May 7, 2024 • 39 mins
Corey Micciolo did not meet his father until he was 5-years-old. Soon thereafter Corey landed in the middle of a custody battle. From the first time he was left alone with his father, Corey came home with bruises, busted lips, and more. His mother complained but nobody listened. Only now are people paying attention because of an awful video showing 6-year-old Corey Micciolo being forced to run on a treadmill and falling off, over and over. Each time he falls off the treadmill, his father puts him back on and turns the speed up, allegedly. Christiopher Gregor is on trial facing murder charges for allegedly killing his own son in what the media calls the Treadmill Abuse Trial. On this episode of Body Bags, Joseph Scott Morgan will explain what really happened to Corey Micciolo and why 6-year-olds don't drop over dead, and Dave Mack will fill in the rest of the story of how Corey was given to a father that never bonded with him while his mother begged for anyone to listen.
00:38.98 Introduction, talk about weapons
05:17.90 Discussion of exorcise as punishment
10:01.23 Talk about making 6-year-old run on treadmill
16:01.12 Discussion of bruises and injuries
21:06.32 Talk about Corey's health is fine, except for bruises
26:20.26 Talk about Corey tells doctor about football and treadmill
32:41.40 Discussion of children don't die of natural causes at 6
37:27.82 Discussion of injury to abdomen
39:12:19 Conclusion Final Diagnosis, Blunt Force impact, laceration of heart
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:08):
Body Bags with Joseph Scott Morgan. Weapons. We talk a
lot about weapons in forensics, and sometimes you come across
things other than knives and guns, anything that you can
(00:31):
bludgeon somebody with bare hands, ligatures, fire. You think about
all of things and you think about, well, those items,
those elements can be easily weaponized weapons of convenience many times.
(00:52):
But I have a question, is it possible that someone
could potentially lethally weaponize exercise. We're going to find out
and we're going to have a discussion about a six
(01:14):
year old boy who unfortunately is no longer with us.
I'm Joseph Scott Morgan, and this is body Bags. I
was never a grand athlete, Dave. I played football in
high school around a lot of really great athletes, people
(01:37):
that went on to have pro careers, but all of
us suffered equally in football. It proved well when I
went off into the military because it's like, okay, I
can do this because of what I had gone through
in high school was football, and there were times when
I felt like my coaches, as I know your coaches
were using exercise to punish you, and it really wasn'tx
(02:00):
like you're trying to improve yourself. What they're trying to
do is improve your mental mental state, to pay attention
to detail.
Speaker 2 (02:07):
And Joe, I understand what you're saying there, but you
know you're talking high school, college military using exercise not
for exercise, but for discipline. And I get it, but
we're talking about a six year old boy here. We
don't even really know exactly when Christopher Gregor and Corey's mother,
Brianna michlo first met. We know that Brianna Michloh was seventeen,
(02:30):
Christopher Gregor was twenty one when Brianna Michloh gave birth
to Corey. Gregor was reportedly not in the boy's life
until he was five years old. And it was only
at that time when Brianna Michloh saw it child support
from Gregor, that a paternity test was done and when
he came back with well, I'm not paying child support,
I'm getting custody, and he did. He got custody of Corey.
Speaker 3 (02:51):
Michelo.
Speaker 2 (02:52):
Now, the very first meeting that Corey allegedly that Corey
had with his dad, the very first time they were alone,
Corey allegedly returned home to his mother with a busted lip.
According to New Jersey Online, Micheloh didn't believe Christopher Gregor's
excuse that he accidentally kicked their son while playing soccer,
(03:12):
so she reported it to the DCPP, and DCPP caseworker
accepted the story as told by Christopher Gregor, just an accident.
I kicked him while were playing soccer and no big deal.
They his boom didn't even investigate. Gregor was able to
rest custody of Corey away from his mother, Bria Michloh,
because Brie had an ongoing drug problem at the time.
(03:36):
At one point, Gregor was able to have bri Michelo's
visitation taken away due to drugs. Michelo had her visitation
restored after she completed a drug treatment program, but for
over a year after that first meeting, she claims that
Corey was routinely abused by Gregor, and she reportedly suspected
(03:56):
the father was using a treadmill as punishment tool during
their visitations. Bri Micheloh called authorities one hundred times reporting
her son Corey's abuse. Briann Michelo sought an emergency change
of custody after seeing the bruises on Corey's body on
April first. Okay, April first is a big day. Brianna
(04:16):
Micheloh has her son. She sees these bruises all over
his body. She takes him to the hospital.
Speaker 3 (04:22):
She gets.
Speaker 2 (04:24):
A doctor who's an expert in child abuse injuries, and
Corey is examined. He has fourteen bruises in various stages
of healing on his body. Fourteen. The child is six
years old, he's a month away from turning seven. Got
bruises all over his body, and Anna Michelo reaches out
to get an emergency change of custody because of this
(04:47):
and is denied. She takes Corey back to Christopher Gregor's
house the next day, and on April the second, Corey
gets out of the car, walks to his father's front
do Or opens the door. No problems walking, talking, everything's fine.
The night before at the hospital, no problem with his lungs,
no problem with it. He's other than all the bruises
(05:08):
on his body, He's fine. He goes to his dad's
house and in a matter of hours, Christopher Greyor calls
Briannon Michelo. I need Corey's insurance, health insurance stuff. I
got to take him to the hospital. He's throwing up,
he's slurring his words, and so he hangs up. After
getting the information, he doesn't tell Brianda. He doesn't tell
Brianna where he's taking her son, which hospital, So she's
(05:32):
trying to figure it out. She's calling around all the hospitals,
can't find where her son is. She finally calls the
police and says, look, I'm not the custodian, but I'm
in fear. My son's gonna die. His father has taken him.
The hospital won't tell me where you know, and the
police then tell her your son has passed. She had
(05:53):
just been denied custody okay, had sought an emergency changed
because she was in fear for her son's life. And
now they're telling him even though she doesn't even know
where her son is, he's dead. What has come to
light is that when Brianna Michlow took Corey to the doctor,
the doctor he specialized in child abuse, she was able
(06:18):
to talk to Corey about where these bruises came from.
And at first he tried to say it was football,
playing football with his dad, practicing football with his dad,
but he mentions falling off the treadmill. There's a videotape
from March twentieth showing six year old Corey being forced
by his father, Christopher Gregor, to get on a treadmill
(06:40):
in the workout gym at the apartment complex. Christopher Gregor
doesn't know there's surveillance cameras. The surveillance cameras catch Christopher
Gregor putting his six year old son on the treadmill
and making him run, and when he falls off, he
turns it up, makes it go faster. Christopher Gregor kept
turning the treadmill up faster and faster and faster as
his son tried to run and keep up, but off
(07:00):
six times, hitting his face, hitting his sides, getting dinged
all up, getting beat up by the treadmill. But six
different times Corey Michelo fell off the treadmill because it
was going too fast, and Christopher Gregor picked him up
and put him back on there and made him run again.
At one point he's frustrated and he bites Corey on
the head allegedly and puts him back on the treadmill.
(07:22):
If not for that video, the case would not be
going on.
Speaker 3 (07:26):
Now.
Speaker 1 (07:26):
Hey, Dave, have you ever fallen on a treadmill I have.
It's it's one well, first off, there's a crowd round,
it's very embarrassing. But secondly, if if I fall on
a treadmill, other than having to call an ambulance and
a bone surgeon, I'm not getting back on the treadmill immediately.
(07:48):
And I'm grown man, been on.
Speaker 2 (07:50):
I fell once, yeah, and it was last time I
was on one yes, yeah, and once and.
Speaker 1 (07:54):
It was the last out of control with the thing.
And particularly you have to understand the controls and all that.
You know.
Speaker 3 (08:00):
I don't know what.
Speaker 1 (08:01):
Actually elevates elevates a six year old to have the
cognitive ability to be able to control the thing. They don't.
