A class of sophomores from St. Thomas Aquinas High School are on a field trip in Fort Lauderdale. It’s a science class, but the subject matter is unusual for high school. Gladys Latimore teaches criminology and this field trip is part of a study in criminal forensics. The kids are student CSIs, but the make-believe crime scene is set up by the teacher.

Ms. Latimore has been setting up field trips with fake crime scenes for nearly 20 years. By now she has a vast collection of mock evidence, plastic skeletons, make-believe weapons, (animal) blood — most everything you’d expect to find at a real crime scene.

The school bus has unloaded the science class at the crime scene of the day. We’re at Fort Lauderdale’s Holiday Park. The class begins its systematic search, carefully observing the rules of forensic scientists.

One student finds a piece of material which he harvests with a pair of tweezers. The youth stores the cloth fragment in a plastic bag, making sure to mark the location where it was found.

A 15-year-old girl student finds an empty soda bottle which she picks up by the neck with a pencil and stores with the hope that it’ll contain fingerprints.

Then another student, Thomas, calls out, "Over here. I think I found our victim." Carefully, several nearby students gather around to look at the newly discovered "body."

"Boy," says one student, "Ms. Latimore really made a great looking dummy for this case."

"Did she ever," says another student, "but where’d she get the stuff to make it smell so bad?"

Ms. Latimore arrives at the scene, looks over the kids shoulders and is shocked. "That’s not mine," she says, "I didn’t put it here — I think it’s a real corpse!"

Immediately the teacher instructs her students to leave the area in an orderly manner, being careful not to disturb what may be a real crime scene, while she uses her cell phone to call the cops — the real cops.

Turns out it’s not a dummy, it’s a real body. The dead person is a 45-year-old homeless man who, according to the coroner’s office, died of natural causes.