A Retired Texas Ranger is Teaching Baylor Students How to Use Forensic Evidence to Help Solve Crimes

James "Sarge" Huggins is using his decades of experience to teach Baylor students how to analyze crime scenes and assemble the forensic evidence needed to help prosecute criminals

January 15, 2025
Forensics class

Baylor forensic science students take part in labs that teach them how to collect and analyze evidence. (Robert Rogers/Baylor University)

Despite the fact that his students have affectionately nicknamed him "Sarge," one of the most popular faculty members in the Baylor University College of Arts & Sciences is not teaching military courses for either the Air Force or Army ROTC programs on campus. Instead, James R. Huggins is a retired Texas Ranger who for the past 15 years has been giving Baylor students the skills needed to analyze crime scenes, evaluate forensic evidence and help law enforcement agencies prosecute criminals.

Jim Huggins
James "Sarge" Huggins

Huggins is a senior lecturer in anthropology –– the department where Baylor’s forensic science program resides. Since arriving on campus in 2010 after a nearly 30-year career in law enforcement, he has helped shaped the curriculum to keep up with constant advances in crime detection and prosecution.

“Forensic science is changing. As I am speaking, a new discovery has happened somewhere in the world that’s going to affect how things are done in crime detection and analysis. As great as forensic science is, it always lags behind a bit before investigators can catch up,” Huggins said. “DNA is a prime example. We didn’t even use DNA for criminal aspects until the late 1980s. We just didn’t have the technology before then to utilize it, but now we do. Since science is playing catch-up all the time, I try to keep what I teach as new and relevant as possible.”

When Baylor first introduced its minor in forensic science, all courses were taught in the anthropology department. After he arrived on campus, Huggins began helping to restructure the program, where the popularity of the minor had led to some courses filling up 160-seat lecture halls and limiting the number of upper-level forensic science courses that could be offered.

Now, first-year introductory classes in basic science are now taught in the chemistry and psychology departments. If students pass those introductory courses, they are permitted to declare forensic science as a minor and enroll in the upper-level forensic classes taught by Huggins –– with titles such as Bloodstain Pattern Analysis, Trace Evidence, Firearms Evidence, Crime Scene Investigation and Forensic Applications in White Collar Crime.

Sharing lessons from a long career

Sarge pocket

The expertise Huggins uses in his classes was acquired during a long career. He grew up in Temple, Texas, and earned a degree in biology with a minor in English at the University of Mary Hardin-Baylor. 

The first job Huggins had in law enforcement was as a highway patrol officer with the Texas Department of Public Safety. He then earned a promotion to sergeant and moved into the Criminal Investigations Division of the DPS. During his first 14 years with the Texas DPS, Huggins was stationed in McKinney, Hamilton, Laredo and Austin. It was during his time in CID that he came into contact with some Texas Rangers. 

“As a polygraph examiner, I started working with a lot of Rangers on cases,” he said. “Whenever they had somebody who needed to be polygraphed, they’d bring them to me.” 

In 1996, Huggins was promoted to become a Texas Ranger, and was then stationed in Centerville, “about halfway between Dallas and Houston on I-45,” he said. He’s been there ever since with his wife Cora, who recently retired as the principal of Centerville Elementary School.

In 2008, with nearly 30 years of law enforcement work under his belt, he earned a master’s degree in forensic science from Oklahoma State University. He began teaching a few evening classes at Baylor as an adjunct professor in 2010. That same year he also taught as an adjunct faculty member at both Sam Houston State University and East Texas Baptist University. At the time, he also ran his own forensic training company.

When Huggins retired as a sergeant in the Texas Rangers in 2011, he was able to become a full-time lecturer at Baylor and drop his adjunct positions at the other schools, as well as close his training company. Since teaching full-time at Baylor, he has commuted to campus from Centerville three days a week. 

Despite his retirement from law enforcement, Huggins maintains a working relationship with local and state agencies.

“I still carry a commission as a Special Texas Ranger, and I help out on certain things every now and then,” he said.

Forensic lab demo

Comprehensive approach

In his classes, Huggins not only passes on information through lectures, but he also includes a laboratory aspect to each class to provide students with hands-on experience.

“I will bring in real cases and have my students work on those,” he said. “For example, in a course I teach called Advanced Forensic Investigations, one giant room is split up into two complete mock crime scenes that students will work on in teams. They’ll start off learning how to draw up a search warrant before they can even get in the building where the crime scene is at.”

Gun demonstration

Huggins said his idea for the class is to give students the technical skills they will need to work on cases, starting with the initial phone call reporting a crime and following that all the way to the courtroom.

