August 19, 2025 • 53 mins
Joseph Scott Morgan gives a master class on Crime Scene Body Examination and Assessment. Professor Morgan offers insight from being on the scene and what is truly important and what needs to be done to insure justice prevails for the person who can no longer speak for themselves. Joseph Scott Morgan and Dave Mack also discuss the shocking truth of what happened at the scene of two of the most high profile crimes of the last 50 years; Trayvon Martin and Jodi Arias victim, Travis Alexander.
Transcribe Highlights
00:00.84 Introduction - Crime Scene
03:10.57 There is only one first time
05:39.41 Every site, every time
09:57.20 Different levels of comfort
15:07.57 First thing, make sure person is dead
19:37.93 Cold from a dead body
25:08.37 Suicide victim wasn't dead
30:31.89 Homicide detectives moving up
35:23.28 Everyone is watching
40:06.88 Want to transport body as if it were still at the scene
45:15.73 Trayvon Martin Autopsy report
50:07.39 Body needs to be examined at scene
52:15.60 Conclusion
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
Quality dams, but Joseph's gotten more. I have this odd habit,
and granted, I'm kind of an odd bird anyway. You know,
who in the right mind would become a death investigator
and spend most of their time around the dead, right,
But I do have this odd habit of whenever I
(00:23):
go to certain locations that I have previously inhabited in
my life, I will look at those locations and I
will base upon my travels in those locations. I'll based
upon cases that I worked and the observations that I make.
(00:46):
My wife has has brought this to my attention on
numerous occasions throughout our married life, because I reflect on
these spots where death occurred, subsequently an investigation occurred, and
these places are marked in time for me. I often wonder,
(01:07):
even in towns I've never been to. I'll drive through
and think about houses and locations, and I think, has
there ever been a death investigation that's been handled there?
Because you know, places hold stories, they hold stories, they
hold on to history, and you never know what you're
going to find when you open any door. And for
(01:30):
me and those that work in the field of death investigation,
they are little surprises around every turn of the knob.
I'm Joseph Scott Morgan and this is body Bags. Yeah, Dave,
(01:51):
I got to tell you, brother. I you know, Kim
and I will go over to Atlanta. We'll go home
to New Orleans, you know, every know, and then to
visit family. But when we do go to Atlanta, she's
brought it to my attention on number of number of
occasions where she'll say, you know, every time we come
(02:13):
over here, you always say I had a homicide there,
suicide there, motor vehicle accident there, or just some kind
of bizarre industrial accent or anything. And that's the way
you kind of mark it out in time and reflectively.
At this point in my in my life when when
I think about these things, I don't so much think
(02:34):
about the dead that were there, because they're gone. I
think about my actions in that space. Did I do
everything I should have done as a death investigator? Was
I thorrow? Was I paying attention to detail? Was I,
as I say, up to snuff on my job? Because
you know, you you reflect on those things, and you know,
(02:58):
you know death is so fine, and you know death
scenes are very final as well. You you know, I
often say that once you cross over a threshold into
a home where death has occurred. You can only cross
over that threshold once for the first time. That's a
bit confusing, maybe, but you can't go back and gather that.
(03:19):
So you have to be prepared when you walk in,
when you're going to do the assessment of the remains
that you find in the house.
Speaker 2 (03:26):
I always think about you driving down the road, kind
of like in Captain America. But as he's on his
way to be turned into Captain America, he's the small,
skinny guy and he's going down the road and he
tells the woman he's with. He says, you know, I
got beat up in that alley way, got beat up
in that stairwell.
Speaker 1 (03:45):
You know.
Speaker 2 (03:45):
He's just pointing out all these different places where events
had happened to him. I think it makes sense that
that's how you go through it, and it does take
you to that next level of did I do these
things right?
Speaker 1 (03:58):
There is.
Speaker 2 (04:01):
In our lifetime a couple of crimes of the Century
trials of the century, one of them of course being
the O. J. Simpson trial, and there was a guy
named Dennis Fung. Dennis Fung collected evidence at the scene
at both at Bundy and Rockingham. He was there at
the scene for Nicole and Iron Goldman and then at
(04:25):
OJ's house, and he collected a lot of this evidence.
And during the Trial of the Century Barry Shck grilled
him really hard about his collection techniques. And my thought
in all of this is that you do only get
one by.
Speaker 1 (04:44):
To the apple. Yes, you do.
Speaker 2 (04:46):
After that, it's all downhill from here. You mess it
up at the beginning. You might set a murderer free.
You approach it like that every minute now you go to.
Speaker 1 (04:57):
Him that that could potentially drove you to sanity if
you did that. What you try to do is just
imagine that you try to stick with a recipe, and
I was. We designed this national national curriculum for death
investigators many years ago, and the kind of theme that
(05:18):
we ran with was every scene, every time, and it
didn't matter. And the old catchphrase was it didn't matter
if you were in Manhattan, Kansas or Manhattan, n yc.
