ABOUT

 

BJ Bourg is the Chief Investigator for a Louisiana District Attorney’s Office. In addition to his investigative duties, he makes regular appearances at area schools discussing the criminal justice process, criminal investigations, proper decision making skills and, on occasion, mystery writing.

 

He has worked in law enforcement for over twenty years. During that time, he has worked as a patrol cop, a detective, a detective sergeant and a police academy instructor.

While working patrol, he was a proactive and highly productive cop and also served as a field training officer. In addition to normal patrol duties, he regularly conducted in-depth investigations into felony cases and effected a large number of felony arrests.

After only two years on patrol, and at the tender age of twenty-two, he was promoted to detective.

As a detective, he worked most of his agency’s death investigations (suicides, homicides, autoerotic asphyxiation fatalities, officer-involved shootings, etc) and attained a 100% arrest and conviction rate on all murder cases assigned to him. In addition to homicide investigations, he investigated over a thousand other felony cases, including burglaries, arsons, robberies, rapes, kidnappings, etc. He had a high confession rate, arrest rate and conviction rate on all cases he investigated. He also recovered hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of stolen property during his tenure as a detective.

After working over ten and a half years in CID, he sought out new challenges as an instructor in the police academy. In addition to implementing an arduous physical fitness program, he taught many classes to new and veteran officers, including Interview and Interrogation, Evidence, Courtroom Testimony, Firearms, Defensive Tactics, Preliminary Investigations, Homicide, Burglary, Robbery, Drug Laws, Building Searches, Fingerprinting, Felony Traffic Stops, Sex Crimes, Report Writing, Crime Scene Surveying and Diagramming, and several others. He is a certified firearms instructor, a defensive tactics instructor, an instructor-trainer, and is one of two officers to become the first certified TASER instructors in his department’s history.

In 2004 he accepted the job as chief investigator for his local district attorney's office, where he has conducted follow-up investigations into hundreds of felony cases, including homicides, rapes, armed robberies and cases involving criminal misconduct by law enforcement officers. He facilitated a parish-wide implementation of the Project LEAD Program through his work and he continued teaching many of his original classes at the local police academy.

In addition to his fulltime duties, he has spent much of his career volunteering for high-risk assignments. Very early on he was recruited to his department’s SWAT team and graduated from his first SWAT school in 1991. As a SWAT operator, he responded to numerous SWAT call-outs involving barricaded suspects, hostage situations, riot control and felony apprehension, and was point-man on countless high-risk entries. He was also a member of the department’s explosives search team and he responded to several bomb threats and reports of suspicious devices.

In 1996, with the full support of his Sheriff, he took the initiative and became the first certified sniper in his department. In the years that followed, he graduated from seven sniper schools and earned the coveted Top Shooter Award at the FBI Sniper School. Additionally, he founded his department’s sniper program and served as commander and trainer of the six-member team until 2005. He was deployed as a primary sniper on countless tactical operations, which included barricaded subjects, hostage situations, counter-drug operations and the apprehension of suspects who committed violent felonies, such as armed robberies, murders and attempted murder of a police officer. He continues to hone his sniper skills and occasionally provides guidance to individual law enforcement snipers.

He has been studying and mixing various martial arts styles and full-contact fighting systems for thirty years (long before it became cool), and has competed in a number of freestyle martial arts tournaments, taking first place in all of them. He boxed professionally from 2002 to 2005 and now trains his son as an amateur boxer. Although he no longer competes, he continues to train as a full-contact fighter and remains in constant fighting condition.

He began writing for hobby in 1999 and got his first short story acceptance in 2003. It was a piece called MUDDY WATERS and it was published in the Summer 2004 issue of Futures Mysterious Anthology Magazine. Since that time, he has had over 150 stories and columns published in a variety of magazines, online markets and print anthologies. Additionally, he has had a number of nonfiction articles accepted for publication by Law and Order Magazine, a top resource for law enforcement officers.

He is the former owner, editor and publisher of Mouth Full of Bullets, a quarterly mystery magazine that ran from 2006 through 2008. During the magazine's history, he published over 200 stories and poems by over 120 writers from seven different countries and twenty-five states within the United States.

He has presented police procedural lectures online, at a writing conference, to a writing group and at area schools. He was the primary sniper instructor for the Louisiana Tactical Police Officers Association's 4th Annual Training Conference and recently presented a lecture on Interviewing for DA Investigators at the Louisiana District Attorneys Association's 35th Annual Conference. Additionally, he has presented concealed handgun safety training courses to civilians and has certified a number of judges and assistant district attorneys to carry concealed weapons.

He lives in southeast Louisiana with his beautiful wife and their two wonderful children. Their extended family consists of two German shepherds, a ball python and whatever critter his daughter can get her hands on.

©BJ Bourg 2011