So that leads to this idea of weaponization of let's
just face it, of a piece of athletic equipment or
workout exercise equipment. It's a means to an end. Now,
(08:21):
I don't know. If we had one of our psychology
friends on here, they could probably talk about things like, well,
it's not about the child, it's about the inconvenience of
the child. It's not about the injuries. It has everything
to do with the fact that he's angry at the
mother and maybe even at the state of New Jersey
for saddling him with a child that he was not
(08:44):
aware of. But yet at the end of the day,
it comes down to this little boy. It is about Corey.
And you know, that's one of the things that's very
frustrating when you start covering trials and areas in true
crime over and over and over again, the victim is
always forgotten, always forgotten. It doesn't matter what context you
(09:06):
look at this situation. And this Gregor Fela, his name
is going to go down, whether he is found guilty
by a jury of his peers or not. His name
will go down in infamy because it is associated with
Corey's death. But Corey's not going to be remembered. It's
going to be the horrible acts that have alleged to
(09:27):
have been committed. So when you think about the environment
in which this child was placed, that and you and
I can both speak to this, I think because of
our backgrounds. From the perspective of a little child, you
get that bubbling up anxiety that comes along with it
that you're going to have to be in the presence
(09:48):
of your abuser or the person that goes to great
links to make your life miserable, let's frame it that way,
and I came through it at a particular time in
life where I had more of a cognitive ability to
kind of process it as I got older. Unfortunately, Corey
is never going to have that chance, because in a
(10:11):
world of a six year old, you probably think that
the world is safe and that people love you and
that they're not going to let any harm come to you.
But unfortunately, with Corey, it wound up being a fatal exercise.
(10:44):
Over the years, I worked a lot of cases involving
more than I care to remember, not just children that
had been abused, but I worked a lot of cases
involving elder abuse as well, which again is a completely dave.
You and I could sit down and talk about elder
abuse for longer than you and I both would care to.
(11:04):
But there's a common theme that happens with people that
are perpetrators and alleged perpetrators when they're trying to explain
how events occur in the life of those that they
are expected to protect. And what always amazes me, I
think is that if there's some kind of critical injury
that has been identified by a healthcare professional, the person
(11:30):
in charge will always say, well, they fail, and then
when the healthcare provider or lord knows, a forensic pathologist
is trying to assess what they're looking at from a
physical presentation, they're thinking, well, yay, he said he fell,
but how many times did he fall? Because you know,
(11:51):
the thing about our body becomes almost like a little roadmap,
a history of what we've endured. And for those that
are kind of hearing talk through this, just imagine anytime
that if okay, if you get up out of the
bed and you've got a night stand or something that's
adjacent to your bed, or there's something that protrudes out
(12:12):
a piece of furniture and you bang your leg. Okay,
let's say you bang your leg four times over a
period of twelve days. Well, each one of those injuries
is going to look different. And it's kind of simple
science because your body in life is always trying to
repair itself, and so these areas of swelling, contusions, even lacerations,
(12:36):
they will begin to kind of resolve. Now they're going
to resolve in ways that might not be favorable. Even
broken bones try to resolve themselves, and you get really
horrible consequences as a result of a bone not being reset,
but to say the least, it provides for us forensically
a roadmap as to kind of the history. It's almost
I love to equate it to this day. It's almost
(12:58):
like cutting down a tree and look at the rings
at the tree, because you can tell by virtue of
you know, people that deal in this sort of thing,
they can look at it and say, well, this was
a drought. You know, this was a heavy rain year,
or you know, whatever the case might be. In kind
of a very more condensed perspective, you look at an
individual's body and you can begin to assess not just
(13:20):
the pattern of the injury, but what stage that injury
is at relative to resolution.
Speaker 2 (13:29):
You know, bringing that up, and I'm so glad you did,
because that actually was something that was brought up at trial.
Speaker 3 (13:35):
By the way.
Speaker 2 (13:35):
You you know, this case is ongoing right now. I've
had to cover a lot of it, and I was
shocked at the testimony of a couple of different people,
but in particular the pediatrician who looked at Corey. I
wanted to point something out. Yeah, Corey was forced to
run on the treadmill March twentieth of twenty twenty one.
It was April the second, when Corey Michelo died, and
(13:58):
that twelve day period from the treadmill incident to his
death is difficult to explain, but listening to you over
the years, I told you this before we started listening
to the pediatrician testify as to what she saw on
Corey Michelo, the bruising that she saw. I had to
(14:18):
actually stop the testimony and walk away twice, because this
six year old boy had fourteen bruises on his body
in various stages of healing. Some were fresher than others.
There were actually two places on his body that were
actually discolored but were white because the pigment hadn't come
(14:42):
back in the healing process, which I need to talk
to you about. But that's what I wanted to make
sure everybody understands that the treadmill incident happened on March twentieth,
thank Corey died April the second. Now, in between that time,
Corey's physical being was he was fine, He wasn't fine,
but he was a six year old boy with bruises.
And when he was brought back to his father's house,
(15:04):
you know, or this is so frustrating, Joe I know, bro,
are we not supposed to protect children?
Speaker 3 (15:11):
Is that not our job?
Speaker 1 (15:13):
It is our job. It's the job of those individuals
that that we elect to office or that are appointed
to office to protect. And as parents, where there's a
whole group of people that are expected to protect children,
they're the most and this is so rote they are
the most precious resource that we possess. It goes far
beyond money, It goes far beyond any kind of physical
(15:34):
possessions that we have. Period end of story. And there
is a monumental failure all the way around in Corey's case.
And look, I could, I could, really, you know, bring
down the thunder, you know, in a situation like this,
beginning to think about this and thinking about everything this
child has endured. But that's this is a great lesson,
(15:59):
I think, in sense that when you're an investigator and
you're out in the field, you have to fight these
feelings in your mind and everything that went wrong and
be able to assess the science that you're looking at.
And unfortunately, the science points to quite a bit of
negligence I think in certain people's world. Well that's about
(16:20):
as far as I want to go at this point.
But I'll put to you this way. It makes my
blood pressure want to blow the top of my head
off because it is so infuriating. My face will turn red,
you know, after I have veins poking out on my
forehead over.
Speaker 3 (16:32):
It what I'm watching.
Speaker 2 (16:34):
When I watch Christopher Gregor with Corey Mischlow, I see
a man who has no emotional tide to this child.
It's like they miss the bonding that takes place between
a parent and a child. It's an emotional bonding, it's
a physical bonding. You know, where you sit and you
hold each other and you watch TV or whatever you do.
And it's that time that Christopher Gregor didn't have with
(16:56):
his son that allowed him because when you watch this,
it's not like watching an actual father with his son
because that's not what men do. But what he did
to this child was abusive. In my mind, he's alleged
to he's not alleged to have made him run on
the treadmill.
Speaker 3 (17:12):
We have video of this.
Speaker 2 (17:13):
Yes, his own attorney at the start of trial and
during opening statements actually had to say, you're not going
to like him. You are not going to like Christopher Gregor.
And he's right. The issue is did he cause his death?
Speaker 3 (17:26):
You know?
Speaker 2 (17:27):
It was it running on the treadmill and the injuries.
But the thing is, Joe is there are at there
were other injuries, and that's why we need to get
into the bruising of what the pediatrician noticed on his body,
because she said that in court.
Speaker 3 (17:41):
She stood up.
Speaker 2 (17:42):
They asked her to show because and I've learned this
from you. When you start talking about certain parts of
the body, yes, and use terms that I'm sure I
was supposed to have learned them in ninth or tenth
grade biology, but I memorized, studied and forgot it.
Speaker 1 (17:58):
And so hang on, I got a sort of sound
bite here and just simply say, okay, Joe Scott, talk
to us in normal people talk. I'm just I'm just
a yeah, I'm not a doctor, you know.
Speaker 2 (18:12):
And that's that's what happened on the stand as his
pediatricians started talking about what it was on his body.
