Working Stiff

by Judy Melinek, Md

  At eleven thirty we had to break. I had been on the stand for two hours, most of that time under cross-examination. I felt pretty good about my testimony but, being pregnant, was damn hungry. Terrell and I had a slice at a corner pizzeria.

  I was sworn in the next morning at nine o’clock and the cross-examination resumed. When Mr. Ellis got on the subject of pattern of injury, he focused on the place in my report where I noted “clear-cut lines of demarcation” in the burn margin.

  “How would anyone be able to pick up a child and place her in the tub just by the hands?”

  “Would you like me to demonstrate?” I offered.

  “Yes.”

  I looked to the bench, and the judge nodded.

  “You don’t have a doll or a model?” I asked Mr. Ellis.

  “No.”

  “Can I demonstrate on my own body?” I asked the judge.

  “Yes,” she replied.

  So I descended from the witness stand and lowered myself with ponderous care onto the floor between the attorneys’ table and the judge’s podium. There I assumed a supine fetal position, with my back to the floor and my hands clasped together at chest level, a little higher than the mound of my belly. “This position indicates how the immersion pattern would have occurred,” I began. “As you can see, my back and buttocks are against the relatively cool surface of the tub, which explains the sparing of those areas from more serious burns. My arms are tightly against the sides of my chest, and my thighs and knees are slightly flexed. Where skin touches skin, hot water can’t get in. That’s why the armpits, thigh folds, and backs of the knees were spared.” I paused to catch my breath, then held my arms up a little more. “As you can see, my hands are above the water, causing the clear-cut immersion lines at the wrists.”

  “Let the record indicate that the witness is lying on the floor with her arms bent in front of her at chest level, and that her back and buttocks are to the floor,” the judge told the court reporter.

  Terrell Evans got in on the act. “Can it also indicate that her knees and thighs are slightly bent and that her feet are off the floor?”

  “Yes,” said the judge. We all then looked at the transcriptionist, at whose feet I was sprawled, and she nodded.

  I struggled to sit up. Terrell leaped forward and offered me a hand. I grunted and clutched my back once I had straightened. It must have looked histrionic, but my back always hurt throughout pregnancy, and rolling around on the hard floor had done nothing to help it. I stood there in that small room, my big belly now the center of everyone’s attention, and found myself right in front of Lakaisha’s mother. She had been growing more agitated during my demonstration, and was now huffing. She stood up abruptly and started out of the courtroom, mumbling something about the bathroom.

  “Mr. Ellis, please control your client,” the judge commanded.

  “She has to go to the bathroom!” the attorney replied, and the judge called for the record to indicate Lakaisha’s mother had left the room. Lakaisha’s grandmother was staring daggers at me again. I didn’t mind. I could understand why she was angry—she believed her daughter’s story. But it was my duty to tell her dead granddaughter’s story, as I had seen it told on Lakaisha’s scalded skin.

  The story ends badly. Lakaisha’s mother pled to a negligent homicide charge and got probation. She didn’t spend a day in jail over her daughter’s death. My testimony in family court wouldn’t bring Lakaisha back, but I hoped it might keep her mother from hurting the other children, by removing them from her custody as the state sought to do. That was the only contribution I might have made in the end. I never found out how the court ruled on the custody of the three surviving children.

  Lakaisha’s homicide taught me that being a mother informed my work. I could trust my maternal instincts and experience when it came to forensics. I knew what a four-year-old child could reasonably do to herself. I knew how to tell the difference between normal rough-and-tumble childhood injury and abuse. I knew how frustrating a screaming toddler could be and the amount of self-control and maturity a mother needed to raise just one child, let alone four.

  I also knew, however, that Lakaisha’s scalding death did not come about because her mother succumbed to a moment’s awful impulse. Lakaisha’s mother had set out to punish the girl. She had waited several minutes for that bathtub to fill at least six inches. Then she forced the child into the water and held her down. I don’t think she intended to kill her daughter. But she certainly did intend to hurt her.

