Dead Center

by Shiya Ribowsky

  After establishing the body’s relationship to the scene, I survey the surroundings. Are they in order or disarray? If there is disorder, is it the sort that would have been made by a usually sloppy person, or by an intruder or some other disturber of the scene? Are there signs of a struggle or a robbery? I look into the medicine cabinet, the garbage, and the refrigerator for clues as to what might have caused the death. What has the decedent been eating lately? Are the medicine bottles on the cabinet shelf, or out on the counter—the latter possibly indicating more frequent or more recent use?

  Only after I have examined the context of the dead body in its surroundings—and taken many photographs of those surroundings—do I take photos of the body itself, and then I begin to investigate it.

  I always have to disrobe the body, because clothing can conceal damage. Once, a body was found sitting, fully clothed, and without external signs of violence, in the waiting room of a city hospital. When we disrobed the body, we found a bullet hole under the arm, high up in the armpit. The man had been shot to death, the bloody clothes removed, the body cleansed of external blood, then reclothed, and taken to the hospital’s emergency waiting room, where—the murderer or his assistants correctly figured—it could sit in a chair for a long time without being noticed, certainly for long enough to permit them to make their escape.

  As I spent more time at the OCME, I learned more about matters that had been in the headlines in recent years, but that I had not paid much attention to prior to joining the office. While I had known that Dr. Hirsch’s appointment was relatively recent, I came to learn the history that led to his appointment as chief medical examiner (CME). This had occurred in 1989, after Mayor Edward Koch fired the previous CME, Dr. Elliot Gross, who had been appointed by Koch in 1979 following the dismissal of Dr. Gross’s predecessor, Dr. Michael Baden.

  According to published reports, both Dr. Baden and Dr. Gross were considered highly competent pathologists, but deficient as managers of the country’s largest ME’s office. Dr. Baden’s dismissal came after Mayor Koch received negative reports on Dr. Baden’s administering of the OCME from the city’s health commissioner and from the Manhattan DA. These officials contended that Dr. Baden had lost important evidence in homicide cases and had been unresponsive to requests from their respective offices. In turn, Dr. Baden sued the city for wrongful dismissal, and that suit wound its way through the courts until it was rejected by a federal appeals court in 1986. Dr. Gross, who took over the office following Baden’s departure, was also fired by Koch; his termination came after charges—later dismissed—of professional misconduct.

  Dr. Hirsch’s advent to the office was more than changing the chief executive. The city chose Dr. Charles Hirsch to rescue the beleaguered agency and restore that agency’s tarnished reputation. New York could not have made a better choice, because Dr. Hirsch brought with him a whole new philosophy on how death investigations should be conducted and who should conduct them. Before the Hirsch era, death investigations for the ME’s office had been done mostly by freelancers, doctors who were per diem contractors. These physicians practiced in various fields of clinical medicine ranging from general practice to urology, but by and large had little or no formal training in forensics. They went about their days seeing live patients, making rounds at hospitals, even performing surgery, all the while carrying beepers provided by the ME’s office. When a death was reported to OCME, the communications unit would start paging the doctor who was listed as on duty. It was often hours before the “tour doctor,” as he or she was known, would respond to the communications unit, and often many more hours before the doctor would investigate the case. One of my fellow MLIs, who before becoming a PA had been a New York City cop for twenty-one years, told me that in the late 1960s during his rookie year he was assigned to sit on a DOA for his four-to-twelve shift. He was relieved at midnight with still no sign of the ME. After his return to work the next day, he was reassigned to the same DOA, still waiting for the ME to arrive.

  Even when OCME tour doctors did deign to show up, some of these freelancers did “drive-by” investigations, cursory at best. Occasionally, they did not even bother visiting the death scene in person but simply telephoned the police on duty there, asked them a few questions, noted down the cops’ observations and conclusions, and wrote them up as the OCME’s conclusions, as though they had actually been at the scene.

  When Dr. Hirsch arrived on the scene in 1989, his administration inherited the old investigators, and, as typically happens in city bureaucracy, he could not simply dismiss those tour doctors that he felt were not performing up to his standards. Determined to purge the agency of the worst of them, he dutifully followed the city’s arcane labor rules, and at that pace, it took almost a decade to get rid of them all. During that time, at least one tour doctor was indicted on charges of submitting fraudulent travel expense sheets for death scenes that he never actually visited.