If you stuck to this recipe, these basics along the way,
then it's going to be in your best interest to
(05:39):
do this, because you're not going to stumble if you
just got this kind of But you know, the thing
about it is we're humans. So you you're going to
bring all of your crap that's going on in your
mind and everything else around it into that environment, and
it suddenly becomes a not so pristine procedural at that
(06:01):
point in time because you're influenced by do I have
enough money in the bank to pay my bills this month?
My daughter's got a dance recitle. I really like to
be at all these things are distracting, and so yeah, hey,
and back to den Swung. I'm glad you brought him up.
There's one thing that I always found fascinating about some
(06:22):
of those media images of dentists out there at the scene.
I urge anybody to look at this. He's walking around.
He's wearing a taibek suit and he's got on like things,
got shoe covers on. And what are the type k
suit suit we call bunny suits. Many times there are
those white suits that they're disposable, you zip them up,
(06:44):
and horrible to work in. I mean you lose like
five five pounds of water weight, you know when you
They're horrible. I mean it's just absolutely horrible. And don't
even get me started. I've got friend, I've never done this,
but I've got friends that are investigators that they all
they would do was work meth scenes and they would
have to wear a full a full rig that's different
(07:08):
than the Taveek suit. And they actually had you know,
a respirator a fan at the top of the thing.
And you talk about sweating to death and you're having
to first off, the thing could blow up on you,
and secondly, you're having to pay attention to evidentiary considerations
the hair the dot. Yeah. Yeah, So back to Dennis.
If you see, like there's a couple of those images
where you can see him in we'll say the bunny suit,
(07:31):
you know, that's out there, and the detectives that are
out there are in their street clothes and they're traveling
over the same area. And I'm thinking, what's the point
And there's actually an image of one of the corner
investigators and they're they're pushing, pushing the gurney. I guess
(07:54):
it has to be well, I guess it could be
either uh, well, it could be either one of the victims,
but she has no protection on either, you know, and
they're pushing the scurny, you know, through that area and
that sort of thing. So I don't know, and sometimes
those things can be taken out of context, but always
thought light, you know, every scene, every time. Yeah, it's
(08:15):
good for the goose, is good for the gander. You
apply these techniques at every moment.
Speaker 2 (08:20):
But Joe, what about staying on that very quickly because
that case was so big? Yeah, you know, and even today,
television shows and specials that focus on that crime, whether
it's focusing on OJ Simpson as a person or as
the crime as a double homicide, whatever it is, gets
huge ratings. And there is yet another documentary on Netflix
(08:43):
right now, which is why this is top of mind
for me. But one of the things that took place
show and I wonder how many times you've had to
deal with this at the crime scene because there was media,
there were people standing by looking. I know you have
LOOKI lose at every crime scene.
Speaker 1 (08:57):
Yes you do.
Speaker 2 (08:57):
But the police actually ordered somebody to grab a blanket
from inside the house and spread it over the body
of Nicole Brown Simpson because her body was in a
position where the media could get video of it, and
he didn't want that, so they grab a blanket from
inside the house and cover her body immediately. Is from
(09:21):
inside her home. It could have any number of people's
DNA on it from the standpoint of all the people
who have ever been inside that house, including the guy
who becomes your big suspect O. J.
Speaker 1 (09:33):
Simpson just could And I got to tell you that
same issue arose in Trayvon Martin as well. Wow. Really yeah?
And you know how you treat the body transfer if
you're covering, because look, I mean we got to face it.
I mean people, there are very few people out there
(09:54):
that are let me see, how can I say this.
There's different levels of comfort, psychological comfort. So as a practitioner,
if you're psychologically comfortable with being around a dead body,
you probably want that that's an asset. You're not distracted,
you're not terrified, you're not put off your game at
(10:16):
all because you know you're there to work to death.
But general public are very uncomfortable seeing dead bodies and
they have a real hard time day putting two and
two together. I think, like, why do we leave bodies uncovered?
That seems just lay people, you know, have people laying
(10:37):
in the middle of the road, And yet it does
get to a point many times where's very it becomes disrespectful.
But there's also things that we're thinking about, is like
transfer of evidence and all those sort of things. So
you know, you have to matter because the investigator's perception
is different than the general public that might be. You
know used term lookie Lou, and I love that term,
(10:59):
where they're watching everything that you do and you know
they're there, and I've had people screaming outside the tape
us to cover him up. You're being disrespectful. His mom's
here and you know, or his cousin's here or whatever
it is, and they're screaming back and forth and they
(11:20):
don't have they're caught up in that moment. They don't
really have an understanding of the bigger picture. You know,
we're trying to do this first off without contaminating the
body because the body's pristine at that point, and we
have our own reasons for not covering the body immediately.
But that's where, you know, the assessment of the remains
(11:40):
really comes in. And that's one of the things I
wanted to talk talk about to try to help help
our friends understand why it is that we do what
we do. You know, at a scene, and particularly it's
one thing to assess a body. Dave at at the
morgue in a very protected environment. But that doesn't, in
(12:05):
my opinion at least doesn't have as much value as
that initial assessment that you haven't seen. And again it's
back to a word that you and I use a
lot in its context. When you have a body that's
in the morgue is completely out of context. Okay, you've
got a body in the field. And when I say
in the field, I mean like indoor outdoor scene. You've
(12:26):
got it in context at that point. So you have
to observe the body at that moment to time and
be able to appreciate what may or may not have happened.