  I had done my job honestly, had done what I could to speak for Lakaisha. As I sat on the A train from the Brooklyn courthouse all the way home to the Bronx, I couldn’t shake the feeling that the reason Lakaisha’s mother wouldn’t look me in the eye was because I was the only person alive who knew exactly what she had done. I suspect she had lied to her own mother about it, and maybe to herself. I know she lied to the paramedics and hospital doctors and police. But she couldn’t lie to me, because I had seen for myself the pattern of premeditated assaultive injury on Lakaisha’s body. And the body never lies.

  I ached to be with my son. Maybe watching him run around the playground would help me feel better. But sitting on the park bench with T.J. that evening, rubbing my gravid belly, I felt only tired, drained, ineffectual. All I could do was promise myself, and promise Danny and Leah in my womb, that I would never harm them.

  My husband is of the opinion there’s no such thing as a good death. I know better. Lakaisha had a bad death. So did Andres Garcia. So did Miguel Galindo, crushed by the giant egg roll shredder-mixer. Jerry the crack addict—panic-stricken, glass-stabbed, and burned, plummeting to the sidewalk and smashing up his insides while remaining perfectly conscious—bad way to die.

  People ask me all the time, “What’s the worst way to die you’ve ever seen?” I assure them, “You don’t want to know.” There are always some, however, who press me and insist they do want to know. So here it is: the worst way to die I’ve ever seen.

  Detective Ellen Kennett came in with the body and told me the story before I’d opened the black vinyl bag. Sean Doyle was a restaurant bartender who went out drinking after work on Friday night with a friend named Michael Wright and Wright’s girlfriend. They were walking home in the early hours of the morning when Doyle apparently said something his buddy didn’t like. “Wright thought Doyle was making a pass at his girlfriend, and he got pissed off,” the detective said. “And he’s a big guy.” A shouting match turned into a shoving match, though the girlfriend claimed the two men were just “joking around.” Wright himself later described the altercation to the police as “roughhousing.” Detective Kennett, however, had heard the 911 tape.

  “Someone is getting the shit beaten out of him down there!” a neighbor told the operator. The neighbor’s husband came on the line and claimed a man was screaming, “No—don’t break my legs!” The police later interviewed several eyewitnesses who saw “a big guy whaling on a little guy.” One told a security guard at an adjacent building, “I saw it all—he threw the guy in!”

  The open manhole had a plastic chimney over it, to vent steam from a broken main while Consolidated Edison repaired it. There was an eighteen-foot drop to the boiling water on the bottom of the steam tunnel. The Con Ed supervisor who talked to our MLI at the scene stated that it was 300° down there, where Sean Doyle landed. Police and paramedics arrived quickly but couldn’t get Doyle out. They had to wait for Con Ed to shut off the main, and even then it was far too dangerous to send a rescuer into the steam tunnel. Doyle wasn’t dead when the Con Ed workers first arrived, the MLI’s report told me. They said he was arching his back and reaching upward to them. He was screaming.

  It took four hours to retrieve the body. The MLI took the corpse’s temperature before bagging him up, as is protocol in a death by hyperthermia. It read 125°, she wrote in her report, “though it was probably more, because the thermometer only goes to 125º.”

  Doyle’s body was leathery to the touch, twis
ted, and glistening with beads of clear water. The outer layer of epidermis was peeling off his hands, feet, shoulders, and legs. His mouth was a black-lined O of burned tissue, his eyes cloudy. Every inch of skin was bright red. The man on my autopsy table had been steamed like a lobster.

  “Why is he sitting like that?” Detective Kennett, who was observing the autopsy, asked me. Doyle’s knees were bent and his hips angled in.

  “It’s called a pugilistic pose. The long muscles contract from the heat. It makes the arms and legs curl, and can sometimes break bones.”

  “How’s it do that?”

  “You know how your steak shrinks when you cook it?” I said. “Same thing.”

  “Oh.” Kennett nodded with that look homicide detectives get, of opening a mental filing cabinet and sliding something in.

