During David Miranda’s 24 years of being a crime scene investigator agent he never carried a gun.
Since CSI’s aren’t sworn officers, they aren’t allowed to do so.
Miranda, a 61-year-old student at Citrus College with an undeclared major, wrote the play “On Days Like These” based off of real events throughout his career.
The logline of Miranda’s play is “What do you do when the only weapon you have is the truth?”
His experiences aren’t what you would expect for an average community college student to have gone through. One of the events that inspired his play the most is when a family went to him and asked him to go to Mexico to finish an unsolved case.
He never ended up going for a number of good reasons at the time but always wonders how it would’ve worked out had he agreed to make the trip down south.
His play illustrates how things might have gone had he accepted their offer.
Miranda was a CSI for many years but knew he was a writer long before that.
Being a CSI actually prohibited him, in a way, from being a writer.
“Every department that I know of people that I know that have written anything; even if it’s a textbook. Anything you’d write that’s going to go out to the public that isn’t part of a case has to be submitted up to your chain of command for approval,” Miranda said.
Miranda has a published book titled “Evidence Found: An Approach to Crime Scene Investigation.”
He did not publish this book while still a CSI even though it had so much to do with his line of work.
He said he waited to publish anything he wrote because, “I was not interested in their opinion on my writing of any fiction or even this book.”
Miranda was not however, barred from writing altogether. He still had to write homicide reports which by far was not his favorite kind of writing to do.
Miranda said there was “nothing more painstaking… than a homicide report.”
Miranda plans on turning his play into a movie and plans on writing a whole series of television episodes for it.
He also is working on another screenplay on Jeanne de Clisson also known as the Lioness of Brittany; which he is doing heavy research for. He plans to take some directing classes and hopefully direct it himself.
