Dead Center

by Shiya Ribowsky

  Eventually, for handling scene deaths I would adopt a variation of the classic crime scene investigation pattern, a way of approaching the body through making concentric circles around it, of an ever smaller diameter—indoors it would be in concentric squares, really, since most rooms are more square than round. I would start at the outer periphery and work my way inward, so that I only arrived at the body itself after I had reached an understanding of the context in which it lay.

  In a similar fashion, I learned to do witness interviewing and fact gathering before examining anything. Once, a few moments after I had arrived at a scene, I was asked by a detective how long I thought the body had been lying there. Only a few months on the job, and not yet humbled by the mistake I was about to make, I glanced at the body, which was quite bloated, and blithely opined, “At least a week.” The detective dutifully wrote this down in his little notepad and soon left. I finished my scene investigation and only then thought to talk to the doorman about when he had last seen the decedent alive. To my chagrin, the doorman stated positively that he had seen the decedent alive three days before. A little further investigating proved he was correct. We found an ATM receipt indicating the decedent had been outside three days before he died.

  The apartment in this particular case was very hot, and had I known during my scene investigation that he had been alive and kicking three days before, I would have easily recognized that the decomposition I noticed had been heat-accelerated. Making the call to that detective to correct my time-of-death estimate was embarrassing, but it helped cement my habit of gathering all available information before I started poking around—and certainly before I began rendering opinions.

  Many lessons devolved from the following instructions, cautions, and needlings that were said to me during my training—phrases that, in later years, I would find myself repeating to the MLI-Is whom I would train:

  “Don’t step in that.”

  “Put on your gloves before you touch anything.”

  “Don’t put on your gloves until you’ve taken photographs.”

  “Turn the body over away from you.”

  “Aren’t you going to look closely at those medicine bottles?”

  “I didn’t like the way you spoke to the family.”

  “The way you described the apartment in your report is not complete. You forgot to mention the rotting garbage smell in the kitchen.”

  During my early months of training, the senior MLIs supervising me at scenes were constantly correcting me. Once, I was about to let a family leave the death scene without obtaining important information from them. Another time, I forgot to ask the family to sign certain important forms. Other rookie mistakes included stepping in places that I shouldn’t have. Like into a pool of blood on the ground in an outdoor death scene, just after I had bought, and was wearing, a new pair of white sneakers. I left a footprint outlined in blood here, a similar pattern there, and bloody tracks all over. The detectives investigating the scene had to be alerted to my misdeed so that they did not immediately put out an APB for a Reebok-shod killer—not to mention that I had murdered a perfectly good pair of eighty-dollar sneakers.

  Another thing I had to learn at scenes was to curb the natural inclination to let my imagination run amok. I arrived at another early case, a triple homicide in Brooklyn, and began working the scene. Prior to looking at the bodies, I spent a half hour trying to reconstruct, from the trail of blood, and from the disarray in the apartment, what must have happened—how the three homicides had gone down. I did not realize that the other officials at the scene were getting increasingly frustrated. Finally I was pulled aside by an old Jewish crime scene detective, a cop for thirty-five years, with twenty-five of them in crime scene investigations. Outside the apartment, this guy told me two things.

  “Listen, boychick,” he said, “You seem like a nice kid, so I’m gonna give you some advice you should take with you for the rest of your career. First, you’ve been engaging in ‘mental masturbation.’ (What he meant was that I had been trying to figure out what happened, rather than tabulating what I’d seen.) That might be of some interest and pleasure to you, but it’s of no help to anyone else in the room.”

  After this rebuke, I was careful not to let my imagination run ahead of the facts, and I spent my time gathering those facts.

  When the old crime scene detective saw that I was taking the first lesson to heart, he offered another (it had little to do with the immediate case at hand, but he felt it was important to impart):

  “Always look up at the ceiling at a crime scene; you’ll be a real star.”

  The veteran had noticed that almost no one looked up at a crime scene investigation, but he thought that all investigators should.