(12:51):
Whenever you approach human remains in the field from a
medical lead perspective, there's a way that we have to
go about assessing them that's going to And it's just
understand if you've I urge anybody, if you've never watched
(13:14):
ballroom dancing, it seems like an odd, odd kind of
segue here, but ballroom dancing, watch how the partners move together.
It's quite amazing. You know they know or figure skating
or whatever. And imagine that at a scene you've got
(13:35):
multiple people trying to dance to the same tune and
not bump into each other. And it's very delicate, very
very delicate, you know, because if you're figure skating or
doing pairs, or if you're ballroom dancing, you know, back
to what you said earlier, there's no chance that if
you screw up, you're going to let a killer run
(13:55):
run free. And you know there's no penalty other than
points and maybe your pride. I don't know. I can
neither skate nor ballroom dance. I hope to learn how
to ballroom dance someday, you never know. Kim's been trying
to talk me into it. But I have had to
do a dance at crime scenes where and many times
(14:16):
these spaces are very very tight. Okay, I reflect back
times I've crawled under houses, and you really get to
know the people you're working with because your eyed eye.
If you've ever been in a crawl space in a house,
first off, I don't like going in them because I'm
claust phobic, But then put other people in there, and
(14:36):
you've got a body that's buried beneath the floorboards or
whatever the case might be. And yeah, John Wayne Gacy
was not the first person to do that. By the way,
and it's been done many times after him, and it
was done many times before him. So you have to
work in these tight spaces. You really have to know
what you're doing. And one of the first things that
you do as a medical legal death investigator when you
(14:57):
show up at the scene, even though somebody is telling
you that a subject is deceased, well, you've already formed
that in your mind as you're you know this, this
idea has been put forward, You've been told that they're deceased.
You're the one that's going to have to verify this
(15:17):
and write it down. I'm going to do my own examination.
So there's like, really briefly, there's what we refer to
as the seven cardinal signs of death, and they're very
easy to understand. So number one lack of respiration, And
how can you assess that You look. You can literally
(15:37):
look if you get adjacent to the body and try
to see if their chest is rising and falling. And yes,
I've come across people that actually care carry mirrors in
their bags to see if it will fog up. I've
never done that, but there are people out there that
do it. That's the old you know, that's the old
way of doing it. Lack of detectable pulse and heartbeat.
(15:58):
Now that is something I will do. I will go
with a gloved hand and I will check for a
KARATEID pulse because it's the easy it's for me. I
know that people in the medical field will probably they'll
have their their preference. I've checked for karates. I don't
go for the risk because if I can get exposure,
if I can have access to the neck, it makes
(16:22):
it easier. And generally the detectable pulse that you fill
in the croat, it is much more robust, say, than
trying to manipulate the risk. And particularly with the dead,
if you're an evidentiary consideration, you don't want to move
the arms because it takes them out of there, you know,
in their prisonine state. So yeah, you check for depect
(16:43):
detectable pulse and you know, maybe a heartbeat, check see
if the pupils are fixed, you know, non responsive to light.
Do that. And here's one that many people don't think about.
Our friends that are paramedics certainly know this, and nurses too,
uh is unresponsiveness to painful stimuli where uh, you know,
(17:09):
you do a sternal rub with a gloved hand, you
take your your knuckles and you rub it hard on
stern them and most of the time, you know, there's
a h a response to that. There's also something else,
and again I'm not a big fan of this, but uh,
(17:31):
touching the eyes because if somebody who is alive, they're
going to respond, unless they've got some kind of deep
neurological problem, they're going to they're going to respond. I mean,
you know, anybody's listening to me right now. If you
just try to take the tip of your finger and
touch your eyeball without you know, retracting in some way,
(17:52):
you know, it's pretty amazing that you can do that.
But most people are going to respond to it and say, well,
that sounds kind of odd. Morgan, you go around opening eyes.
You know, most most of the dead that I came
across didn't have their eyes closed. And that's that's a
little thing. You know. I think that everybody assumes that
people close their eyes when they die, and that's not
(18:15):
the case. I'd say it was probably sixty forty for me.
Sixty percent of the cases I worked their eyes were open.
I didn't. You know, people don't always close their eyes
and That's another thing that troubles people that are out
at scenes. I found, particularly with new cops, they'll say,
aren't you going to close their eyes? You know? And
(18:37):
again a Hollywood thing. You know where you take and
you can do this, you know where they'll they'll pull
the eyelids down and that sort of thing because it
makes them. It makes people feel uncomfort Look, I'm uncomfortable
with people staring at me in the first place in
life that are alive. And you can imagine individuals how
uncomfortable it makes them so. And the other thing that
we do is is is checked for cold skin. What
(19:02):
do you mean by cold skin? Well, even if you've
got surgical gloves on, when you put your hand on
the dead and at jack say, I teach my students
because they're young, they don't. Most of them have never
been around death in their life. There's the kind of
cold that mama warns you about when your kid put
(19:23):
a jack, don't put a hat on. That sort of
thing that's cold. And if you've ever had a spouse
that says, come here, I want you to feel something.