But the reality issue, they said, would you stand up
please and face the jury and show them, you know,
So this doctor stands up and she shows them where
the bruises are on again. Six year old boy with
(18:34):
fourteen bruises in various stages of healing, and she is
showing the jury and she starts with left cheek. He's
got a bruise on his left cheek. Now, I'm gonna
be honest with you, Joe. If I'm around a child
then has a bruise on his face like that, I
(18:54):
don't care who his dad is, who his mom is.
I'm asking what happened? What happened there, Bud, And if
he doesn't have a very quick answer, oh, I had
a go cart crash, I ran into a tree. My
brother hit me. You know, if he doesn't have a
quick answer, I'm following up.
Speaker 1 (19:12):
Yeah, because you know, if you've got an individual that
you're questioning about it and they're searching, you know, they're
trying to come up in their mind with well, how
can I explain this right? And it's almost impossible. And
of course, you know Corey, the sweet little kid is
doctor Deacon, who is actually the pediatrician. She's having a
conversation with this child and she's asking him some how
(19:36):
did these how did these injuries come about? He says, well,
my dad's trying to teach me football. That's all fine
and good, and teach your child football. You can take
him out in the yard. You can throw, you can,
I don't know, work on pursuit angles. He can do
all those.
Speaker 3 (19:50):
Work in the box.
Speaker 1 (19:51):
Yeah, catch the ball, you know you you no matter
what it is. But are you telling me that remember
what we talked about earlier? Are you run in Oklahoma drills?
And if you're not familiar with what an Oklahoma drill
looks like, look it up on YouTube. I'll a'l stiffly
or a bull in a ring and it's bull in
the ring. And I'm not saying this happen, but we're
(20:13):
talking about full contact. Yeah, you know when and i'd
come home, you know, in high school I have bruises
all up and down my arms and that sort of thing.
Speaker 3 (20:22):
But this is a dad with a six year old son.
Speaker 1 (20:24):
No, come on, so you can't.
Speaker 3 (20:25):
They're playing catch?
Speaker 1 (20:26):
Yeah, I know you're playing catch at this point, right
And at best you'll maybe teach them some rudimentary past
past routes. You know that you want to run with them,
you know that kind of stuff. But it doesn't rise.
You know, when you have a clinician like this pediatrician
that is doing the assessment on this child, I can
(20:48):
only imagine, you know, as they're as they're assessing this.
They've seen this before, Dave. This is not something that
happens on just every blue moon for a pediatrician. They've
seen it in practice. They've seen a lot of it
in their training, because most physicians will work at big
(21:09):
teaching hospitals, and you see all kinds of things and
teaching hospitals and you feel like you're spitting in the
ocean to try to raise a water level when you're
trying to protect somebody. You see kids that'll come through
multiple times in these environments and you can't do anything
about it, to interdict it. And unfortunately, in the case
(21:29):
of Corey, his injuries were far worse than anything anybody
could have imagined. The odd thing about being in a
(21:57):
morgue working with a forensic pathologist. You're standing at a
table and you have no connection to the body that
is lying before you while they were in life. And
it's a weird place to be in day because you
can look at the body man and you're sitting there
(22:18):
and you're trying to consider what led them to my table,
what led them to this cold, stainless steel table, And
you're looking down and you have time, you have a
lot of time in the morgue to do assessments that
other people in other medical professions don't have. You don't
(22:39):
have a waiting room, you don't have other people tugging
at you. Now, you might have other cases to do,
but think about the morgue is that you can take
your time when doing your assessment. And there is nothing
that will give a staff of forensic scientists pause more
(23:02):
than the death of a child. I'm not saying that.
You know, we don't give our due diligence to other cases,
but when you have a dead little kid in front
of you, little kids are not just supposed to fall
over dead. They're not an eighty five year old grandpa
with atheroscartic cardiovascular disease and a history of acute mild
(23:27):
cardial infarctions or tias or CVAs or any of those
things that come along in the brain. It's not what
we're talking about.
Speaker 3 (23:36):
He's six years old. Six Yeah, covered in bruises.
Speaker 2 (23:40):
Now we know there was a history of bruising on
this six year old boy. And I will tell you
that in looking at this, there were people who notice things,
There were people who said things. There was a noticeable
difference after Corey Michelo began living with his father full
time and only saw his mother on visitation. And his
(24:03):
first grade teacher testified that he wore clothing that was
inappropriate for the weather. It was too hot to be
wearing long sleeve outfits and things like that, and teachers
and you mentioned this. Teachers and doctor, they've seen all
this before and so they know what the signs are.
So the bruising and we're only going to deal with
the treadmill on on April first, that's when the pediatrician
(24:25):
saw Corey. He was having a number of issues and
so as she was examining him, she was looking at
the bruises and she marked them down and talked about it.
If she mentioned the bruise on the eye, she mentioned
this yellow green bruises, big ones show and she pointed
out a number of other ones. And I don't know
(24:46):
what it means. I don't know what these different bruises
on different parts of his body mean. I do know
that the doctor she spoke with Corey and asked about
where did these bruises come with?
Speaker 3 (24:58):
What happened?
Speaker 2 (24:59):
She said that he he did mention playing football with
his dad and the treadmill incident in air quotes, and
she talked to him a little further about this, and
she testified in court that Corey put more emphasis on
the treadmill as the source for a lot of the
injury she was seeing, not playing football with his dad.
(25:20):
What did the bruises mean, Joe.
Speaker 1 (25:22):
I'm glad you asked to stay, because you know, when
you're looking at a bruise, that is you mentioned one
specifically that was yellow in color, you're looking at a
bruise if you're aging, which we do in forensics, we do. Well.
Let me back up. Practitioners. Clinical practitioners that are taking
care of the living. They assess to pediatricians specifically, they
(25:46):
will look at bruises and they can agent. But we
use the same tool with dead because when an individual
does die, everything and this is kind of an obvious statement,
everything ceases. But the beauty of that from an investigative
standpoint is that you literally get a freeze frame at
that moment time because the bruise, the contusion is not
going to continue to resolve. It's frozen. It's frozen in
(26:09):
that amount of time. If the body is left preserved,
you can really do a thorough assessment if the body.
You know, if you find a body that's decomposing, which
this is not the case, then those things will be
a little bit tougher to kind of assess. But you're
looking at a bruise that's yellow. You're talking about seven
to eight days maybe nine of post trauma, of post
(26:32):
impact event. Because anytime you have a bruise, there is
an impact that's associated with That's the only way that
you're going to have the presentation of a contusion. What
I think the question this begs is when you look
at the external presentation of the injuries, what critical areas
of the body? Does it overlie? Now, if you look
(26:55):
at say a bruise that someone might have on their
bicep that doesn't have the same level of criticality, say,
for instance, if child has a bruised or blackened eye,
because now you're talking about potential brain injury. Or if
you see somebody has a bruise to their leg, Okay,
maybe their outer thigh, maybe they bumped into a table. Eh.
(27:19):
That can it's certainly painful, and it can tell you
a lot historically. But buddy, let me tell you something.
If you see bruises on the abdomen. Those are specific
impact injuries. How many? How many times in your life?
And in my life too, I'm asking myself the same question.
Have I walked into something with my abdominal muscles leading
the way or my abdomen leading way where I have
(27:41):
a specific impact site on that location anytime? And I'm
not a boxer. You know, if you're a boxer, you
get out of the ring and you're taking body shots,
you know you're going to have contusions, you know, all
of you. These guys don't escape, you know, right, and so,
but those bruises be the same age. So if you
(28:02):
get multiple sites all over the body, you know that
someone has specifically targeted in an area. Say you get
a punch to the admin, punch in the eye, or
any number of other locations, and you begin to assess
those and literally what we do at autopsy is we
in size those specific areas. You just don't look at
(28:24):
it externally. You make a cut into that area and
you can actually appreciate how the thing is resolving and
you have to track this very carefully.
Speaker 2 (28:32):
Day.
