court records state that the spent shell casings collected at the scene of Cornelius’ murder matched those collected from the scene of a shooting in Houston in which Washington was suspected.
“We try to practice comprehensive collection where all the shell casings are entered into the NIBIN system that are found at any crime scene here in our area that we work,” Darliek said. “There are also the firearms that are brought into the San Antonio police department property room. (Those guns) are also test fired and entered into the NIBIN system as well.”
Darilek said there is no shooting too big or too small when it comes to shell casings entered into NIBIN. From gun shots fired into the air on New Year’s Eve to a murder scene, Darilek said all shell casings are collected for evidence and sent over to the San Antonio Police Department’s NIBIN lab.
From the field, the shell casings are taken to a lab, the location of which the ATF has asked KENS 5 to not disclose. San Antonio Police Detective Michael Carter reviews the shell casings under a microscope, looking for the best representative sample to enter into NIBIN.
“We average probably 50 to 70 shooting events a week,” Carter said. “The 50 to shooting 70 shootings in that week can be anywhere from 200 to 400 shell casings a week, so I'm probably going to be looking at – I will look at all of them, probably. So there's 400 shell casings a week just in evidence case that does not include test fires.”
Carter said he pours through the shell casings collected from scenes in search of “the beauty queens of the bunch.”
“Not every shell casing in the event is going to be placed in,” Carter explained. “Just the best representative sample of each firearm present. So, when I do my triage, I'm looking to determine how many guns are present and then pick the best sample from each gun to get a sample into the machine.”
From there, Carter enters the shell casing into a machine, which takes several images, both 2D and 3D, as he’s prompted to enter case information, highlight distinct markings on the shell casings.
“Where this all takes place is something called internal ballistics,” Carter said. “Internal ballistics is where the gun goes through what they call a cycle of operation. And during that cycle of operation, various different things are happening. And that's what's causing these marks to appear on the shell casing, and that's what this is capturing.”
Each firearm produces its own distinct marking on a shell casing, essentially giving each firearm a unique thumbprint. With more than 3 million images entered into NIBIN, and counting, the leads generated by the correlation center are an estimated 98.6% accurate.
But it’s the speed at which the system operates that makes the tool so in investigations.
“If there was a critical incident where we had to recover shell casings and we recovered a gun, I can have responses back in as little as five hours,” Carter said. “One hour for me to put it in the machine, four hours for them to do the evaluation and get us response back. That's huge compared to what we used to have. The ability to get that information into the investigators’ hands in a timely fashion allows them to carry that investigation that much farther and that much faster.”
Darilek said the ATF is looking to expand is reach in Texas, specifically in the valley. Currently, the ATF has NIBIN sites in Houston, Dallas, Fort Worth, Arlington and San Antonio.
“We are able to solve crimes that we couldn't solve without it,” Darilek said of the value of NIBIN. “There are many, many crimes that go unsolved because there's not a lead for an investigator to start with, and with NIBIN, that gives us a place to start. That gives that firearm to start with and then we can start looking for it.”