Laser scanning technology helps investigators piece together a champion boxer’s death.

It was murder, not suicide, which caused the death of former world featherweight and junior welterweight boxing champion Arturo Gatti according to a team of forensic investigators. On July 11, 2009, Gatti was found dead on the floor of his condo in the Brazilian resort town of Porto de Galinas. He had been vacationing there with his wife, Amanda, and young son, when he was discovered lying face-down near a staircase on the first floor. Brazilian authorities initially considered Gatti’s wife a prime suspect and arrested her, but released her soon after and concluded that Gatti had hung himself with a handbag strap. Arturo Gatti, police claimed, was despondent following an argument with his wife earlier that evening and took his own life. Skeptical of the Brazilian authorities’ conclusions, the boxer’s friends and family hired a group to travel to Brazil to determine, once and for all, the circumstances surrounding his death.

Claims of a botched investigation dogged Brazilian authorities almost from the start. Though called a suicide, police failed to explain how the body of a 170-pound man could be suspended from a cloth strap long enough to cause death. Extensive and unexplained trauma to the back of Gatti’s head was inconsistent with the position in which the body lay, and it caused extensive spatter throughout the tiled dining and kitchen areas of the suite. Toxicology tests were inconclusive, and the original investigation failed to adequately document the crime scene for later analysis. In order to fully understand the circumstances of Gatti’s death, the investigators needed to document and virtually recreate the circumstances. Enter Andre Stuart.

Andre Stuart, CEO of the forensic animation firm, Call 21st, was among the group hired by the then 37-year-old fighter’s family to recreate the scene. “The [original] documentation of the crime scene was quite incomplete,” explained Stuart. “Our job was to reconstruct the crime scene as to the time of death and provide data to other experts to use as the basis of their analysis.” The FARO Laser Scanner used by Stuart mounts to a standard tripod and emits laser beams in all directions. The device captures the reflected points and assembles them into a point cloud—essentially a three-dimensional image made up of the millions of data points projected from the scanner. That point cloud is then fed into any number of software packages to be transformed into color, 3D representations of actual conditions. It took Stuart five scans (or about 30 minutes) to capture the entirety of the condo space. The data was “built-out” in Autodesk® 3D Max® modeling software, which pieced together the data into a three-dimensional animation.