Speaker 3 (28:32):
Is that like rings of a tree?
Speaker 1 (28:34):
No, it's not like rings of a tree. That's yeah,
that analogy doesn't necessarily apply here. What it does apply
to more, I think is probably targeting areas. Because let's
just say you've got a bruise. Find the bottom the
right aspect of your right rib cage the last rib anteriorly.
(28:57):
That approximates the area where your liver is, so on
the right side. So if you have a bruise a
contusion on your abdomen approximating in that area. And I'm
in the morgue and I'm looking at this, you know
what I'm going to think. I'm going to think, Well,
it's presenting with a bruise here, It's not an easy
area to bruise. I note this had required a tremendous
(29:19):
amount of impact or velocity. When I open this person's abdomen,
I want to know what the liver looks like, because
you can actually have a contusion to deliver. There's actually
another odd term I think I've mentioned before that forensic
pathologists use. It's called a fracturing of the liver. We
think fracturing with bone. You can and it's truly a laceration.
(29:42):
The liver splits. It's so dense and so heavy, it'll
split and fracture, and so that's seeping blood. And the
other thing you get when you open up the abdomen,
Dave is that many times you'll see the organs, the
abdominal organs, floating in blood or there'll be a pro
sense of blood. It will be clotted, and that also
(30:03):
gives you an idea that something has happened in the
recent past more than likely. So the external injuries that
a person, a child, and in Corey's case, that they
would be presenting with all over their body, those little
points of impact, it runs much deeper, That's what I'm
(30:24):
talking about. It runs much deeper. What you're seeing on
the surface is only it's a very superficial kind of
almost like X marks the spot and a treasure hunt.
When you go beneath the X at that point in time,
that's where you're really going to begin to understand how
vicious an event may have been that would have led
(30:48):
to an otherwise healthy sex year old child's dead.
Speaker 3 (30:51):
Kids.
Speaker 1 (30:52):
Kids, as you well know, kids are very resilient, you know,
I mean kids fall, they take some of the worst.
That a fall that my grandson who's you know five,
we see James is five now he'll be six soon.
A fall that Jamison might take as a five year
old six year old, he's it would kill you, and
(31:13):
I right, it would kill you. And they'll bounce back.
They'll bounce back.
Speaker 2 (31:18):
And that's why when I had to listen to had
to I had to listen to the testimony of the
doctor and getting away from the clinical and just thinking
about a child. I'm telling you, Joe, I had to
stop because the number of bruises, where the bruises were
on his body, and the various stages that they were
in the healing process. It didn't go unnoticed, okay, And
(31:40):
I want to be clear on this that it did
not go unnoticed. But his mother, because of her past
and because she had lost in court, she had continued
to fight for Corey. She had gone back to court
many times and had talked, She had reported the abuse
that she saw. She was the one his mother, Corey's
mom takes him to the doctor on April first, where
(32:01):
the doctor documents all these bruises and injuries. And after that,
because it was attributed to the treadmill incident, his mother,
Corey's mom, Bree, sought custody immediately, an emergency cut because
of these abuses that she could see the boy died
the next day.
Speaker 3 (32:21):
Now at waste.
Speaker 1 (32:23):
Make sure make sure you tell everybody where he died.
Where did he go into rest?
Speaker 3 (32:28):
Okay? Oh, here's the thing to back up. Okay.
Speaker 2 (32:31):
Corey's mom, bri takes him to the doctor on April
the first. Doctor sees these bruises. Yeah, Brianna files with
the state. She files with DCCP. I think is what
it's called in New Jersey. She filed with them right away.
Corey died a day after his mother took him to
the doctor for the treadmill abuse, which was ten days.
Eleven days after the treadmill incident, Brianna Michelo reported the
(32:55):
abuse to DCPP and filed for emergency customs April first.
The request was denied the next day, April the second,
on nine am in the morning, Brianna had to bring
Corey back to his dad. Corey Michelo is able to
get out of the car's nine am, April the second.
He's able to get out of the car, he walks
(33:18):
to his dad's front door and opens the front door
himself and lets himself into the house. Nothing seems out
of the ordinary. He's fine. Later on, a couple hours later,
Brianna gets called from Christopher Gregor asking for Corey's insurance card,
saying he's lethargic, he's throwing up, he's slurring his words,
(33:41):
and I'm going to take him to the hospital. And
so he does. Now he doesn't tell the mother. He
does not tell Brie where he's taking Corey, just taking
her to the hospital. Taking my son to the hospital.
So she's left with calling the area hospitals, Joe trying
to find her son, who she knows is sick. She's
hauling every hospital. Finally, you know what she had to do,
(34:02):
she had to call the police station and say, look,
I'm not the custodian old mother. You know, he's with
his dad, but he's sick, and his dad's stating in
the hospital. But he doesn't tell me where. And that's
when the police tell her, but your son's passed. Now
she drops him off of the house of nine am.
He's fine. Later on that afternoon he has passed away.
(34:26):
And he actually Corey passed away in the hospital. He
was actually in that he was getting a cat scan yep,
and actually had a seizure in the cat scan at
the hospital, surrounded by doctors and nurses and he's right
there and still still he died.
Speaker 3 (34:44):
They could not save his life.
Speaker 1 (34:46):
Nothing they could do. Dave. He is, he is on
that slippery slope, and what it tells me is that
there is ongoing hemorrhage within him. And it's interesting of
note here. You know, he prior to be taken to
the hospital, he awakes from a nap. He realize how
hard it is to get a six year old to
(35:07):
take a nap. It's a herculean task to say, beliefs
it is. But he's taken a nap. If you've got
a kid that's six years old and it's in the
middle of the day like this, particularly a little boy
who's full of energy, he's bouncing around this sort of thing,
he's going to lay down and take a nap like
he's a three year old.
Speaker 2 (35:25):
Old.
Speaker 1 (35:26):
Yeah, feel good. And when he wakes up, Dave, he's slurring.
He's slurring, he is, he's complaining of nausea, symptomology, just
kind of the disorientation and slurring the speech. That tells
me that there's probably some kind of neurological problem going on. Conversely,
it can also indicate that there is a tremendous amount
(35:48):
of internal blood loss going on, and that can arise
from any number of locations. Remember what I was talking
about with the points of impact. And Corey does, in
fact die in treatment room. You know where they're going
to do the CT. And I know, you know what
it's like to go into a CT. It's not as
bad as an MRI, but you know, they're they're loading
you into this this thing. You know, you're laying there
(36:08):
on your back and all of that, and then all
of a sudden and they're talking to you. Ever notice
how they talk to you over the loud speaker.
Speaker 3 (36:14):
Well, you got.
Speaker 1 (36:17):
To keep you from decompensating in there. I always feel
like I'm in a you know, in a torpedo tube anyway,
you know, I don't. You don't like being in that environment.
And look, you got a six year old kid, and
these things are noisy too. He imagined what it's like
to try to get a six year old calm down
and to keep them alert because they have to give
you directives. You're also how hard it is for a
(36:38):
six year old to lay still? Yeah, I know, but
yet they're giving him directives and all of a sudden
day he's not responding. He's not responding to verbal verbal
commands or directives or anything like that. Buddy, he is
going into a cardiac arrest. How many times has this
(36:59):
ever happened in the presence of a clinician, where you've
got a kid that's not suffering from terminal illness and
they're surrounded in a hospital and they go into a
fatal event before your eyes and there's nothing you can
do about it. But in the wake of all of
(37:20):
this and the fact that the police had been looking
into this, it did obviously lead to charges. But just
let me run this down to you real quick, because
I think that it needs to be plainly stated that
when when Corey was autopsied and they begin to assess
(37:45):
those things that you remember, you remember day were, you know,
we were talking about those things that are just under
the surface. This baby had cardiac which means heart and
liver contusions, which means he had sustained impact injuries to
(38:09):
his heart to his liver. There was an inflammatory response,
which means that it wasn't necessarily in the phase that
it had just happened. It had happened days before, okay,
And this was kind of a rollout. He's getting worse
(38:35):
and worse and worse all the way along. And you know,
the final diagnosis for this child was that he had
sustained first off consequences of chronic abuse, not acute. Acute
means suddenly chronic means Dave, ongoing, ongoing, and the entries
(39:02):
that he had sustained. He had blunt force impact of
the chest, the abdomen, Dave with a laceration of his heart.