  I must point out that some of the tour doctors did splendid work, and there are still three of the per diem doctors working for OCME in our Staten Island office, where they are well regarded. However, even before he arrived in New York City, Dr. Hirsch had determined to replace the part-time tour doctor system of investigation with investigators who were better trained for the specific task of death investigations—and he had just the model in mind. When he had earlier come to Suffolk County, New York, from Cleveland, Ohio, he had inherited the country’s first MLI corps composed exclusively of PAs, a program established by his Suffolk County predecessor. Part of Dr. Hirsch’s attractiveness to Mayor Koch was his intent to begin a similar MLI corps to deal with the much larger jurisdiction of the city of New York. These investigators would be properly trained in death investigation, and would be available twenty-four hours a day, and they would not have private practices that could distract them from their postmortem duties. With a corps of full-time MLIs, no excuses would be tolerated for the ME’s office not responding quickly to death scenes. The corps was designed and trained to perform death investigation better, more professionally, and more thoroughly than had ever been done before in New York. Shortly after Dr. Hirsch arrived in New York, he publicly stated that he was staking his professional reputation on the success of the new corps of investigators. We new recruits were imbued with this spirit of reform, on being part of a new administration that was going to turn death investigation in the Big Apple on its head.

  Once the MLI corps program got started in New York City, there were dramatic changes in the way the ME’s office went about its work, and if the general public never noticed, professionals such as the cops certainly did. Evidence that there was, indeed, a new sheriff in town came in such statistics as our response time; the average time it took us to respond to a death scene dropped from a lethargic half a day to a prompt within the hour. Precinct detectives, accustomed to many years of legendary poor response from the ME’s office, were shocked to receive calls from uniformed officers at scenes, saying, “Get over here now, the ME’s here.” And when the detectives did arrive at the scene, and encountered one of the new MLIs, they soon realized that we were very good at what we did. We took our work seriously, and in turn expected to be treated with respect by our law enforcement colleagues. Even so, it was about three years into the MLI program before there was widespread acceptance by the detectives of our presence—and our competence—at death scenes.

  Even after the MLI corps as a whole were accepted by our police colleagues, rookie MLIs still had to make their own reputations out on the street if they expected to be taken seriously. When I arrived at OCME, it was explained to me that there were three levels of MLIs—or rather there were supposed to be three levels: I, II, and III. In practice, though, there were only two levels: I and II. On Level I, you were supervised. On Level II, you were able to handle cases entirely on your own without a supervisor present or even checking your work when you returned to the office. As a young MLI-II, I gloried in the responsibility and lack of someone looking
over my shoulder; but looking back, I realize that my colleagues and I would probably have benefited from some closer supervision. But in typical bureaucratic fashion, the city did not get around to creating the MLI-III position until 2005, sixteen years after Dr. Hirsch took office. Prior to its formalization, an in-office title of Senior MLI was used to designate those MLIs who demonstrated leadership qualities and excellent investigative skills.

  About ten months after I began at OCME, there came a moment when I was working with a body in an apartment, holding its arms with mine as I turned it over, peering into its eyes for signs of disease and what not, and doing it all so smoothly and correctly that my supervisor said to me, “Now you’re dancing.” In that instant, I got the overwhelming sensation that I was finally coming to understand what was expected of me as an investigator. I was almost there, almost ready to move up to Level II.

  A few weeks and perhaps a hundred death scenes later, the supervisor stayed in the car as I walked up to the sixth floor in a Lower East Side tenement building to examine a dead person and speak with his family. It was not the first time the supervisor had stayed in the car while I worked, but I sensed it could be the last.

  The moment is vivid in my mind. I remember a whitewashed brick building with narrow stairs on which the linoleum was so worn with use that the steps themselves seemed indented; in my mind’s eye, I can see my brown work shoes on those stairs—skipping down the stairs, exhilarated, because I knew, just knew, that I had handled everything upstairs perfectly and hadn’t at any point felt the need to call down to the car to ask for guidance.

  The scene upstairs had been chaotic with what I would come to dub the “noisy quiet,” the unsettled and far-from-silent chaos of a death scene, filled with milling police, a distraught and grieving family, and a body that needed examination. During my time in that apartment—less than an hour—I had not only been able to “dance” properly with the body but also to perform another necessary task: to answer the family’s questions, and to interview and soothe them. At the same time, I was able to speak on the phone with the funeral director and make sure that the family understood the next steps in the process. In that apartment, I had been the subject matter expert, and had not only done my job but also certified to myself that I was ready to go on to the next level of medicolegal investigation, to become an MLI-II. I would no longer need to rely on supervision. From here on out, I would be on my own.

  SIX

  BEING AN MLI-II means that you’re a seasoned pro, but it also means that the responsibility for every case falls squarely on your shoulders. Sometimes that means listening to what the cops have to say; sometimes that means solving the cops’ case for them.

  One day I was called to a bloody scene in a Harlem apartment and was greeted at the door by two impatient detectives from the local precinct—impatient because they could not touch the body until I got there, and they had been waiting for me quite a while. Cops sitting and waiting for the MLI to arrive and do his job is the usual state of affairs when a death scene is presumed to be a homicide scene—but you would not know that from the depictions of homicide investigations in most television crime shows.