  Doyle’s heat-contracted muscles didn’t break any of his bones. Neither did the plunge through the manhole. Despite having been beaten up and then sustaining a fall of eighteen feet, he had very little blunt trauma. No hemorrhaging, no head trauma at all. I wish I had found head trauma. It was hard to perform that autopsy knowing that the man had been conscious when he sustained the horrifying thermal injuries I was seeing. I couldn’t evaluate whether he had sustained any bruises, because the tissues that show contusions were all cooked. I couldn’t find any abrasions because his skin’s outer layer had largely peeled off. His liver wasn’t bloody and red like a normal one, nor was it floppy and pale from exsanguination. It was brown and firm. Same with the heart, kidney, spleen, and all the other viscera. Even the brain had been scalded solid. Veins and arteries had turned to sausage.

  Third-degree thermal burns destroy nerve endings—but because this poor man had suffered a steam burn and there was no flame involved, the nerve tissue in his dermis was not damaged. He would have suffered terrible agony from the burns to his skin, and from his organs cooking internally.

  When I opened Sean Doyle’s trachea, I found foam in his airway. His lungs had filled with fluid as thermal injury started to break them down, and each breath whipped up an edematous froth, making it harder to draw air. That air came in at a searing temperature, damaging the flesh of his upper airway and swelling his trachea, asphyxiating him. At the same time the physiologic stress of the extreme heat was driving up his blood pressure and heart rate. Hyperthermia was swelling his brain. Any one of these three mechanisms—asphyxia, cardiac arrest, or hyperthermic cerebral edema—could have been the proximate cause of death. Any one of them would have been sufficient to kill him, and the physical evidence told me they had been working in concert. This was “thermal injury due to steam and scald burns,” Sean Doyle’s cause of death.

  I called Dr. Hirsch when I was done with the autopsy to run it by him. I was certain this was a homicide and not an accident. Even if the two men had been joking around or roughhousing, the fact that there was physical contact between them when Doyle went down the steaming manhole makes it “death at the hand of another.” That’s what homicide means. Maybe it’s an accidental homicide, but that doesn’t make it an accident. Hirsch agreed. “All you need is a volitional act. Intent is a common element in a homicide, but it’s not required.”

  The worst nightmares I ever had in my two years at the New York OCME came after I performed the postmortem examination of Sean Doyle. It was dark, I was alone, and the only thing I could hear was screaming—a sound so animal in its clawing desperation that at first I didn’t recognize it as human. In my dream there was a pit full of steam just below me, where Sean was screaming at me to get him out. I couldn’t see him through the steam. I tried to reach down to him, but the heat drove me back. When I felt that heat, Sean’s screams grew worse, his pleading more desperate, as though we were connected. I knew exactly what was happening to him down there, every inch of him inside and out burning. I understood what that meant, but there was nothing I could do to save him. The dream kept coming for weeks.

  In the end I autopsied twenty-seven homicides in New York City. They changed me. I learned how to think like a detective when making diagnoses from autopsy findings. I witnessed the results of the violence—cruel or casual, senseless or calculated—that ordinary people inflicted on one another.

  One week in June, I investigated three murders, all the victims killed in their own homes. One was a junkie stabbed nine times and throttled by a friend who came over to shoot up. Another was a woman a few years shy of a hundred years old, strangled with an electrical cord. The last was a schizophrenic woman robbed, garroted, and stabbed in the chest and neck.

  I needed a day off. T.J. and I left Danny with my mom and we went to a friend’s place on the Upper West Side for a brunch party, then to a movie, and finally out to dinner. T.J., nostalgic for Los Angeles, chose a little cafeteria-style Mexican restaurant where you order your meal at a counter and then find an open table. While we were standing in line chatting about the movie, I noticed the guy in front of us. He was a huge man—six two easily—in his midtwenties, with a shaved head and nickel-size black lacquer plugs piercing both earlobes. His forearms were covered with the sort of tattoos I had seen on drug users as a way of camouflaging needle tracks. Some of them I recognized as prison badges. The thing that really startled me, though, was the back of the man’s neck. He had a perfectly circular scar at the base of his skull just to the left of midline, and a vertical, linear, well-healed surgical cicatrice extending down his cervical spine.

