The Education of a Coroner

by John Bateson

  “Both of them were stupid as hell,” Holmes says. “Hundreds and fifties were on the ground when they left.”

  He made his way to the end of the store where the two men had come in, thinking that their car had to be in the parking lot. His car was there, too, and was equipped with a police radio. As he started up the last aisle he saw them leaving, the big man still brandishing his gun and the small man carrying a stack of money trays. They hadn’t thought to bring bags or pillowcases to put the money into; they just took the whole trays.

  Holmes exited a few seconds after they did but couldn’t see them. They disappeared around a corner of the building, and when he got there, they were gone. The most he saw was a glimpse of a car speeding away. It was a red Toyota sedan, although some of the paint was worn away, and Holmes thought a woman was driving.

  Holmes ran to his car and used the radio to call in the incident. “I just witnessed a 211 with a 245,” he said, using the code numbers for armed robbery and assault with a deadly weapon, the latter because the East Indian teen had been knocked out. “The two suspects are African-American. One is at least six foot one, weighs 215 to 225, and is wearing a heavy coat and watch cap. The other is about five eight, weighs 150 to 160, and is wearing an army peacoat and beanie. They might be in a distressed-looking red Toyota with a woman at the wheel.”

  After that, he went back inside to check on the boy who had been struck. Holmes had requested an ambulance, and it arrived within minutes, along with multiple police cars.

  The boy was conscious, but groggy. No one else had been injured or needed assistance.

  “Jesus,” one cop said to Holmes. “You actually saw the whole thing?”

  “Yeah,” Holmes said.

  “Why didn’t you shoot?”

  “Because they had bigger guns than me. Besides, this place is packed with women, and if I had let them know I was here, they would have grabbed the first person they saw, and then the situation would have escalated, getting really ugly really quickly. I decided that the best thing to do was get the hell out of their eyesight so they didn’t know I was here, then warn others to stay away from the front.”

  The cop thought about that for a second, then nodded in agreement.

  Whenever a crime was committed in Marin, especially a crime in which the suspects were African-American, it was standard practice for the police to position a patrol car at the foot of the Richmond–San Rafael Bridge. Cops didn’t think of it as racial profiling; rather, they were just playing the odds. Given the paucity of black residents—except in Marin City—it was likely that the perpetrators lived outside the county. The police car was parked on the off-ramp to San Quentin Prison, where it was easy for the officers to watch every vehicle that passed. It also was easy for motorists to see the stakeout vehicle, which was intended. Law-abiding citizens instinctively slow down when they see a police car, while criminals tend to speed up and, therefore, stand out.

  One of Holmes’s good friends happened to be in the car that was waiting at San Quentin. He saw a red Toyota race by with a woman at the wheel and an African-American male passenger. Neither of them looked in the cop’s direction, which was a tip-off. The cop pulled out quickly and stopped the car, and another police vehicle arrived right behind him. The two occupants, a quivering woman and a small, wiry man, surrendered without incident. When police opened the trunk, they found the trays of stolen money. They also found the big man scrunched up inside.

  Police didn’t wait to put the trio in a lineup at the station. Instead they were lined up on the side of the road right there. Riding in the front seat of a patrol car, Holmes did a drive-by identification of the two men. They had changed clothes since leaving the grocery store but were unmistakable.

  When the case was ready to go to trial, the two men claimed that they were innocent even though they had the trays of stolen money. Police officers informed them that there was a witness to the robbery, a person who was trained in criminal identification and carried a gun but didn’t intervene because that might have precipitated the taking of a hostage. When the suspects heard that, they accepted a plea bargain.

  “Looking back on it,” Holmes says, “a lot of things could have gone wrong in that situation. Fortunately, only the boy was injured, and not seriously. The two idiots were arrested quickly, the money was recovered, and very little court time was needed. Also, I didn’t have to use my gun. All things considered, it couldn’t have turned out any better.”

  Holmes still thinks about it, though, every time he sees a Halloween display. It hasn’t diminished his appreciation of the holiday, but it does give him pause.