They put their hands on your face after you've been outside,
and of course you retract that's a particular kind of
cold that is an environmental cold. But I submit to
(19:47):
you that if you have, if you've never touched the dead,
there's a coolness that the dead have that's unlike anything
else that you'll ever remember. Uh uh, it's it stays
with you. And so we check the body and generally
(20:09):
in the past we've said, cull to the touch, warm
to the touch. The warmer the body is, the higher
the probability is that they haven't been dead that long.
And so, but there is a coolness to the skin
that's perceptible, you know that you can you can appreciate.
And of course the presence of some of our decompositional
factors you know that we've we've talked about with riger
(20:31):
mortis and live or mortise, are they present, because that's
not going to be present in the living. Uh. And
of course over signs of decomposition, you know, if there's
signs of maggot activity, you know, the train has left
station long ago, and so those are those are some
of the basics that we look for.
Speaker 2 (20:50):
Back to riger mortis, Yeah, how quickly does that set in?
And I know that there's not an exact time, but
from the time a person actually breathes their last and
the time that they begin to get stiff to where
you can tell, yeah, how long.
Speaker 1 (21:08):
Heat influences a lot. I've seen it begin to set
in in the small muscles of the face within two hours,
I think is the probably the quickest I've actually seen it.
Now there's something going on at a chemical level. It's
(21:28):
going on, you know, and it's just when is it
going to manifest itself? Right? And that's you know, and
it is a benchmark. It's certainly more reliable. Riger is
actually more more reliable than algar. Algor mortis is a
measurement of body temperature, which is so skew the data
(21:50):
is almost, as far as I'm concerned, is almost worthless.
Riger is a good indicator. I think post warm lividity
is even a better indicator of most mortem interval because
it's completely gravity dependent. Uh, and you see it pretty quickly,
you know. So, but but er, you know, riiger can't
set in, and it's going to set in in the
(22:10):
small muscles and then uh be appreciable. And so it's
happening everywhere simultaneously, you know, the jaw, even the eyelids.
The eyelids little muscles around the eyelids. They develop riger
in there too, and if you really got fone tuned
with it, you can actually there's a resistance when you
try to open the eyelids. So you're going through all
(22:32):
of this to try to understand what the status of
the body is before you ever get ever gone.
Speaker 2 (22:40):
To a scene where they said, Joe, this guy's dead.
He's been, he's gone, and you go over there and
start looking and maybe he's not. But they've been walking
around while they're waiting for you, thinking this guy's dad.
Speaker 1 (22:53):
Yeah, not me. I have colleagues that had that happen.
Actually in Atlanta, a guy cut his wrist in a
warm back and he was sitting up in this bathtub
that was filled with bloody water. It was it was
horrible and as a matter of fact, my colleagues had
gotten there, and this is back when we still took polaroids.
(23:16):
It scenes. They took polaroid photos and thirty five millimeters
of this guy in the bathtub, and a forensic pathologist
that was in training actually went over to the bathtub
to do check for the cardinal signs of death, you know,
which is kind of standard stuff that we do and
went over and touched went to actually check for a
(23:38):
karate because his head was above the water so and
his hands are sitting up on the edge of the
of the bathtub. And this individual noticed that the subject's
hand went up moved responding. Now, the police and the
(23:59):
EMTs had been out there before us, obviously because they
called them, and the old investigator that had companied the
old investigator had accompanied the young doctor out there. The
doctor was in training. This individual told the investigator that
(24:20):
this guy's alive, and the investigator was shocked because this
is not something that happens, you know. You hear all
these stories about people waking up in a body bag,
of people waking up in coolers, and the reason there's
those cases are so shocking is because they rarely have
ever happened, and when they do, it's terrifying, you know,
it's the stuff of nightmares. And this investigator, this old
(24:46):
investigator started chewing ass at that moment Tom and didn't
stop for almost an hour. Relative to the police officers
outside the door, he got in his face like a
Marine Corps drill instructor using a knife, hand and everything,
you know, screaming at him, getting them to start rolling
(25:08):
the ems back out there. The same crew came out.
You know what turned out this was like it was
like at the height of AIDS and they had not
bothered to stick their hands into the bloody water and
their EMT's. Dude, the air EMTs and stories actually got
(25:33):
a happy ending. They extricated guy, took him to the hospital,
sewed his wrist up, hung multiple units of blood on him.
Once he got stabilized, they sent him a psychiatric unit
and he got into treatment after that, survived that he
(25:54):
was that close to it.
Speaker 2 (25:55):
I say, if not for a training, if not for
somebody in training being told to follow the rules after
everybody's already dismissed it, Yeah, if not for that, and
so you kind of credit the person who sent the
trainee over there to check on everything.
