In a small room in the Cass County Council on Aging’s Lowe Center, a group of children in matching yellow T-shirts played crime scene investigators as they dusted for fingerprints and examined fake blood splatter.

The Penn Township Fire Department, the Dowagiac Public Safety Department, the Cass County Sheriff’s Office, Midwest Energy and the COA hosted the 10th annual Camp Safe Kids Monday.

The annual event, designed for children aged 9 to 11 years old, ran from 9:30 a.m. to 3:30 p.m. Monday, June 19. The camp aimed to teach children from all over the Cass County area about safety topics ranging from traffic and bike safety to first aid.

The COA provided free breakfast and lunch for all participants.

“The kids that are 9 to 11 have so much thrown at them all the time,” said COA Active Team Leader Sandi Hoger, who helped organize the camp. “We are trying to counteract that and teach them how to prevent some things.”

The first workshop provided for the children was a crash course in CSI led by Cass County Sheriff’s Office Deputy Makenzie Kreiner. The workshop taught the children how to lift fingerprints off glass surfaces and how to analyze the ways that blood splatter would show up on different types of surfaces. Red paint was used as a substitute for blood.

Kreiner said she came up with the idea for a CSI workshop because it falls in line with the energy levels of the children.

“I do basic crime scene training for adults, and I found out that the kids really like hands-on activities,” Kreiner said. “They don’t really do well when they are just sitting, so lecturing them doesn’t really work.”

This workshop was a favorite among the children, particularly Abby Dennis, a fourth grader at Edwardsburg Intermediate School.

Dennis found out about the camp from a friend of her grandmother, and was so impacted by the course and Kreiner that she is considering a future in law enforcement.

“I’m gonna be a police officer,” Dennis said. “Crime stuff is super cool.”

Other activities included first aid training, which included teaching children CPR and the Heimlich Maneuver, bike and traffic safety training, in which the children received helmets fitted by the police department, fire safety, which taught children how to get out of a burning house and how to shoot a fire hose, boat and water safety, as well as introducing children to police dogs and explaining to them how the dogs search for drugs.

The camp split the children into groups, with two senior citizens monitoring and leading each group. This allowed the children to interact with the seniors, something Hoger feels is valuable and important.

“The senior citizens really have a good time with the kids,” Hoger said. “It’s nice for the kids to interact with the older people to see exactly how they are and what they do.”

While Hoger said the COA did not do anything special for the 10th anniversary of Camp Safe Kids, some of the children felt that Monday’s day camp was more fun than in other years.

“This has been my favorite. This is my third year,” said Malachi Meterer, a sixth grader at Concord Junior High School in Elkhart, Indiana. “Next year, I’ll be too old, so this is a fun last day.”