Source: The Peterborough Examiner

Most kids don’t go home from camp with a DNA profile; even fewer go home with a profile that tells them they have an identical twin.

But that’s just what happened to two Thamesford 17-year-olds at the Trent University Forensic DNA camp.

At the close of camp Friday, Samantha and Rebecca Koot were handed a DNA profile that proved they are identical twins, not fraternal.

“They were really really excited,” said camp director Chris Kyle. “They were quite happy. Yes, there were tears.”

The girls’ parents were in the audience and were equally excited, he said.

“It’s a question they’d all had for a long time. We were able to provide them with that information that will help them know, now, forever.”

The girls were two of 21 teens aged 14 to 18 who attended the second of three forensic camps this year.

Aaron Murray, 14, of Trenton, said he attended because he wants to be a forensic scientist one day.

“It was amazing,” Murray said yesterday in the parking lot as he prepared to go home. “It was even better than I’d thought.”

Everybody’s friends, he said.

“It’s like one big family.”

Murray said a week of real life crime scene investigation didn’t turn him off the idea, although camp counsellors had thought it might.

“It’s not all like CSI,” camp co-ordinator Anali Kazakos told The Examiner earlier this week. “The camp gives kids a chance to see what it’s really like.”

Murray’s mother said the cost of the camp, $750 including meals and lodging, is expensive, but worth it as a once in a lifetime experience.

Similarly, 16-year-old Stacey Loftus’s mother, Tina, said she was eager for her daughter to go to forensics camp.

“She’d changed from wanting to do forensics to marine biology. I figured send her here instead of wasting four years going to school to find out what she wanted to do,” Loftus said.

The university should do more to advertise the camp, she said, because her daughter only found out about it by accident from her science teacher in Hamilton.

“We didn’t know where the camp was except it was in Peterborough, so I called the police department and they told me about it,” she said.

Kyle said he has mixed feelings about growing the camp.

“While we want to promote the university and forensic science program, we don’t want to overtax people who are volunteering their time. I’d rather keep it moderate and really high quality,” he said.

A fourth tentative week of camp has been cancelled due to a shortage of people and time to organize it, he said.

It wasn’t from lack of applications, or a similar camp offered this summer for the first time at the University of Ontario Institute of Technology in Oshawa, he said — staff are still receiving inquiries about the Trent camp. Numbers of applications were about the same this year as in previous years, he said.

Yet until he cancelled the fourth week, he had not turned away people if they fell into the proper age group.

As camp closed Friday, the new camper-scientists staged a courtroom drama, complete with murder suspect, judge and jury — and yes, lots of scientific evidence to prove the suspect had indeed killed her best friend with a hatchet.

She was found guilty, camp-style.