Speaker 1 (26:10):
Yeah, yeah, the rules. Yeah yeah, you have to and
you never you know, it's it's an adage to this
the oldest time. You know, don't believe anything you hear
or what you're told. Yeah, he's dead, and that from
that moment time for me, when I would do an
assessment at the scene, I would begin to think about
(26:31):
that that case in particular, because I didn't know what
I was going to walk into you know. Now, I've
had cases over the years where you know, somebody is
of course I've had these, but you go out and
somebody is like, you know, substantially decomposed and you're not
necessarily you know, leaning into the whole, you know, cardinal
(26:52):
signs of death thing at that point in time. But
even with you know, the elderly, when we would go
out to scenes where we have an apparent natural death,
where people say this is a natural death before you
get out there and you're doing the assessment on some
(27:13):
eighty year old memo that's laying in the bed. Well,
what do the elderly always complain of, Well, they complain
of being cold, right, so their skin can be cool
to the touch, right, they go into these deep sleeps
that they're hard to rouse from, you know. And so
I always had that specter in the back. I didn't
want to be the guy that had a body zipped
(27:34):
up in a body bag and then next morning they
pull them out of the cooler. The bag is unzipped
and the person is struggling to breathe. They've been in
a cooler all night long, probably suffering from hypothermia. But
there's in a bag. No, you know, I mean that's
for me, that's the stuff of nightmares. Professionally, Yeah, hey,
let me ask you.
Speaker 2 (27:55):
Yeah, okay, when you get to a crime scene, Joe,
from the very big there is a chain of command
of who is in charge at the scene. Yes, So
when when you arrive, yeah, are you now do you
come in because there is a body that's that's dead,
Do you then become the person in charge of the
(28:18):
scene for right now until the body is gone.
Speaker 1 (28:21):
Yep. As long as the body is there, you run
the scene. And that's that's an old adage and it's
actually written into law and certain and in certain jurisdictions,
it's kind of an understanding. Now, many times you'll have
police departments that will literally wait until the last minute
(28:42):
to call the corner. A lot of that has to
do with distrust. They don't view the corner as being
on the inside of you know what we you and
I have come to refer to as the investigative bubble,
and so they will do everything that they can to
avoid having the corner out there early. However, this is
(29:02):
a problem with that. First off, many of the departments
that you work that you work with when it comes
to homicide investigators. I would there was a period of
time in Atlanta where I would look up at a
homicide scene and there'd be some new kid that's standing there,
and they refer to themselves back then as the Hat Squad.
(29:25):
There used to be a television show where the Hat Squad,
you know, where they would wear these snap brim hats,
and they adopted that, and that was kind of this
sign you know that they're a homicide investigator, and they
were the only ones that wore these hats. Well, every
time I'd look up at a scene for a period
of time, there was a new kid wearing a snap
brim hat. He had no experience at all as a
(29:46):
homicide investigator. So the one constant in the universe, in
the world of death is the investigator of the corner investigator,
because you're always there. You know, we don't change jobs.
We don't move from homicide to burglary to armed robbery.
We don't get a promotion to lieutenant. It's just it's static.
We've got a very tiny rank structure. Chief investigator, senior investigators, investigators,
(30:14):
investigative assistants. In some jurisdictions, Chicago was famous for that
for a while, you know. So our rank structure is
very you know, and we're there to be death investigators.
With police departments, many times you'll have people that will
pass through as homicide detectives and by the time they
(30:34):
get to the end of where they're really good at
being a homicide detective, the department says, Okay, you're going
to be promoted or we're going to move you over
to another place, and you've lost all that knowledge. So
my whole point of this is that we're kind of
the I'm more of a fan of being out there early,
being part of the team. And in Atlanta that was case,
(30:56):
I mean, they would call us out. Really in New
Orleans that was the case. We'd be a part of
the investigator process. But you hear horror stories all over
the place where you know, the police will delay, you know,
in summoning the corner or the emme to come out,
and sometimes that's that's they need to bear that burden rightfully,
(31:19):
you know, because there are people that have not been trained.
They don't know where to put their feet, they don't
know what to do, they don't know they don't know
their place. Because everybody's got a place you know in
the environment. You don't do it by yourself. You can't
do it. You might think you can do it, but
you can't because there's too many moving parts. But you
(31:40):
have a specific job when you go out there. And
for me, it was the assessment of the remains and
trying to determine who they are immediately or get a
clue as to who they are. Might not know definitively
because I've had in cases I don't believe in driver's
licenses for firm ideas as starting place. I trust no
(32:02):
government document that I found with a body, because there
is too easy to be counterfeited. It's too easy. We
had these notorious identical twins in Atlanta that they were
never part of a death investigation, but they would notoriously
and cops would talk about them like it was some
kind of legend. They would swap each other's driver's licenses
(32:25):
all the time and you couldn't tell one from the other.
Teachers had the same experience with identical twins as well.
It's just that that part is in the criminal element.
