From NBC News:
The stranger wore scrubs when she plucked the 3-day-old newborn from a Texas hospital and hid her in a handbag. Lubbock police, with the aid of the infant’s family and surveillance, created a computer composite of the suspect for the public.
Then, a call came in. A witness who was there that early March morning in 2007 said the composite was wrong. Police summoned Suzanne Lowe Birdwell, a forensic sketch artist with the Texas Rangers, to help get it right.
“The woman said she was there in the maternity waiting room. She said the image they put on the television, the computer composite, looked like a white woman,” Birdwell recalled.
The suspect — later identified as Rayshaun Parson, who was sentenced to 20 years in prison for the kidnapping – was black. She had been caught within 24 hours of Birdwell’s sketch going out.
When digital devices fail to deliver, police still turn to the organic alternative of paper, pencil and a personal touch that a forensic sketch artist offers. It’s a skill that artists say has been drawn on less and less in a world where surveillance and cellphone cameras are ubiquitous, and computer programs can be cost-saving measures.
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