Coroner Stories

Late one night I was called out to a house in one of the lower economic regions of the city. It was actually my first trip to this particular area. I’d driven past it numerous times on the expressway and never even knew it was there. There are several of these types of areas in this and every other city I suppose. Thousands drive past them on the interstates and main roads and never actually go through them. These are areas of the city I would never drive through if it weren’t for the fact that there were police officers waiting for me.

This particular part of the city was certainly known to law enforcement. The fact that one of the major thoroughfares for rail traffic in the city was only two blocks to the west would have made one think that I was now on the wrong side of the tracks. One look down the street to the neighborhood on the other side of the tracks, and I was immediately aware that neither side was particularly enviable.

As I parked across the street from the address, a police lieutenant appeared from nowhere as I opened the door. He spoke quietly so that only I could hear, “We’ll talk inside.�?

He then ushered me past a large group of people that had accumulated in the driveway and we made our way to the front porch. An officer on the porch nodded at me with a look as though he recognized me from some previous scene and opened the screen door. I nodded back politely, though in truth I didn’t specifically recall him. It’s fairly easy for thousands of officers to remember a dozen or so death investigators. It’s not so easy the other way around.

My first clue that the inside of this house was going to be an absolute pit was the circuitous route that the lieutenant and I made to the front porch as we navigated our way through car parts, appliances, and broken toys. People who give little regard to the impression their front yard makes seem to care even less when it comes to the part of their property that is not in the public eye. I have yet to walk across such a yard and enter a house where I would consider sitting down or touching anything without gloves on.

As I entered the house I couldn’t help notice the pie-shaped “snow angel�? pattern that the front door had carved in the debris that covered the living room floor. Beyond that, a small path had been trampled in the garbage that forked at the other end of the room and led to other parts of the house. It was along this path that the lieutenant and I now stood along with another officer and two crime scene technicians, each of us seemingly afraid to step off the main path into the surrounding area.

I got the rest of the information I needed from the officer inside the house. A mother had gone to check on her two and a half year old girl and called 911 when the little girl didn’t respond. The officer had arrived at the scene shortly after the paramedics who were in the process of checking for vital signs. The lack of vital signs and the obvious presence of rigor mortis was enough for the paramedics to pronounce the girl dead at the scene. The little girl was also known to have some sort of debilitating disease because paramedics noticed that she had a gastric feeding tube in place.

After the briefing in the living room, I carefully followed the two crime scene technicians into the back bedroom of the house. To say that I was shocked by what I saw is an understatement. The significance of first exposure to that scene was evidenced by the way that both crime scene technicians were looking at me to see my reaction.

Stay tuned for Part II…

Lost in the shuffle between Halloween and Christmas is a holiday that a growing segment of Americans hold in higher regard than Thanksgiving—the Day of the Dead. Of the “minor holidays”—those that don’t provide a day off from work but still validate the consumption of alcohol—the Day of the Dead intrigues me the most.

Beyond being able to butcher the pronunciation of “Dia de los Muertos,” I’m no expert on the subject by any means. My understanding of the Day of the Dead is that it’s essentially the pagan tradition of honoring dead ancestors practiced by the indigenous civilizations of Mexico combined with their Spanish conqueror’s celebration of All Saint’s Day (the day sandwiched between Halloween and All Souls Day). I like the idea of a holiday where those that have passed are honored by celebrating.

To me, that makes much more sense than taking flowers to a place where the recipient will never see them. After seeing a number of bodies that have been exhumed, I have a tendency to view cemeteries as nothing more than an underground biological reclamation site. To me, visiting a grave site makes as much sense as going to a library where books with blank pages have been archived.

For more information on the Day of the Dead, consult your local library. For best results, consult one where the books have words.

If I had my way, single people would never own hot tubs. But then I suppose someone would file a lawsuit because the right of single people to own a hot tub was being violated. So I suppose it’s alright if they own them, but there should be restrictions that keep single people from using hot tubs unless they are with someone.

My logic is that the only bodies I’ve ever had to pull out of hot tubs were single people who were alone at the time of using their hot tub. To my knowledge it’s never happened that a person has died in a hot tub and not been removed immediately by the people they were with or the responding paramedics. To my knowledge no one has ever said, “Wow, I can’t believe Jerry didn’t get out of the hot tub when I did last Thursday.”

In my experience, deaths involving hot tubs seem to fall into one of two categories—small children who manage to gain access to them and adults who die while using them. In the case of children, they are usually discovered fairly soon after falling in. The average time that a parent seems to become concerned about a missing child before actively searching for them is about 15-30 minutes (not a scientifically researched amount—just one I hear a lot). Of course it takes only minutes of submersion before irreversible damage has been done.

A key dynamic of a child drowning has kept me from ever having to remove a child from a spa (or even a swimming pool for that matter). That is to say, the person discovering the child in the water instinctively removes them from the water. I don’t think anyone put in that position would stop to consider the integrity of a potential crime scene or assume that the child was beyond saving. I know I wouldn’t.

When it comes to adults who die while using hot tubs, there is a different dynamic. The situation always seems to involve someone who “checks out” days before a friend or family member “checks up” on them. The end result is that the deceased has been decomposing in a small body of stagnant water for days. Decomp juice and purge from the body forms a frothy layer on the surface of the water resembling a pot of gumbo. The swarm of flies present makes one very conscious about whether their mouth is open or closed. The water’s color and transparency reminds me of combining all the different colors of Easter egg dye into one. This disgusting sight ensures that the person discovering the body never instinctively removes them from the water. Of course, neither do the police or paramedics—after all, they are well aware that’s my job.

One of my more recent experiences with a hot tub related fatality involved a gentleman who died days before he was found. He was in a seated position in the tub, but he had fallen forward to where he was face down in the water with his arms floating to the sides. The plan was for myself and the funeral director to raise the body back into a seated position using its arms—that worked fine. Next, the plan was to lift him at the armpits and pull him back until he was seated on the side of the tub. That too worked out fine.

The final step was to let him tip back and lower him onto the body bag as gently as possible. The skin at the area of the arm where the funeral director was holding the body slipped off and the full weight of the body jerked me forward. Somehow I managed to grab the side of the tub before falling face first on top of the body. Before I even had time to consider how fortunate I had been, I was splashed with what felt like a wall of water that the rigored legs of the body had kicked up as they left the hot tub. The only thing that prevented me from firing off a flood of expletives was the fact that my lips were busy keeping the water on my face from entering my mouth.

Comments had been down for a while by accident, but should be up and running now.

The following links are to some good articles discussing some of the issues I wrote about in my last post:

“Identifying Hurricane Dead Poses Unusually Daunting Challenges” by Shaila Dewan, The New York Times

“New Orleans begins collecting Katrina’s victims” © 2005 The Associated Press

“Investigators’ first priority: ID the dead” by John Fuquay, Clarion Ledger

“U.S. faces huge task to identify Katrina victims” Copyright 2005 Reuters Limited

“Identifying victims a grueling task” by Ann O’Neill, CNN