It was kind of funny, you know when you think
about it, But you know when you begin to kind
of toss us around your mind. You're thinking, oh, wow,
you know, this is kind of it's a place to start,
(32:46):
but you have to know your spot in the pecking
order relative to death investigation and relative to the part
you're going to play when you're assessing a body. And
it's kind of amazing and you know, looking back over time,
and it's not that I'm anything special, it's just that
(33:11):
when it comes time to actually view the body and
assess the body at the scene, everybody that was doing
something else suddenly appears at your shoulder as you're knelt
over the dead body. Yeah, it's a weird thing. I
(33:44):
don't know how many of y'all can identify with this.
Have you ever? Have you ever been like at the
office at your job, either you're working under a car maybe,
or you're working in a bank or maybe I don't know.
I mean what you do. Maybe you're cooking and suddenly
you draw a crowd and people are looking over your
(34:04):
shoulder as you're writing like on a computer and everything's
appearing on screen and everybody's watching. You take that and
translate that into death investigation, because when you're the neo
and you're at at a scene, you're probably knelt over
(34:24):
the body bodies, assuming the bodies on the on the
ground right. You could be either in a house or
out out in the forest or wherever, and you're about
to examine this body. Suddenly it's the old Davis, the
old uh, the old ef Hutting commercial. You know, Younger
people are not going to understand that. Do your favorite,
do yourself a favor, Look up ef Hutting YouTube. Just
(34:47):
go check that out and you'll see what I'm saying.
When he speaks, he's listened. And so it's almost like
it's the final Christmas Christmas present, you know, and everybody
wants to watch you and the wrap because they're sitting
on hens and needles here. They want to know. They
want to try to understand the mechanism of death because
it might not necessarily be obvious. People think it's always obvious.
(35:08):
It's not. They won't see if there's anything visible. And
one of the things you have to fight when you're
doing an assessment, particularly on a homicide scene, is undressing
the body of the scene. It is. It's one of
the biggest no nos you can commit because you're so
(35:28):
you so much want that knowledge at that moment time,
because everything's revolving around the body.
Speaker 2 (35:33):
And why that would be the case, why would you
do that? Well, you can't imagine.
Speaker 1 (35:37):
Yeah, and so with clothing, for instance, let's just say
we've got multiple gunshot ones okay, okay, and clothing. The
fabric of clothing moves differently from a rest of a body. Okay. Famously,
Trayvon Martin the black hoodie. Okay, that black hoodie fell
away from his body when he was shot by George
(36:00):
zimmer Zimmerman. So it fell away. He had an underlying
garment that was underneath that, but that that hoodie was
so big, you know, it fell away from that kid's
body and he's above George Zimmerman. Well, you lose all
relationship between the clothing. And if you disrupt that clothing,
(36:22):
even by unbuttoning a shirt, okay, now you've miss aligned
the buttons. Perhaps, are you going to go back and
re button it? Well, if I have to go back
and rebutton it, technically you're altering evidence at that moment
in tom Wow, because if the if the shirt was
buttoned when you got there, Okay, you photographed that shirt
(36:44):
being buttoned when you got there, before you ever touched
the body. Suddenly in the next images the bodies the
shirt is unbuttoned at the scene and you think that
I know, people, I can I can hear it right now.
People are saying that doesn't matter. Wrong, it does matter
because you people can actually say you're altering evidence at
(37:07):
that point in time. You want to try to do
the assessment at the scene to try to Now. Sometimes
gunshot wounds, stab wounds are very obvious. You can appreciate them.
I've appreciated them dozens of times. Okay that scenes and
been able to, you know, formulate something about range of fire,
the type of instrument that's being used, that sort of stuff.
(37:28):
But you don't many times you'll have these outside voices.
That's why I like to work alone. You have these
outside voices that are saying, well, can you pull that
shirt up a little bit more, or let's pull his
pants down because there's something right here, or you know,
let's take the shoe off. The worst cases are I'm
(37:50):
thinking a couple of cases of impalements that I've had
over the years where you've had this huge object that
is sticking it's sticking out of the body and you
want to first off, people find it offensive to see
something sticking out of a body. I understand completely. But
(38:12):
if somebody's impaled like on a tree branch which I've had,
rebar which I've had, a fence post which I've had,
I'm not going to pull that thing out of the
body at the scene. I've had somebody killed with an arrow,
and as many cowboy pictures as I've watched over the
course of my life, and I've seen some guy snap
(38:33):
the thing off, you know, and pull appreciate out through
the other side dramatically. I'm not taking that out of
the body. I'm not going to adjust the body in
any way. Now. For instance, I had a guy that
was impaled on a center post chain link fencing on
I and the thing hit him square between the eyes,
(38:56):
and he had aluminum post. I guess it's aluminum. It
has run out of the back of his head and
there's a core brain sample back down range of his
head and the car kept moving forward. One of the
most bizarre things I've ever seen. So I've got a
link the pipe hanging out of the back of his head,
I've got it protruding from the front of his head.