I don't know what to make of this, but when
I see this case, I think about what he endured.
(39:27):
People talk about how they've been injured in life and
how they've had their heart broken. This child literally died
of a broken heart. I'm Joseph Scott Morgan, and this
is body backs
Body Bags with Joseph Scott Morgan. Weapons. We talk a
lot about weapons in forensics, and sometimes you come across
things other than knives and guns, anything that you can
(00:31):
bludgeon somebody with bare hands, ligatures, fire. You think about
all of things and you think about, well, those items,
those elements can be easily weaponized weapons of convenience many times.
(00:52):
But I have a question, is it possible that someone
could potentially lethally weaponize exercise. We're going to find out
and we're going to have a discussion about a six
(01:14):
year old boy who unfortunately is no longer with us.
I'm Joseph Scott Morgan, and this is body Bags. I
was never a grand athlete, Dave. I played football in
high school around a lot of really great athletes, people
(01:37):
that went on to have pro careers, but all of
us suffered equally in football. It proved well when I
went off into the military because it's like, okay, I
can do this because of what I had gone through
in high school was football, and there were times when
I felt like my coaches, as I know your coaches
were using exercise to punish you, and it really wasn'tx
(02:00):
like you're trying to improve yourself. What they're trying to
do is improve your mental mental state, to pay attention
to detail.
Speaker 2 (02:07):
And Joe, I understand what you're saying there, but you
know you're talking high school, college military using exercise not
for exercise, but for discipline. And I get it, but
we're talking about a six year old boy here. We
don't even really know exactly when Christopher Gregor and Corey's mother,
Brianna michlo first met. We know that Brianna Michloh was seventeen,
(02:30):
Christopher Gregor was twenty one when Brianna Michloh gave birth
to Corey. Gregor was reportedly not in the boy's life
until he was five years old. And it was only
at that time when Brianna Michloh saw it child support
from Gregor, that a paternity test was done and when
he came back with well, I'm not paying child support,
I'm getting custody, and he did. He got custody of Corey.
Speaker 3 (02:51):
Michelo.
Speaker 2 (02:52):
Now, the very first meeting that Corey allegedly that Corey
had with his dad, the very first time they were alone,
Corey allegedly returned home to his mother with a busted lip.
According to New Jersey Online, Micheloh didn't believe Christopher Gregor's
excuse that he accidentally kicked their son while playing soccer,
(03:12):
so she reported it to the DCPP, and DCPP caseworker
accepted the story as told by Christopher Gregor, just an accident.
I kicked him while were playing soccer and no big deal.
They his boom didn't even investigate. Gregor was able to
rest custody of Corey away from his mother, Bria Michloh,
because Brie had an ongoing drug problem at the time.
(03:36):
At one point, Gregor was able to have bri Michelo's
visitation taken away due to drugs. Michelo had her visitation
restored after she completed a drug treatment program, but for
over a year after that first meeting, she claims that
Corey was routinely abused by Gregor, and she reportedly suspected
(03:56):
the father was using a treadmill as punishment tool during
their visitations. Bri Micheloh called authorities one hundred times reporting
her son Corey's abuse. Briann Michelo sought an emergency change
of custody after seeing the bruises on Corey's body on
April first. Okay, April first is a big day. Brianna
(04:16):
Micheloh has her son. She sees these bruises all over
his body. She takes him to the hospital.
Speaker 3 (04:22):
She gets.
Speaker 2 (04:24):
A doctor who's an expert in child abuse injuries, and
Corey is examined. He has fourteen bruises in various stages
of healing on his body. Fourteen. The child is six
years old, he's a month away from turning seven. Got
bruises all over his body, and Anna Michelo reaches out
to get an emergency change of custody because of this
(04:47):
and is denied. She takes Corey back to Christopher Gregor's
house the next day, and on April the second, Corey
gets out of the car, walks to his father's front
do Or opens the door. No problems walking, talking, everything's fine.
The night before at the hospital, no problem with his lungs,
no problem with it. He's other than all the bruises
(05:08):
on his body, He's fine. He goes to his dad's
house and in a matter of hours, Christopher Greyor calls
Briannon Michelo. I need Corey's insurance, health insurance stuff. I
got to take him to the hospital. He's throwing up,
he's slurring his words, and so he hangs up. After
getting the information, he doesn't tell Brianda. He doesn't tell
Brianna where he's taking her son, which hospital, So she's
(05:32):
trying to figure it out. She's calling around all the hospitals,
can't find where her son is. She finally calls the
police and says, look, I'm not the custodian, but I'm
in fear. My son's gonna die. His father has taken him.
The hospital won't tell me where you know, and the
police then tell her your son has passed. She had
(05:53):
just been denied custody okay, had sought an emergency changed
because she was in fear for her son's life. And
now they're telling him even though she doesn't even know
where her son is, he's dead. What has come to
light is that when Brianna Michlow took Corey to the doctor,
the doctor he specialized in child abuse, she was able
(06:18):
to talk to Corey about where these bruises came from.
And at first he tried to say it was football,
playing football with his dad, practicing football with his dad,
but he mentions falling off the treadmill. There's a videotape
from March twentieth showing six year old Corey being forced
by his father, Christopher Gregor, to get on a treadmill
(06:40):
in the workout gym at the apartment complex. Christopher Gregor
doesn't know there's surveillance cameras. The surveillance cameras catch Christopher
Gregor putting his six year old son on the treadmill
and making him run, and when he falls off, he
turns it up, makes it go faster. Christopher Gregor kept
turning the treadmill up faster and faster and faster as
his son tried to run and keep up, but off
(07:00):
six times, hitting his face, hitting his sides, getting dinged
all up, getting beat up by the treadmill. But six
different times Corey Michelo fell off the treadmill because it
was going too fast, and Christopher Gregor picked him up
and put him back on there and made him run again.
At one point he's frustrated and he bites Corey on
the head allegedly and puts him back on the treadmill.
(07:22):
If not for that video, the case would not be
going on.
Speaker 3 (07:26):
Now.
Speaker 1 (07:26):
Hey, Dave, have you ever fallen on a treadmill I have.
It's it's one well, first off, there's a crowd round,
it's very embarrassing. But secondly, if if I fall on
a treadmill, other than having to call an ambulance and
a bone surgeon, I'm not getting back on the treadmill immediately.
(07:48):
And I'm grown man, been on.
Speaker 2 (07:50):
I fell once, yeah, and it was last time I
was on one yes, yeah, and once and.
Speaker 1 (07:54):
It was the last out of control with the thing.
And particularly you have to understand the controls and all that.
You know.
Speaker 3 (08:00):
I don't know what.
Speaker 1 (08:01):
Actually elevates elevates a six year old to have the
cognitive ability to be able to control the thing. They don't.
So that leads to this idea of weaponization of let's
just face it, of a piece of athletic equipment or
workout exercise equipment. It's a means to an end. Now,
(08:21):
I don't know. If we had one of our psychology
friends on here, they could probably talk about things like, well,
it's not about the child, it's about the inconvenience of
the child. It's not about the injuries. It has everything
to do with the fact that he's angry at the
mother and maybe even at the state of New Jersey
for saddling him with a child that he was not
(08:44):
aware of. But yet at the end of the day,
it comes down to this little boy. It is about Corey.