  “I guess it’s appropriate that it was a Safeway store,” he says, drawing out the two syllables. Safe-way. “Although if it had been a Lucky store, that might have been good, too.”

  CHAPTER 18

  CASES IN THE NEWS

  The list of well-known musicians and singers who have lived in Marin County is long. It includes Bonnie Raitt, Booker T. Jones, Carlos Santana, David Crosby, Huey Lewis, Janis Joplin, Jesse Colin Young, Maria Muldaur, Peter Tork of the Monkees, Sammy Hagar, and Van Morrison. It also includes various members of the Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane, and Metallica, including the lead singers of each of those bands. Bill Champlin (Sons of Champlin), John Cipollina (Quicksilver Messenger Service), and jazz pianist George Duke went to high school in Marin. Concert impresario Bill Graham lived in Marin as well.

  As impressive as this list is, a good argument can be made that no one on it has been more influential than the rapper Tupac Shakur, sometimes referred to as 2Pac. Murals bearing his likeness are all over the world, and many current rappers imitate his style and mannerisms.

  In 1988, when Shakur was seventeen, his family moved from Harlem to Marin City. It wasn’t as dramatic a change as some might think. Although Marin City is only five miles north of San Francisco, and only a mile and a half north of upscale Sausalito, it’s on the other side of Highway 101 and is a world apart. Unincorporated and small—it has fewer than three thousand residents—Marin City’s racial and socioeconomic composition is closer to Harlem’s than to any other place in Marin County. At the time Shakur lived there, Marin City was predominantly African-American. Today, after more than two decades of gentrification, blacks comprise 38 percent of the population—the same percentage as whites. This is in marked contrast to the rest of Marin County, where 80 percent of residents are white and only 3 percent are black. The median income in Marin City is $38,000, versus $91,000 for the county. More than 37 percent of Marin City residents live below the poverty line, compared with 8 percent for the county.

  Marin City was developed in 1942 to house World War II shipyard workers, immigrants, and other low-income people. They were crammed into tenement-type buildings of flimsy construction, many of which have since been razed and replaced, although housing remains substandard relative to the rest of the county. The majority of residents are renters who, because of their low incomes, often are forced into crowded living conditions.

  In the early days of Holmes’s career, Marin City was a hotbed of seething anger. The presence of police was incendiary rather than placating, and served to ignite rather than quell pent-up aggression. When he had to go to Marin City to investigate a death, regardless of the time of day, Holmes usually encountered a crowd of loud, emotional, and sometimes hostile people. As the years went by, the tension subsided considerably and coroner’s investigators were accepted. In the beginning, though, their presence was questioned.

  “A typical scenario was that Aunt Nellie would die,” Holmes says, “and she would be in her seventies. It might be in July, when it was hotter than hell because the air-conditioning in the building didn’t work, one o’clock in the morning, and she was on the fourth floor. Despite the late hour and the fact that her death probably was natural, there would be a crowd of people out in front of the building when I arrived, and two or three cops near the entrance, standing back to back because the residents did
n’t like cops. I came into the building and some folks looked at me skeptically, although I wasn’t wearing a uniform with a badge so they knew basically why I was there. They allowed me, sort of, into the fourth-floor hallway, which would be packed, thirty or forty people, all of them talking. I was the only white guy because the cops weren’t coming in; that would just make the situation worse.”

  He pauses. “So I would go in and see Aunt Nellie, and talk to whoever was there that was in the family, tell them what was going to happen, ask them if they had a choice for a mortuary. Then I left. And if it was something like that it was fine, but if there was a homicide, then there were three different factions of people who were mad, and the situation was volatile. I had a gun, but there was no way when I was in the middle of that crowded hallway that it was going to do me any good. Besides, I was pretty sure I wasn’t the only person there who was armed right that minute.”