(39:16):
What do you do? You know, I'm not going to
go in there and put my foot on the back
of his neck and pull this thing out like I'm
king Arthur, you know. So we had to get a
torch and cut it on the back end in the
front and then go back to where that skin, bone
and brain core were and cut that bit out and
(39:38):
transport all that back to the morgue so that it
could be appreciated. And that's really an over the top example,
but it's happened multiple times. Your idea is to try
to remove things at the scene, or to try to
You don't want to alter anything. You want to try
to trent and this is a crazy concept. You want
(39:58):
to try to tran support the body back almost as
if it were still at the scene. If the body
body is laying on its side and it's got some
kind of uh uh uh and it's got some kind
(40:20):
of of uh of element that is protruding from the body,
I'm not going to lay the body on its back.
I'm putting the body on its side. If the individual
has their hands tied above their head, I'm not going
to break riger. I'm going to put them in a
bag with their hands still over their head, with their
(40:40):
hands bound. I'm not doing that. I'm not going to
take anything. Here's another thing. We don't remove nooses. That's wow,
and that's we will. We will take the noose off.
Remember we've heard about this, and list will detach it
from the hard point. Remember he had that in his
notes about hard points. We'll detach it from the hard point.
(41:05):
Noose is still going in on the person's body because
I don't want the pathologists to be able to see it,
and they will remove it. There's a very particular way
that you remove a noose and it's kind of fascinating.
Maybe I can get into that some other times. But
you want them to be able to see these things
in place the way you saw them, or is it
close to the way you saw them at the scene.
Speaker 2 (41:28):
You mentioned Trayvon Martin and clothing Joe. Yeah, we're going
to go back to that very quickly because I understand
that once you've identified this person is deceased, they're dead
on scene. Freeze this so we actually have everything that
happened in that moment here. It is right here. But
(41:49):
when you have paramedics showing up and they're trying to
determine or save the life, Yeah, they're going to be
ripping you. They're going to be cutting clothing off and
everything else to try life saving measures.
Speaker 1 (42:06):
And I want them to want to I want to
rip my clothes off if I'm in cardiac arrest, right, yep.
Speaker 2 (42:12):
But when you arrive on a scene where the body
is already gone there, the person is dead, and now
we have a scene, it's a static scene. Nothing is changing.
It serves no purpose other than I guess a question
about trying to figure out what actually took place. You know,
I guess I can't end for the life of me, Joe,
(42:33):
And I know I'm just a microphone guy. Why you
would take any clothing off of a dead body at
the scene.
Speaker 1 (42:41):
It's something that has There are very few reasons why
you would do it. And one of the most troubling
things about the Martin case has to do for me forensically,
not the not everything else. It's that's another person's department. Okay,
(43:04):
that's not what I'm interested. I'm interested in his clothing.
So one of the most troubling things, and you know
this is I'm going back, you know, right now, to
back in time to this is when I got my
start on air, was Trayvon Martin and Jody Areas they
were kind of happening simultaneously, and me and Vinnie Politan
(43:26):
and we actually did a demonstration you can still find
it on YouTube of me on my back with a
plastic simulator gun that we used at Jack State. You know,
we had these mock up weapons. I me laying on
my back in the position that Zerman would have been
(43:47):
firing from, and Vinny literally leaning over me and his
tie falling away from his body. And I was doing
this to demonstrate range of fire and how it can
be when you're trying to assess that, and you know,
particularly as it applies to clothing. So enough of my
rambling there to get back to this point. You can
(44:11):
see these online. I urge everybody to go look at it. Okay,
go look at Trayvon Martin's body in the grass before
they put the yellow blanket on him out of the
back of the trolman's car. That many questions were raised about,
you know, thinking about transfer of evidence and all that.
(44:31):
By the way, they let this kid's body lay out
in the rain for a protracted period of time because
in Florida it rains all the time. In the evenings
and that sort of thing. It's like, I'm thinking, you know,
looking back, and I'm thinking, do they not have tents
in Florida? It just didn't make sense to be you know.
Speaker 2 (44:47):
You got those hurry up tents.
Speaker 1 (44:48):
Yeah. Yeah, well you literally got CSI tents. I mean
they had made especially for this purpose. Anyway, So when
you see his body, he's wearing the hoodie okay at
the scene. Well, one of the most confusing things. And
I'm going to read this verbatim just that you have it.
This is actually from doctor Bow's autopsy report, who, by
(45:13):
the way, was later fired. Doctor Bows actually discusses in
the opening paragraph of his autopsy report and what's referred
to as the external examination. This is when Trayvon Martin's
body has gotten back to the morgue. He actually states,
and I'm quoting here, the body is viewed. Are you
(45:34):
ready for this, Dave unclothed at the scene. Yeah. And
here's the thing about it is the line before that
that opens the thing up is that the body is
secured in a blue body bag with medical Examiner seal number.
And he gives a seal number which is kind of
like the seal that you see, they're kind of like
(45:56):
the seals that people put on the back of eighteen wheelers,
you know, the doors, and it's got a stamp on
it with a number to say that nobody's broken into
the thing. We do that on bodybacks too, So you
put a seal on the zippers and you hold them together.