And you know, that's one of the things that's very
frustrating when you start covering trials and areas in true
crime over and over and over again, the victim is
always forgotten, always forgotten. It doesn't matter what context you
(09:06):
look at this situation. And this Gregor Fela, his name
is going to go down, whether he is found guilty
by a jury of his peers or not. His name
will go down in infamy because it is associated with
Corey's death. But Corey's not going to be remembered. It's
going to be the horrible acts that have alleged to
(09:27):
have been committed. So when you think about the environment
in which this child was placed, that and you and
I can both speak to this, I think because of
our backgrounds. From the perspective of a little child, you
get that bubbling up anxiety that comes along with it
that you're going to have to be in the presence
(09:48):
of your abuser or the person that goes to great
links to make your life miserable, let's frame it that way,
and I came through it at a particular time in
life where I had more of a cognitive ability to
kind of process it as I got older. Unfortunately, Corey
is never going to have that chance, because in a
(10:11):
world of a six year old, you probably think that
the world is safe and that people love you and
that they're not going to let any harm come to you.
But unfortunately, with Corey, it wound up being a fatal exercise.
(10:44):
Over the years, I worked a lot of cases involving
more than I care to remember, not just children that
had been abused, but I worked a lot of cases
involving elder abuse as well, which again is a completely dave.
You and I could sit down and talk about elder
abuse for longer than you and I both would care to.
(11:04):
But there's a common theme that happens with people that
are perpetrators and alleged perpetrators when they're trying to explain
how events occur in the life of those that they
are expected to protect. And what always amazes me, I
think is that if there's some kind of critical injury
that has been identified by a healthcare professional, the person
(11:30):
in charge will always say, well, they fail, and then
when the healthcare provider or lord knows, a forensic pathologist
is trying to assess what they're looking at from a
physical presentation, they're thinking, well, yay, he said he fell,
but how many times did he fall? Because you know,
(11:51):
the thing about our body becomes almost like a little roadmap,
a history of what we've endured. And for those that
are kind of hearing talk through this, just imagine anytime
that if okay, if you get up out of the
bed and you've got a night stand or something that's
adjacent to your bed, or there's something that protrudes out
(12:12):
a piece of furniture and you bang your leg. Okay,
let's say you bang your leg four times over a
period of twelve days. Well, each one of those injuries
is going to look different. And it's kind of simple
science because your body in life is always trying to
repair itself, and so these areas of swelling, contusions, even lacerations,
(12:36):
they will begin to kind of resolve. Now they're going
to resolve in ways that might not be favorable. Even
broken bones try to resolve themselves, and you get really
horrible consequences as a result of a bone not being reset,
but to say the least, it provides for us forensically
a roadmap as to kind of the history. It's almost
I love to equate it to this day. It's almost
(12:58):
like cutting down a tree and look at the rings
at the tree, because you can tell by virtue of
you know, people that deal in this sort of thing,
they can look at it and say, well, this was
a drought. You know, this was a heavy rain year,
or you know, whatever the case might be. In kind
of a very more condensed perspective, you look at an
individual's body and you can begin to assess not just
(13:20):
the pattern of the injury, but what stage that injury
is at relative to resolution.
Speaker 2 (13:29):
You know, bringing that up, and I'm so glad you did,
because that actually was something that was brought up at trial.
Speaker 3 (13:35):
By the way.
Speaker 2 (13:35):
You you know, this case is ongoing right now. I've
had to cover a lot of it, and I was
shocked at the testimony of a couple of different people,
but in particular the pediatrician who looked at Corey. I
wanted to point something out. Yeah, Corey was forced to
run on the treadmill March twentieth of twenty twenty one.
It was April the second, when Corey Michelo died, and
(13:58):
that twelve day period from the treadmill incident to his
death is difficult to explain, but listening to you over
the years, I told you this before we started listening
to the pediatrician testify as to what she saw on
Corey Michelo, the bruising that she saw. I had to
(14:18):
actually stop the testimony and walk away twice, because this
six year old boy had fourteen bruises on his body
in various stages of healing. Some were fresher than others.
There were actually two places on his body that were
actually discolored but were white because the pigment hadn't come
(14:42):
back in the healing process, which I need to talk
to you about. But that's what I wanted to make
sure everybody understands that the treadmill incident happened on March twentieth,
thank Corey died April the second. Now, in between that time,
Corey's physical being was he was fine, He wasn't fine,
but he was a six year old boy with bruises.
And when he was brought back to his father's house,
(15:04):
you know, or this is so frustrating, Joe I know, bro,
are we not supposed to protect children?
Speaker 3 (15:11):
Is that not our job?
Speaker 1 (15:13):
It is our job. It's the job of those individuals
that that we elect to office or that are appointed
to office to protect. And as parents, where there's a
whole group of people that are expected to protect children,
they're the most and this is so rote they are
the most precious resource that we possess. It goes far
beyond money, It goes far beyond any kind of physical
(15:34):
possessions that we have. Period end of story. And there
is a monumental failure all the way around in Corey's case.
And look, I could, I could, really, you know, bring
down the thunder, you know, in a situation like this,
beginning to think about this and thinking about everything this
child has endured. But that's this is a great lesson,
(15:59):
I think, in sense that when you're an investigator and
you're out in the field, you have to fight these
feelings in your mind and everything that went wrong and
be able to assess the science that you're looking at.
And unfortunately, the science points to quite a bit of
negligence I think in certain people's world. Well that's about
(16:20):
as far as I want to go at this point.
But I'll put to you this way. It makes my
blood pressure want to blow the top of my head
off because it is so infuriating. My face will turn red,
you know, after I have veins poking out on my
forehead over.
Speaker 3 (16:32):
It what I'm watching.
Speaker 2 (16:34):
When I watch Christopher Gregor with Corey Mischlow, I see
a man who has no emotional tide to this child.
It's like they miss the bonding that takes place between
a parent and a child. It's an emotional bonding, it's
a physical bonding. You know, where you sit and you
hold each other and you watch TV or whatever you do.
And it's that time that Christopher Gregor didn't have with
(16:56):
his son that allowed him because when you watch this,
it's not like watching an actual father with his son
because that's not what men do. But what he did
to this child was abusive. In my mind, he's alleged
to he's not alleged to have made him run on
the treadmill.
Speaker 3 (17:12):
We have video of this.
Speaker 2 (17:13):
Yes, his own attorney at the start of trial and
during opening statements actually had to say, you're not going
to like him. You are not going to like Christopher Gregor.
And he's right. The issue is did he cause his death?
Speaker 3 (17:26):
You know?
Speaker 2 (17:27):
It was it running on the treadmill and the injuries.
But the thing is, Joe is there are at there
were other injuries, and that's why we need to get
into the bruising of what the pediatrician noticed on his body,
because she said that in court.
Speaker 3 (17:41):
She stood up.
Speaker 2 (17:42):
They asked her to show because and I've learned this
from you. When you start talking about certain parts of
the body, yes, and use terms that I'm sure I
was supposed to have learned them in ninth or tenth
grade biology, but I memorized, studied and forgot it.
Speaker 1 (17:58):
And so hang on, I got a sort of sound
bite here and just simply say, okay, Joe Scott, talk
to us in normal people talk. I'm just I'm just
a yeah, I'm not a doctor, you know.
Speaker 2 (18:12):
And that's that's what happened on the stand as his
pediatricians started talking about what it was on his body.
But the reality issue, they said, would you stand up
please and face the jury and show them, you know,
So this doctor stands up and she shows them where
the bruises are on again. Six year old boy with
(18:34):
fourteen bruises in various stages of healing, and she is
showing the jury and she starts with left cheek. He's
got a bruise on his left cheek. Now, I'm gonna
be honest with you, Joe. If I'm around a child
then has a bruise on his face like that, I
(18:54):
don't care who his dad is, who his mom is.
I'm asking what happened? What happened there, Bud, And if
he doesn't have a very quick answer, oh, I had
a go cart crash, I ran into a tree. My
brother hit me. You know, if he doesn't have a
quick answer, I'm following up.