  One thing Holmes learned was that when he had to go into a building in Marin City, he let his stethoscope hang out of his coat pocket. He didn’t make a big deal of it; he just let enough of it hang out so that is was clearly visible. “That way I was perceived as a man of medicine,” he says, “rather than a cop. It made a big difference in how I was received.”

  The most notable case that Holmes investigated in Marin City occurred August 22, 1992. After performing at an outdoor music festival there, Tupac was signing autographs when a fight broke out around him between members of two rival gangs. Reportedly, Tupac drew a legally registered gun, then dropped it. His stepbrother picked up the gun and fired a single shot. He wasn’t aiming at anyone, as far as Holmes could tell, but the bullet struck a six-year-old boy named Qa’id Walker-Teal in the forehead. Qa’id was on a school playground one hundred yards away, innocently riding a bicycle. There was no exit wound.

  The boy was rushed to Marin General Hospital and placed on life support. He died shortly thereafter. Dr. Jindrich noted in his autopsy report that there was a marked fracture of the skull with excess fluid and bleeding in the brain. Even if Qa’id had survived the shot, which was highly unlikely, so much damage had been done that he would have been in a vegetative state for the rest of his life.

  The case never went to trial, so neither Holmes nor Jindrich testified in court regarding it. The stepbrother was arrested for firing the gun, but many people believed that he took the fall in order to protect his famous relative, who hadn’t dropped his gun at all and was the real shooter. None of the people who witnessed the event would testify, however, which also was common in Marin City. Qa’id’s mother brought a wrongful death suit against Tupac, and there was an out-of-court settlement for an undisclosed amount, thought to be between $300,000 and $500,000. With the settlement, charges were dropped and that was the end of it.

  Tupac’s own life was cut short when he was gunned down four years later in a drive-by shooting in Las Vegas. Although there was widespread speculation that jealous rival and East Coast rapper Biggie Smalls was behind the shooting, the Los Angeles Times reported that Tupac, then twenty-five, was killed by members of the Southside Crips, a Southern California gang, in retaliation for Tupac’s involvement several hours earlier in the beating of one of the gang’s members.

  THE ROCK LEGEND

  The death of little Qa’id Walker-Teal and Tupac’s alleged role in it drew considerable interest from the media, but it resulted in nowhere near the level of frenzy that followed Jerry Garcia’s death three years later, in August 1995. The front man for the Grateful Dead lived in Tiburon and died in a high-end residential drug and alcohol treatment facility in Marin called Serenity Knolls.

  On the advice of his physician, Jerry had checked into the facility the previous day, having recently spent two weeks at the Betty Ford Center in Southern California. A night watchman making his rounds heard Jerry snoring at 4 A.M., but when he came by again at 4:23 A.M. the snoring had stopped and Jerry appeared lifeless. A nurse on the premises started CPR and paramedics were summoned. They arrived to find Jerry in asystole—that is, without a heartbeat—and pronounced him dead. He was fifty-three years old.

  Holmes went into work that morning only a few hours after Jerry died; nevertheless, word had gotten around quickly that the rock legend was dead. The hallway in front of Holmes’s office was jammed with people and cameras and light bars. There were reporters from European news outlets in addition to U.S. print and electronic media. Jerry’s body wasn’t even there—it had been taken to a local mortuary for autopsy—but that didn’t matter to everyone who was eager for any kind of sound bite.

  Jane, Holmes’s secretary, got there before Holmes, and when she pushed through the throng in order to unlock the door, microphones were pushed in front of her with everyone asking, “What can you tell us about Jerry Garcia?”

  Jane was in her seventies and had never heard of Jerry Garcia. “Jerry who?” she said.

  “Jerry Garcia of the Grateful Dead,” a number of people answered in unison.

  She had heard of the Grateful Dead but had no idea what the name referred to. Working in a coroner’s office, it could refer to a lot of things.

  She shook her head, said, “Sorry,” and ducked into the office as quickly as possible, locking the door behind her. When Holmes arrived, everyone clamored around him. He knew that Jerry Garcia had died—his investigator who handled the case, Gary Erickson, had called him at home to let him know—but Holmes didn’t have enough information yet to be able to comment publicly about it.