  Your average television crime show generally highlights the exploits of a few cops, the same ones in every episode, cops who seem to catch every interesting case in the city. The detective stars always arrive at crime scenes to find the Crime Scene Unit (CSU) and the ME already there, finished with their work, and each having prepared a short speech from which our heroes will glean all the clues they need. Straying even further from reality, the ME usually appears on screen more for effect than for substance because often the television detectives don gloves and examine the body themselves. Then, armed with the results of a perfect crime scene investigation, our intrepid stars go out and follow every lead by themselves until they solve the crime. What’s more, they do all this in sixty minutes—less the time for commercials.

  Reality is messier, slower, and less dependent on star detectives. Major crimes, especially homicides, are not solved by lone detectives egged on by their incredibly savvy and perpetually irritated bosses. Complex crimes are solved by teamwork. There are about 40,000 cops in the NYPD, including more than 3,000 detectives. Every borough has at least two specialized homicide detective units, but, unlike what happens in television shows, the detectives in the homicide units are never the primary investigators of a case. The detectives in the homicide unit merely supplement the work of the precinct detectives who actually catch the case.

  When 911 is called to report that a body has been found, the 911 operator relays the call to an RMP (an archaic term standing for radio-mounted patrol car) covering that sector of the local precinct. The RMP’s uniformed officers respond to the call; and unless the perp (perpetrator) was stupid enough to have hung around, the uniforms’ primary job is to secure the crime/death scene. If this is an obvious homicide, or a possible one, a patrol supervisor will also respond, and often so will the precinct commander. While they are doing so, the precinct’s desk sergeant will notify the precinct’s detective squad.

  Once the commanding officer of that detective squad (usually a detective lieutenant) has been notified of a DOA, he will dispatch two detectives to the scene. The squad commander will also pass the information on to the borough’s homicide squad commander, who will send over a detective or two to help out. The homicide detectives will remain attached to the local precinct for at least the first seventy-two hours of the ensuing investigation.

  This is done because the first three days of a homicide investigation are critical, since most of the cases that do get solved are cracked from clues picked up in this time period. Because of inaccurate portrayals of police work on television, most people are unaware that the precinct detectives have primary responsibility at homicide scenes. Homicide squad detectives function as temporary labor, augmenting the manpower of the local precinct during the early days of an investigation.

  Next, the squad commander will alert another specialized unit of detectives, the CSU. In New York City, CSU is based in the Police Crime Lab in Queens, and from there responds to every major crime in the five boroughs. And even with lights and sirens, they often get bottled up in traffic.

  Just as no one is supposed to touch a body until the ME arrives, so too no one is to enter a homicide scene or examine the body until CSU has finished its work. To do otherwise is to risk the destruction of valuable forensic evidence and invite withering cross-examination from defense attorneys who will want an explanation as to why proper crime scene protocol was not followed.

  New York Police Department’s CSU usually requires at least a couple of hours to process a scene because a surprising amount of work is involved. First they must photograph the scene and the body, then measure all the dimensions of the crime scene and create a sketch of it, indicating on the drawing the position and location of the body and of any other evidence they might have noticed. Then they dust for fingerprints, and finally they collect evidence such as weapons, shell casings, spent rounds, drugs, drug paraphernalia, and so on. Only when all of this has been accomplished can the body be examined by the MLI.

  After CSU has been contacted, the precinct desk sergeant also makes a number of other phone calls to various police brass and to the assistant DA on duty. Eventually the sergeant will notify the ME’s office, but often not until an hour or two after the case has first been reported. The result is that the ME invariably arrives at the scene well after the detectives.

  So when I arrived at that reported homicide scene in Harlem, I was not surprised to be met at the door by impatient detectives, who I knew were not upset with me. A great deal goes into processing a crime scene, and it wasn’t my “tardiness” that was holding things up or causing their anxiety. Even if I had arrived earlier, the detectives would have had to wait, along with me, since CSU was not nearly finished with their work. The waiting was par for the course; in all the years that I performed scene investigations for the ME’s
office, I recall only a very few cases where I arrived at a homicide scene after CSU was done. Hanging around and drinking endless cups of coffee with the cops, just outside the scene, as we waited and the body stiffened, was de rigeur.

  On this occasion, when I stuck my head in the apartment door shortly after I arrived, the lead CSU detective told me he still had about an hour to go, so while waiting I chatted with the precinct detectives and got “the story.” They told me that the decedent, who was lying on his back on the floor in a pool of blood, had been a member of a band that had been using the apartment to rehearse. They said he had died of gunshot wounds, and that they already had a prime suspect in custody, the band’s lead singer, whom they had taken in for questioning at the “house,” the local precinct. However, the suspect wasn’t singing a tune that the cops were buying; instead, he was claiming self-defense—that there had been a scuffle, and the gun had gone off accidentally. Since no one else had been in the room at that moment except the shooter and the dead man, it might prove difficult for the police to refute the suspect’s song.