Speaker 1 (19:12):
Yeah, because you know, if you've got an individual that
you're questioning about it and they're searching, you know, they're
trying to come up in their mind with well, how
can I explain this right? And it's almost impossible. And
of course, you know Corey, the sweet little kid is
doctor Deacon, who is actually the pediatrician. She's having a
conversation with this child and she's asking him some how
(19:36):
did these how did these injuries come about? He says, well,
my dad's trying to teach me football. That's all fine
and good, and teach your child football. You can take
him out in the yard. You can throw, you can,
I don't know, work on pursuit angles. He can do
all those.
Speaker 3 (19:50):
Work in the box.
Speaker 1 (19:51):
Yeah, catch the ball, you know you you no matter
what it is. But are you telling me that remember
what we talked about earlier? Are you run in Oklahoma drills?
And if you're not familiar with what an Oklahoma drill
looks like, look it up on YouTube. I'll a'l stiffly
or a bull in a ring and it's bull in
the ring. And I'm not saying this happen, but we're
(20:13):
talking about full contact. Yeah, you know when and i'd
come home, you know, in high school I have bruises
all up and down my arms and that sort of thing.
Speaker 3 (20:22):
But this is a dad with a six year old son.
Speaker 1 (20:24):
No, come on, so you can't.
Speaker 3 (20:25):
They're playing catch?
Speaker 1 (20:26):
Yeah, I know you're playing catch at this point, right
And at best you'll maybe teach them some rudimentary past
past routes. You know that you want to run with them,
you know that kind of stuff. But it doesn't rise.
You know, when you have a clinician like this pediatrician
that is doing the assessment on this child, I can
(20:48):
only imagine, you know, as they're as they're assessing this.
They've seen this before, Dave. This is not something that
happens on just every blue moon for a pediatrician. They've
seen it in practice. They've seen a lot of it
in their training, because most physicians will work at big
(21:09):
teaching hospitals, and you see all kinds of things and
teaching hospitals and you feel like you're spitting in the
ocean to try to raise a water level when you're
trying to protect somebody. You see kids that'll come through
multiple times in these environments and you can't do anything
about it, to interdict it. And unfortunately, in the case
(21:29):
of Corey, his injuries were far worse than anything anybody
could have imagined. The odd thing about being in a
(21:57):
morgue working with a forensic pathologist. You're standing at a
table and you have no connection to the body that
is lying before you while they were in life. And
it's a weird place to be in day because you
can look at the body man and you're sitting there
(22:18):
and you're trying to consider what led them to my table,
what led them to this cold, stainless steel table, And
you're looking down and you have time, you have a
lot of time in the morgue to do assessments that
other people in other medical professions don't have. You don't
(22:39):
have a waiting room, you don't have other people tugging
at you. Now, you might have other cases to do,
but think about the morgue is that you can take
your time when doing your assessment. And there is nothing
that will give a staff of forensic scientists pause more
(23:02):
than the death of a child. I'm not saying that.
You know, we don't give our due diligence to other cases,
but when you have a dead little kid in front
of you, little kids are not just supposed to fall
over dead. They're not an eighty five year old grandpa
with atheroscartic cardiovascular disease and a history of acute mild
(23:27):
cardial infarctions or tias or CVAs or any of those
things that come along in the brain. It's not what
we're talking about.
Speaker 3 (23:36):
He's six years old. Six Yeah, covered in bruises.
Speaker 2 (23:40):
Now we know there was a history of bruising on
this six year old boy. And I will tell you
that in looking at this, there were people who notice things,
There were people who said things. There was a noticeable
difference after Corey Michelo began living with his father full
time and only saw his mother on visitation. And his
(24:03):
first grade teacher testified that he wore clothing that was
inappropriate for the weather. It was too hot to be
wearing long sleeve outfits and things like that, and teachers
and you mentioned this. Teachers and doctor, they've seen all
this before and so they know what the signs are.
So the bruising and we're only going to deal with
the treadmill on on April first, that's when the pediatrician
(24:25):
saw Corey. He was having a number of issues and
so as she was examining him, she was looking at
the bruises and she marked them down and talked about it.
If she mentioned the bruise on the eye, she mentioned
this yellow green bruises, big ones show and she pointed
out a number of other ones. And I don't know
(24:46):
what it means. I don't know what these different bruises
on different parts of his body mean. I do know
that the doctor she spoke with Corey and asked about
where did these bruises come with?
Speaker 3 (24:58):
What happened?
Speaker 2 (24:59):
She said that he he did mention playing football with
his dad and the treadmill incident in air quotes, and
she talked to him a little further about this, and
she testified in court that Corey put more emphasis on
the treadmill as the source for a lot of the
injury she was seeing, not playing football with his dad.
(25:20):
What did the bruises mean, Joe.
Speaker 1 (25:22):
I'm glad you asked to stay, because you know, when
you're looking at a bruise, that is you mentioned one
specifically that was yellow in color, you're looking at a
bruise if you're aging, which we do in forensics, we do. Well.
Let me back up. Practitioners. Clinical practitioners that are taking
care of the living. They assess to pediatricians specifically, they
(25:46):
will look at bruises and they can agent. But we
use the same tool with dead because when an individual
does die, everything and this is kind of an obvious statement,
everything ceases. But the beauty of that from an investigative
standpoint is that you literally get a freeze frame at
that moment time because the bruise, the contusion is not
going to continue to resolve. It's frozen. It's frozen in
(26:09):
that amount of time. If the body is left preserved,
you can really do a thorough assessment if the body.
You know, if you find a body that's decomposing, which
this is not the case, then those things will be
a little bit tougher to kind of assess. But you're
looking at a bruise that's yellow. You're talking about seven
to eight days maybe nine of post trauma, of post
(26:32):
impact event. Because anytime you have a bruise, there is
an impact that's associated with That's the only way that
you're going to have the presentation of a contusion. What
I think the question this begs is when you look
at the external presentation of the injuries, what critical areas
of the body? Does it overlie? Now, if you look
(26:55):
at say a bruise that someone might have on their
bicep that doesn't have the same level of criticality, say,
for instance, if child has a bruised or blackened eye,
because now you're talking about potential brain injury. Or if
you see somebody has a bruise to their leg, Okay,
maybe their outer thigh, maybe they bumped into a table. Eh.
(27:19):
That can it's certainly painful, and it can tell you
a lot historically. But buddy, let me tell you something.
If you see bruises on the abdomen. Those are specific
impact injuries. How many? How many times in your life?
And in my life too, I'm asking myself the same question.
Have I walked into something with my abdominal muscles leading
the way or my abdomen leading way where I have
(27:41):
a specific impact site on that location anytime? And I'm
not a boxer. You know, if you're a boxer, you
get out of the ring and you're taking body shots,
you know you're going to have contusions, you know, all
of you. These guys don't escape, you know, right, and so,
but those bruises be the same age. So if you
(28:02):
get multiple sites all over the body, you know that
someone has specifically targeted in an area. Say you get
a punch to the admin, punch in the eye, or
any number of other locations, and you begin to assess
those and literally what we do at autopsy is we
in size those specific areas. You just don't look at
(28:24):
it externally. You make a cut into that area and
you can actually appreciate how the thing is resolving and
you have to track this very carefully.
Speaker 2 (28:32):
Day.
Speaker 3 (28:32):
Is that like rings of a tree?
Speaker 1 (28:34):
No, it's not like rings of a tree. That's yeah,
that analogy doesn't necessarily apply here. What it does apply
to more, I think is probably targeting areas. Because let's
just say you've got a bruise. Find the bottom the
right aspect of your right rib cage the last rib anteriorly.
(28:57):
That approximates the area where your liver is, so on
the right side. So if you have a bruise a
contusion on your abdomen approximating in that area. And I'm
in the morgue and I'm looking at this, you know
what I'm going to think. I'm going to think, Well,
it's presenting with a bruise here, It's not an easy
area to bruise. I note this had required a tremendous
(29:19):
amount of impact or velocity. When I open this person's abdomen,
I want to know what the liver looks like, because
you can actually have a contusion to deliver. There's actually
another odd term I think I've mentioned before that forensic
pathologists use. It's called a fracturing of the liver. We
think fracturing with bone. You can and it's truly a laceration.