  Once I had mastered the basics of how to move around at a death scene without wrecking the place, and had figured out how to get through a basic death investigation, things started to go a lot smoother. I was still being corrected, but not as often. Though I was still making mistakes at scene deaths, they were mostly a result of being too cautious. In OCME terms, being overly cautious meant bringing in a body for an autopsy when it could well have been released to the family without one. As a trainee, I didn’t want to screw up, so I thought it was wise to be cautious and ended up sending in just about every body I came across, unless it was a crystal-clear natural death. Even then, I would try to talk the family into an autopsy; I was terrified of missing something.

  Gradually I realized that it takes courage to release a body to the decedent’s family without having had it brought in and examined by a more senior medical expert. Nevertheless, gaining this confidence, and being able to make that essential decision without personal agony or subsequent regrets, is part of growing into the job. An MLI receives a lot of encouragement from the MEs when he or she avoids making this particular mistake, because every case you don’t bring in is a case the MEs don’t have to autopsy.

  One such “mistake” I really lived to regret was to bring in a murdered dog.

  The dog had been shot in an apartment alongside his owner, a suspected drug dealer. Since both man and dog had been shot, we needed to know if the two victims had been killed with the same gun or with different guns. If the latter were true, then the cops would be looking for two shooters. So what if one of the dead was a real walking mop, the shaggiest, oldest part-sheepdog I’d ever seen, with gray dreadlocks? I had the dog and his owner brought in for autopsies, and during those autopsies, the bullets were extracted. They were from the same gun, a fact that the police and we needed to ascertain. Nonetheless, when I returned to the MLI squad room the next day, I found that my colleagues had hung a sign over my desk: ACE VENTURA, PET DETECTIVE.

  The ribbing continued for a while. During the next month or so, when I was out in my car, the two-way radio would crackle and the dispatcher would inform me that there was a cat dead on 84th Street, or a parakeet in Washington Heights, and ask—because of my “special sensitivity”—did I want to handle these particular calls? This type of humor was a big part of the culture at OCME, and one of the reasons why I frequently remarked that the city’s mortuaries were surprisingly fun and happy places to work. We even had a mascot, of sorts. Cindy, as we called her, was an ornate brass urn containing cremated human remains. This is the underlying story: A taxicab driver had found the urn in the back seat of his cab one afternoon, and, not sure what to do, took it to a local police precinct. He was told to take it to the ME’s office. The driver, of Indian extraction, was quite upset at having to cart around the remains, and as soon as he had placed them on our reception desk, he fled, leaving us little information about the urn or its contents. Eventually, we did learn Cindy’s true identity: She had been a child, a little girl, who had died of natural causes. We attempted to return the “cremains” to the only living relative, a grandmother, but she refused to accept the urn. So Cindy became the MLI mascot, escorted to all our annual holiday parties. We all knew our work was quite serious, but when we were
out of the view of bereaved families, a gently irreverent attitude toward the Grim Reaper was the norm.

  Some of my rookie mistakes weren’t entirely of a forensic nature. Once I received a call from a family member who wanted her brother’s body exhumed, some five years after his death in a hospital, because of a dream she’d had the previous night. This elderly, crotchety woman kept me on the phone for half an hour as she told me that in this dream her brother had appeared to her and said he could not rest in peace because he had been murdered. I heard her out, promised her that we would look into the matter, hung up the phone, turned to my training officer, and said, “Boy, we sure get a lot of wackos calling here.” Of course I had neglected to shut off the speakerphone; not only was my supervisor listening in but the caller also heard everything I said. That the little old lady turned out to be a psychiatric patient, and that there was no validity to her claim, did not diminish the cringe-making impact of this lesson. After hearing this story, Dr. Hirsch said to me, “You have my permission to say anything you want to a family member—just hang up the phone first!”