  Mr. Skull Hole’s story leaped out at me, as though I were performing his autopsy. This man had done something awhile ago that had induced somebody to shoot him carefully in the back of the head. Based on the rough diameter of the scar, the shooter probably used a .22 or other small-caliber weapon, at close range. The blow had knocked the tattooed man down and probably out, but the bullet lodged in the thick bulb of bone at the butt of the skull and didn’t penetrate. A skilled surgeon had extracted the slug, stemmed the bleeding, and saved Mr. Skull Hole’s life. I could even see the textbook pinprick scars of the suture staples on either side of the old incision going down his neck.

  When we chose a table, Mr. Skull Hole sat at an adjacent one, though there were plenty of others available. He ate in a hurry, then just sat there doing nothing in particular, nursing a soda in a to-go cup. He looked like he was waiting—and the longer he lingered, the more I worried.

  We must have looked like a pair of clueless tourists. Earlier, while buying our meals at the counter, T.J. had riffled around in his wallet searching for the right combination of bills, instead of pulling the money out quickly and discreetly the way he usually did. We had spent much of the meal talking loudly about how much fun Manhattan can be on a bright summer day when you’re just strolling and window-shopping. T.J. was wearing a Hawaiian shirt, and I was in a flouncy sundress.

  As my husband continued to gush over the movie theater’s surround sound system like he’d just fallen off the turnip truck, I scribbled a note on a napkin. “The guy on your left has been shot in the back of the head and survived (see scar). He is watching us and may follow us.” T.J. read the note, glanced around as though searching for the bathroom, and assumed a worried look after he evaluated Mr. Skull Hole. We were silent while T.J. took a bite of his enchilada; then, after a good chew, he changed the subject. “Honey, do you know which precinct we’re in?” he asked me, casually but not quietly.

  “No.” I didn’t see what he was getting at.

  “I’m just wondering if this is the one-four. That guy from yesterday, the one Detective Ferguson’s investigating, wasn’t that out of the one-four?”

  I caught on. “No—I mean, yes, you’re right, Ferguson works out of the one-four, but I think right now we’re in the one-oh. I never really pay attention to which precinct the cases come out of unless it’s a homicide.”

  As that last, magic word left my lips, there was the sound of a chair being pushed back in haste, and our stalker passed us on his way out the door without a backward glance, leaving his drink behind.

&
nbsp; At first T.J. and I were amazed and amused that our ruse had actually produced a result. Then the thrill wore off, and we were both spooked. “Probably a coincidence,” T.J. said unconvincingly. We waited a few minutes, then left the restaurant only when we saw an available taxi stopped in traffic on the street. We had been planning on taking the subway home to the Bronx, but agreed to splurge on the cab fare instead.

  8

  Not Your Fault

  The lodger was the one who called the police, worried because her landlord’s car was parked out front and the master bathroom was locked. When the police busted down the door, they found Menachem Melinek hanging by the neck from an extension cord tied to the shower curtain rod. My father had made one previous suicide attempt, by overdose, that we knew of. The one that succeeded was on April 13, 1983.

  When my mother’s friend Ruth broke the news to me, I started laughing. I couldn’t stop and couldn’t figure out why. I went into my bedroom and sat on the bed for a while, then went to the kitchen. My mother was there, sobbing—but I couldn’t cry at all. I asked Ruth why I was laughing and she said it was hysterical laughter. That made sense, but still didn’t bring tears. I was thirteen and had done my share of crying over silly things, but after my father’s suicide I was perfectly numb.

  There were hundreds of people at the memorial service. The crowd seemed to include every psychiatry resident he had taught during his seven years at Jacobi Hospital, all his colleagues from the several medical centers at which he rounded, and all the patients from his private practice. My entire eighth-grade class was there, forty-something kids. Many of my dad’s patients came up to me after the ceremony and told me he had really helped them. He was a wonderful man, they all said, a great man. I had never seen any of these people before.

  On the way to the funeral, my mom reminded me that my grandparents had been told their son died of a heart attack, and I was not to say otherwise. She’d never asked me to lie before, but she explained that they were elderly and wouldn’t be able to bear the truth. I suspect my grandparents never believed the heart attack story. It was hard to tell. Their state of grief was so deep they never emerged from it.