(29:42):
The liver splits. It's so dense and so heavy, it'll
split and fracture, and so that's seeping blood. And the
other thing you get when you open up the abdomen,
Dave is that many times you'll see the organs, the
abdominal organs, floating in blood or there'll be a pro
sense of blood. It will be clotted, and that also
(30:03):
gives you an idea that something has happened in the
recent past more than likely. So the external injuries that
a person, a child, and in Corey's case, that they
would be presenting with all over their body, those little
points of impact, it runs much deeper, That's what I'm
(30:24):
talking about. It runs much deeper. What you're seeing on
the surface is only it's a very superficial kind of
almost like X marks the spot and a treasure hunt.
When you go beneath the X at that point in time,
that's where you're really going to begin to understand how
vicious an event may have been that would have led
(30:48):
to an otherwise healthy sex year old child's dead.
Speaker 3 (30:51):
Kids.
Speaker 1 (30:52):
Kids, as you well know, kids are very resilient, you know,
I mean kids fall, they take some of the worst.
That a fall that my grandson who's you know five,
we see James is five now he'll be six soon.
A fall that Jamison might take as a five year
old six year old, he's it would kill you, and
(31:13):
I right, it would kill you. And they'll bounce back.
They'll bounce back.
Speaker 2 (31:18):
And that's why when I had to listen to had
to I had to listen to the testimony of the
doctor and getting away from the clinical and just thinking
about a child. I'm telling you, Joe, I had to
stop because the number of bruises, where the bruises were
on his body, and the various stages that they were
in the healing process. It didn't go unnoticed, okay, And
(31:40):
I want to be clear on this that it did
not go unnoticed. But his mother, because of her past
and because she had lost in court, she had continued
to fight for Corey. She had gone back to court
many times and had talked, She had reported the abuse
that she saw. She was the one his mother, Corey's
mom takes him to the doctor on April first, where
(32:01):
the doctor documents all these bruises and injuries. And after that,
because it was attributed to the treadmill incident, his mother,
Corey's mom, Bree, sought custody immediately, an emergency cut because
of these abuses that she could see the boy died
the next day.
Speaker 3 (32:21):
Now at waste.
Speaker 1 (32:23):
Make sure make sure you tell everybody where he died.
Where did he go into rest?
Speaker 3 (32:28):
Okay? Oh, here's the thing to back up. Okay.
Speaker 2 (32:31):
Corey's mom, bri takes him to the doctor on April
the first. Doctor sees these bruises. Yeah, Brianna files with
the state. She files with DCCP. I think is what
it's called in New Jersey. She filed with them right away.
Corey died a day after his mother took him to
the doctor for the treadmill abuse, which was ten days.
Eleven days after the treadmill incident, Brianna Michelo reported the
(32:55):
abuse to DCPP and filed for emergency customs April first.
The request was denied the next day, April the second,
on nine am in the morning, Brianna had to bring
Corey back to his dad. Corey Michelo is able to
get out of the car's nine am, April the second.
He's able to get out of the car, he walks
(33:18):
to his dad's front door and opens the front door
himself and lets himself into the house. Nothing seems out
of the ordinary. He's fine. Later on, a couple hours later,
Brianna gets called from Christopher Gregor asking for Corey's insurance card,
saying he's lethargic, he's throwing up, he's slurring his words,
(33:41):
and I'm going to take him to the hospital. And
so he does. Now he doesn't tell the mother. He
does not tell Brie where he's taking Corey, just taking
her to the hospital. Taking my son to the hospital.
So she's left with calling the area hospitals, Joe trying
to find her son, who she knows is sick. She's
hauling every hospital. Finally, you know what she had to do,
(34:02):
she had to call the police station and say, look,
I'm not the custodian old mother. You know, he's with
his dad, but he's sick, and his dad's stating in
the hospital. But he doesn't tell me where. And that's
when the police tell her, but your son's passed. Now
she drops him off of the house of nine am.
He's fine. Later on that afternoon he has passed away.
(34:26):
And he actually Corey passed away in the hospital. He
was actually in that he was getting a cat scan yep,
and actually had a seizure in the cat scan at
the hospital, surrounded by doctors and nurses and he's right
there and still still he died.
Speaker 3 (34:44):
They could not save his life.
Speaker 1 (34:46):
Nothing they could do. Dave. He is, he is on
that slippery slope, and what it tells me is that
there is ongoing hemorrhage within him. And it's interesting of
note here. You know, he prior to be taken to
the hospital, he awakes from a nap. He realize how
hard it is to get a six year old to
(35:07):
take a nap. It's a herculean task to say, beliefs
it is. But he's taken a nap. If you've got
a kid that's six years old and it's in the
middle of the day like this, particularly a little boy
who's full of energy, he's bouncing around this sort of thing,
he's going to lay down and take a nap like
he's a three year old.
Speaker 2 (35:25):
Old.
Speaker 1 (35:26):
Yeah, feel good. And when he wakes up, Dave, he's slurring.
He's slurring, he is, he's complaining of nausea, symptomology, just
kind of the disorientation and slurring the speech. That tells
me that there's probably some kind of neurological problem going on. Conversely,
it can also indicate that there is a tremendous amount
(35:48):
of internal blood loss going on, and that can arise
from any number of locations. Remember what I was talking
about with the points of impact. And Corey does, in
fact die in treatment room. You know where they're going
to do the CT. And I know, you know what
it's like to go into a CT. It's not as
bad as an MRI, but you know, they're they're loading
you into this this thing. You know, you're laying there
(36:08):
on your back and all of that, and then all
of a sudden and they're talking to you. Ever notice
how they talk to you over the loud speaker.
Speaker 3 (36:14):
Well, you got.
Speaker 1 (36:17):
To keep you from decompensating in there. I always feel
like I'm in a you know, in a torpedo tube anyway,
you know, I don't. You don't like being in that environment.
And look, you got a six year old kid, and
these things are noisy too. He imagined what it's like
to try to get a six year old calm down
and to keep them alert because they have to give
you directives. You're also how hard it is for a
(36:38):
six year old to lay still? Yeah, I know, but
yet they're giving him directives and all of a sudden
day he's not responding. He's not responding to verbal verbal
commands or directives or anything like that. Buddy, he is
going into a cardiac arrest. How many times has this
(36:59):
ever happened in the presence of a clinician, where you've
got a kid that's not suffering from terminal illness and
they're surrounded in a hospital and they go into a
fatal event before your eyes and there's nothing you can
do about it. But in the wake of all of
(37:20):
this and the fact that the police had been looking
into this, it did obviously lead to charges. But just
let me run this down to you real quick, because
I think that it needs to be plainly stated that
when when Corey was autopsied and they begin to assess
(37:45):
those things that you remember, you remember day were, you know,
we were talking about those things that are just under
the surface. This baby had cardiac which means heart and
liver contusions, which means he had sustained impact injuries to
(38:09):
his heart to his liver. There was an inflammatory response,
which means that it wasn't necessarily in the phase that
it had just happened. It had happened days before, okay,
And this was kind of a rollout. He's getting worse
(38:35):
and worse and worse all the way along. And you know,
the final diagnosis for this child was that he had
sustained first off consequences of chronic abuse, not acute. Acute
means suddenly chronic means Dave, ongoing, ongoing, and the entries
(39:02):
that he had sustained. He had blunt force impact of
the chest, the abdomen, Dave with a laceration of his heart.
I don't know what to make of this, but when
I see this case, I think about what he endured.
(39:27):
People talk about how they've been injured in life and
how they've had their heart broken. This child literally died
of a broken heart. I'm Joseph Scott Morgan, and this
is body backs
Host
Joseph Scott Morgan
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