  At this time, I was let in on a secret about the OCME main building: the firm belief among the old-timers of the office that our headquarters was haunted. Indeed, if any building in the city had a right to be haunted, ours did, holding so many dead bodies, many of whom had died violently. Our haunting spirits seemed to be technologically savvy because they manifested themselves primarily in the telephone system and the elevators. Our chronic and irreparable phone problems kept a Verizon telephone repair crew busy, full time. Phones rang by themselves; speakerphones went on when you didn’t want them to, calls did not transfer properly, and so on. All of our elevators also acted strangely; in particular, the freight elevator at the rear of the building was inhabited by a spirit with a sense of humor, who liked to open and close the doors for apparently no reason. For a long time, this spirit was favorable to me, opening the elevator as I approached, though it would close as other people approached. Perhaps I was propitiating it properly. Later on, I must have offended Otis, as I called the spirit, or else he left to haunt another elevator, because in 1998 the doors stopped opening at my approach.

  During my training, I learned that unnatural deaths usually made for complicated scene investigations but were no-brainer triage decisions: obviously the body would be brought in for autopsy. On the other hand, natural deaths presented the investigator with the opposite scenario. Fewer hoops for the investigator to jump through at the scene—a relatively uncomplicated scene investigation—but often a difficult decision on whether to release the body. At a scene death, that responsibility rests solely on the MLI.

  A natural death scene was less difficult to conduct, but getting to the point of deeming it a natural death required a relentless effort on the part of the investigator to prevent himself or herself from doing so quickly, and continuing throughout the investigation to maintain a high index of suspicion. It was a constant battle to avoid being lulled into a false sense of security, into prematurely concluding that because everything looked so peaceful, this just had to be a natural death.

  Part of our problem arises from natural and unnatural (violent) deaths receiving different levels of response from the various agencies charged with looking into deaths, including the police and OCME. When an unnatural death (of a human being) occurs, the authorities must attempt to answer seven questions: Who, What, When, Where, Why, How, and a second Who. The police are primarily concerned with the first Who—who did it, who killed the decedent, and the Why, the motive. The remaining five questions require input from the OCME to answer, including that second Who, who is this dead person. In practical terms, this means that when a natural death occurs, the police department’s attention span is very short—only as long as it takes for the ME’s office to verify the natural cause. Once the cops have been given the answer to the whodunit question—it was done naturally, which means no perpetrator—they lose interest. They are perfectly happy to leave the divining of the answers to the remaining six questions to the OCME, which means, initially, to the investigating MLI.

  We learned how to answer those questions as we were trained at scene deaths and in handling hospital deaths, but, perhaps more basically, we also learned from the rigorous, wide-ranging didactic training course that we had to attend every afternoon. Although we might spend our mornings in the field on scene deaths, or in the MLI squad room handling hospital cases, beginning at 2:00 P.M. every day we had two hours of lectures on topics ranging from blood spatter interpretation to how to testify in court. Most subjects were taught by MEs and senior MLIs, but the lecturers also included anthropologists, toxicologists, DAs, defense attorneys, police ballistics experts, and fire marshals who taught us about arson investigations.

  In that class, we learned about every conceivable way people could violently die. We attended lectures on thermal injuries, cutting injuries, ligature strangulation, manual strangulation, and positional strangulation. We learned about gunshot wounds: close contact and loose contact; entrance wounds and exit wounds; wounds caused by large caliber and small caliber weapons, and jacketed and soft-nosed bullets. We learned to spot a shaken baby and how to investigate a sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS) death. We saw photos of people who had been shot, stabbed, run over, hanged, electrocuted, burned, and drowned, or who had fallen from heights or been beaten to death. The smorgasbord of violence was only half the curriculum. Classroom training also included many hours in which natural disease pathology was discussed—good old-fashioned heart disease and cancer, alcoholic liver degeneration, obesity, diabetes, tuberculosis, and all the other diseases that will eventually get you if you manage to avoid a violent death. The line between life and death, I learned in those classes, is exceedingly thin. And the place where that realization hit home was the autopsy room.

  THREE

  ALL THE TRAINING we were receiving, out in the field and during the afternoon lectures, came together in the hours and hours we spent in the morgue, observing and assisting the MEs as they performed the ultimate lab test, the autopsy.

