Among his products are assault weapons.

• Author: Covington, Owen
• Position: People - Tri-Tech Inc. - Company Profile

The popularity of TV dramas featuring forensic science has been a pleasant surprise for Jay Walker Jr., president of Southport-based Tri-Tech Inc., one of the nation's top manufacturers of evidence-collection kits. "Twenty years ago," Walker, 60, says, "if someone asked me what I do for a living, and I told them I was in forensics, they'd say, 'What the hell is forensics?'"

The Scarsdale, N.Y., native, a former Marine, worked 16 years for companies that designed and produced electronic instrumentation for medical and research uses. He left Scarsdale for Durham in 1983 to help revitalize a friend's business making the medical and research equipment. The company folded, but he bought its 1,500-square-foot building and started Tri-Tech to make similar products.

Six months later, a key employee was sexually assaulted. Walker saw a communication gap between the medical personnel gathering scientific evidence from such crimes and the law-enforcement officers using that evidence. "Because of that, I started looking into forensic-product production."

He began his company's conversion by researching the procedures used to gather evidence in sexual-assault cases. He found that there was no uniformity in the methods or the products used...