  One of the courses that he took years earlier at the police academy provided tips in dealing with the media. As annoying as reporters might be sometimes, the instructor said, they aren’t going away. If you try to brush them off, you’ll turn them into adversaries and make any situation worse. The trick, he said, is to make them think that they are in your good graces, that they are your confidants. You don’t have to tell them much, but if you do it over several sentences it sounds like you’re giving them substance. Also, at disaster scenes and car accidents where there are lots of gawkers, the instructor said that investigators shouldn’t try to block reporters’ access by telling them to stay behind police barricades. They won’t do it and instead will sneak up on top of a building or someone’s house to try to get a better view. A sounder strategy is to say, “All right, guys, I’m going to take you as close as I can to the area, not just one but all of you together, and I’ll answer every question I can, then I’m going to ask you to step back to that second line.” If you do that, the instructor said, it gives media people something and they don’t feel like you’re snowballing them.

  Holmes always tried hard to work with the press because there were times when he needed them. He provided as much information as he could without disclosing anything that reporters shouldn’t have. What he found was that if he said, “I’ll have something for you at two o’clock if you leave me alone now,” they would go away, but he needed to be there at two o’clock. If he wasn’t, they lost trust in him.

  Typically after a death, reporters go to the police first for information. They are told that everything is under investigation pending the outcome of the autopsy, however, which sends them racing to the coroner’s office, because each one wants to get “the scoop.” In the case of Jerry Garcia’s death, there wasn’t a lot that Holmes could say other than verify that Jerry was dead and that it appeared he had died from natural causes, although that wouldn’t be confirmed until the autopsy was completed in a day or two and the toxicology results were in, which would be several weeks.

  Despite having nothing else to report, the media camped outside the coroner’s office for the next eight hours. TV reporters filmed live cut-ins from there, which were spliced at the beginning and end of B-roll segments on Jerry and the Grateful Dead, and newspaper reporters wrote articles about Jerry’s legacy and speculated on the future of the band. Holmes appeared briefly on film and was quoted in print stories, saying little but trying to sound authoritative while expressing condolences to Jerry’s family
.

  When the autopsy and toxicology reports came back, there were no surprises. Jerry had a history of drug use, of smoking heroin and snorting cocaine, and was in a drug treatment facility, so it was natural to assume that he had drugs his system, and he did. In addition, a small, empty bindle and straws were found in his wallet, typical of cocaine usage.

  The medical cause of death was listed as “recent hemorrhage, atherosclerotic coronary artery plaque due to coronary arteriosclerosis with cardiomegaly and multifocal myocardial fibrosis.” In other words, a bad heart.

  “The reason for the bad heart,” Holmes says, “was Jerry’s lifestyle, which wasn’t just gorging on food or heavy use of drugs and alcohol. It wasn’t just the concerts and all the travel that went with them, either. It was all of those things together.”

  Jerry wasn’t old, but years of hard living had caught up with him.

  THE PSYCHIATRIST’S WIFE

  Early on a cool morning in February 1986, a thirty-eight-year-old woman was found slumped against the steering wheel of her gray BMW sedan. She was wearing a blue sweatsuit, green vest jacket, blue scarf, blue deck shoes, blue leg warmers, white socks, white long underwear, panties, and a bra. In her right hand was a 6.35-millimeter Walther semiautomatic pistol. Her first finger was resting on the trigger, and there was a bullet hole in her head.

  It looked like a clear case of suicide, and ultimately Ken Holmes ruled it that way. There were things about the case that prolonged the investigation, though, all of them having to do with the woman’s husband.

  Elizabeth Blinder wasn’t well known, but Martin Blinder certainly was. In fact, he was arguably the best-known psychiatrist in the country. Blinder’s fame wasn’t due to his academic pedigree, although that was impressive and enabled him to establish a thriving private practice in Marin County. Rather, it was his testimony in a 1979 court case in San Francisco that cemented his reputation.