“They have to do everything,” he said. “The students have to walk into the scene, investigate the scene, collect evidence, package it properly, analyze the evidence, write up reports –– not really the fun part, of course –– and then put together and deliver a presentation of their findings as if they are standing before a grand jury, so that the jurors can decide whether or not the case is worthy to take to the next level.”

And Huggins said that he tries to make his courses as realistic as possible.

“The crime scenes in the lab employ the use of real, non-human blood,” he said. “Students have to learn to take fingerprints, collect trace evidence and make impressions of things such as footprints.”

Real-life applications

Sarah Lombardo
Sarah Lombardo

One thing that students take from Huggins’ CSI class is to “do no harm in a crime scene,” said Sarah Lombardo, a senior psychology major. “Make sure you’re taking the proper procedures to make sure that you’re not messing up any of the evidence that’s there, and that you’re preserving the scene.”

Lombardo said that lesson –– and many others she learned from Sarge’s classes –– helped her during the summer of 2024 with internships she completed at police departments in Irving and Carrollton, where she worked with crime scene officers.

“If you want to build a good case from the start, you have the ability to impact the course of the entire investigation from being the first person on the scene,” Lombardo said. “Just be smart about your actions and think through how it could affect things later –– not just right then.”

Evidence, no matter how small or seemingly insignificant, can have a major affect on cases, said John-William Knight, one of Huggins’s former students who is now a forensic scientist in the Firearms and Toolmarks Section of the Texas Department of Public Safety.

Huggins “taught that attention to detail and meticulous notes and documentation would make or break a case,” said Knight, who graduated from Baylor in 2015 with a degree in anthropology and a focus on forensic science. “His courses gave me specifically a path toward my career with Texas DPS.”

Microscope
Victoria Saunders working with Sarge during a lab

Victoria Saunders, who graduated in May 2024 with a degree in anthropology and a minor in forensic science, said she appreciated the practical experience that Huggins brought into the classroom.

“He has an easy confidence about him,” she said. “He does what he does really well because he knows the foundations of it. He’s had years of experience in this, and he’s able to give us a broader foundation because of those years of experience. Sarge tells us, ‘Oh, look, this is a really weird situation that happened.’ Now we know how to handle because he handled it.”

Multiple career opportunities

To earn a minor in forensic science, students must complete 19 semester hours of coursework. Seven hours of that come from introductory science classes, with the remaining 12 hours consisting of upper-level courses. Huggins said the minor attracts students with a variety of interests and career plans.

“At last count, students from 75 different majors have taken Baylor forensics courses,” he said. “The majority of those students are majoring in biology, chemistry, psychology and anthropology, but I’ve got students that are also majoring in accounting. Forensics can fit with just about anything as long as students have the required science background.”

Students who graduate with a minor in forensic science are prepared for graduate school, or can go to work in a crime lab, a crime scene investigations unit or with a private forensics company. One Baylor graduate from a few years ago took a job with a company that teaches police officers how to administer breath alcohol tests and certify them to run breath-testing equipment. She now does the same sort of work but in her new role in the Texas Department of Public Safety crime lab.

“Other students have pursued degrees in forensic science and gone on to become criminalists in crime labs, investigators in Crime Scene Investigation units, or medicolegal death investigators in the offices of medical examiners,” Huggins said. “Students who have graduated from our program not only work in Texas, but across the nation.”

Forensics as public service

Huggins said someone contemplating a career as a forensic scientist needs to have more than a fascination with solving crimes to be successful.

“This profession requires a person with a dedicated public servant personality in order to do the job and do it properly,” he said. “We don’t do the job for ourselves. We do it for the victims, for the victim’s family, and for society. Even though it’s portrayed that way sometimes, forensic science is not this glorified job where you’re in the news all the time. It’s a public service-type job, so you really have to be dedicated to want to do it.”

A successful forensic scientist also needs to be able to call on superior analytical skills.

“You’ve got to really have a knack for looking down the road at the big picture as well as being able to solve puzzles –– looking for the tiniest details that can lead you to something else,” Huggins said.


ABOUT THE COLLEGE OF ARTS & SCIENCES AT BAYLOR UNIVERSITY 

The College of Arts & Sciences is Baylor University’s largest academic division, consisting of 25 academic departments in the sciences, humanities, fine arts and social sciences, as well as 11 academic centers and institutes. The more than 5,000 courses taught in the College span topics from art and theatre to religion, philosophy, sociology and the natural sciences. The College’s undergraduate Unified Core Curriculum, which routinely receives top grades in national assessments, emphasizes a liberal education characterized by critical thinking, communication, civic engagement and Christian commitment. Arts & Sciences faculty conduct research around the world, and research on the undergraduate and graduate level is prevalent throughout all disciplines. Visit the College of Arts & Sciences website