  I wasn’t exactly shocked by my first visit to the autopsy rooms at the OCME, having encountered an anatomy lab full of thirty to forty cadavers during my PA training. Back then, as a PA student, I was unprepared for the array of sights that I witnessed. Some of the bodies had their faces covered; others didn’t. Some had their veins and arteries exposed, their muscles and organs carefully dissected out and labeled; others were more intact. All were embalmed, and the odor of formaldehyde was not only overwhelming in the classroom, it clung to you for hours after you’d been near the bodies.

  In the anatomy lab, I learned to deal with the sight of death, but in the autopsy room, I learned about the smell of it, as it quickly became clear just how bad dead bodies can reek. The bodies in the OCME autopsy rooms were not embalmed, and as a result they produced other odors, sometimes far worse—the stench of decomposition and of rotting intestinal contents. These digestive system aromas taught me one thing for certain: when someone eats cheap, fast-food cuisine before they die, invariably they will stink worse after death than those whose final meal is macrobiotic.

  An autopsy room is, in many ways, the mirror image of an operating room (OR). At the morgue, unlike in an OR, you gown up but don’t scrub up—because you are protecting yourself, not the patient. For the same reason, afterward you make darn sure to scrub down, because the bacteria coming out of a dead body are very alive, and you need to make sure they all go down the drain.

  The word autopsia in Greek means seeing for one’s self. And that’s what is done in the postmortem examination.

  The layperson’s attraction to the autopsy room, I believe, is the same as it is to a roadside accident—we like to slow down and look at the carnage. The larger field of forensics is itself fascinating, what with examinations of hair and fibers, microscopic traces of drugs and so on, but for attention grabbing the granddaddy of them all is the autopsy. Certainly the autopsy ha
s more “ickiness” associated with it than hair and fiber analysis.

  While this sense of ickiness and the thought of physically cutting into a dead body repulse most people, I maintain that it shouldn’t. A great many times I’ve heard family members say, “Please don’t cut him up. I don’t want him to go through that after everything else he’s suffered.” Though this emotional response is easy to understand, it’s not really logical. Not only is the cutting necessary to discern the truth about a given death, but it is not uncomfortable for the person who used to live in that body. The discomfort that exists is felt purely by the living as they think about the autopsy. The dead feel nothing.

  This is not to say that cutting up a body is easy at first; indeed, to become professionally involved with autopsies at OCME, one must first reach the emotional point where he or she can incise bodies with impunity. To arrive at that mental place, it is essential to develop a mind-set that sees the body as an artifact, creating a sense of objectivity similar to how clinicians in the OR perceive and deal with an anesthetized patient. As I watched my more seasoned colleagues at OCME put on their scrubs and aprons upon entering the autopsy room, I noticed early on that they also donned (or crept into) a shell that permitted them to mentally detach themselves from emotional involvement, to handle traumatized remains without becoming traumatized. I quickly realized that, just as I had to learn to objectify decedents while performing scene investigations, it was now my task to develop an autopsy-room façade.

  Though we death professionals work hard to cultivate our shells, we do not expect a family to have our level of objectivity, any more than a surgeon can expect cold logic from the family of a patient on whom he is about to operate. That’s why one of our tasks is to keep the family’s perspective in mind when we’re discussing an impending autopsy of their family member. Some of us tried to gain that empathy by imagining that it was our loved one about to go under the knife; others, by just remembering how they felt while watching their first autopsy. This perspective is necessary in the family interview room; the shell cannot be present, or at least must be somewhat pulled back during conversations with families or else we will seem callous and inconsiderate. However, the second we walk out of the family interview room and proceed down to the autopsy suite, the shell must click right back into place. For in the autopsy room, a dead body must become a trove of evidence that may yield clues to its former inhabitant’s demise. When we are determining which bodies to autopsy, the central question we ask ourselves is whether we’ll learn anything from doing the autopsy on that particular body. If we think we will, then we have the body brought in and perform a postmortem. If we don’t think we’ll learn anything more than we have gleaned at the scene, then we don’t have the body brought in.