So he's admitting that the body has been sealed with
this thing. He states that when he who is the
(46:23):
pro sector in this case, he is the lead medical
legal investigator. He states in his first sentence, the body
is viewed unclothed. The body is that of a normally
developed blackmail appearing stated age of seventeen. Okay, so he
goes through this external examination. Well, the big question that
(46:43):
we many of us had, and still I don't have
a definitive answer, is what happened to the clothing because
the hoodie is never mentioned in the autopsy report, and
the hoodie is I mean, just think, Dave, how many
times did you live on air mentioned the black hoodie?
You know, I mean it every time the case was covered. Well,
(47:07):
it's not mentioned by the forensic pathologist. And why that
is important is that if that hoodie was removed part
of the job of the forensic pathologist is trying to
understand relationship between particularly gunshot ones, between the distance of muzzle,
distance from the end of the muzzle to the contacting
(47:30):
point on the clothing. All right, and this thing is
all about, uh spatial relationship between Zenerman and and Martin.
If Trayvon Martin is bending over, okay, hoodie is large,
it falls away from his body. Well, it's going to
(47:51):
give the appearance that you know, he was shot at
a distance if you don't have the hoodie. And he
actually goes on to describe in his autopsy report that
this gunshot wound appears to be not a close contact gunshot.
(48:13):
Wom fdl E gets the hoodie, they examine it, don't
know how it routed into their hands, and they say,
this is a contact gunfire event. You know where the
muzzle is actually touching the hoodie. Now, look, I'm not
(48:33):
dragging this around and create some kind of conspiracy. I
mean it's there in the report, and it's one of
those big things that you want to know. How is
it that a body makes it back to the morgue
in a sealed, locked body bag and the pro sector
(48:54):
does not examine the clothing because it's their job to
and the clothing. They remove the clothing at the morgue
and then it's turned over, so his spatial relation that
from a contextual standpoint, the pathologist spatial perception here is
going to be all disrupted because that one key, that barrier,
(49:18):
it's a cloth barrier, could hold a lot of answers,
you know, because you're trying to determine range of fire
along with the body and the story you're being told
and so forth and so on, and so it becomes
very problematic. And again, you know, I think that this
is a good example of when you're doing the examination
(49:43):
on the body, when you're going through through positions of
bodies prone, supine, recumbent, you're talking about the relationship between
the body and any other surrounding evidence. You're talking about
the volume of blood that has been spilled at the scene,
(50:03):
You're you know, you're talking about busted furniture that's lying
adjacent to the scene. If that body in its full
context is not examined and documented at the scene as such,
anything that happens downstream from that is going to be
tainted in some way. And that's why it's so very
important for us, you know, to when we're at the scene.
(50:25):
I've always held to the idea that you know, them
investigators are the eyes and the ears of the forensic
pathologists at the scene, because pathologist is not going to
be at the scene. So what you're documenting at scene
is coming back, you know, to the pathologist so that
they can work out this framework. It's very important, you know,
(50:48):
Like the Martin case, it's so complex. In one sense,
it's complex because of the news media and everything that started.
But actually, from a physical science standpoint, kind of simplistic
thing here, and that one big element of that hoodie
falling away, and the sparity between what the doctor's assessment
(51:11):
was and what fd l E firearms examination was completely different.
I mean, if you just read those stories, if you
read those things separate from one another, doesn't make any sense.
Are we even talking about the same case. You know,
the two observations that we're making here. You know, when
you think about the deposition of you know, of gunpowder
(51:34):
on the hoodie and of course the what you're seeing
manifested on the body by virtue of the defect that's
in the body generated by the gunfire from George Zimmerman's weapon.
That's why, you know, contextually is so important that the
a couple of things that the body that you examined
(51:57):
the scene as well document it everything from position to
you know, changes in the body and even to a
certain extent the trauma that you can document without removing
any clothing or changing the body in any way. But secondly,
(52:20):
and more importantly, I think probably can what you say,
can what you see and document at a scene hold
up in court? Is it valid? Is it actually demonstrative
of those events that marked the end of somebody's life.
(52:43):
I think that that's certainly a point to ponder. Is
certainly something that all investigators going forward need to understand
that because what you do, what you do at a scene,
again back to the old threshold, you can never do it.
The first time you cross that threshold is the last
time you will cross that threshold, at least when it
(53:07):
comes to death. I'm Joseph Scott Morgan, and this is
bodybacks
Quality dams, but Joseph's gotten more. I have this odd habit,
and granted, I'm kind of an odd bird anyway. You know,
who in the right mind would become a death investigator
and spend most of their time around the dead, right,
But I do have this odd habit of whenever I
(00:23):
go to certain locations that I have previously inhabited in
my life, I will look at those locations and I
will base upon my travels in those locations. I'll based
upon cases that I worked and the observations that I make.
(00:46):
My wife has has brought this to my attention on
numerous occasions throughout our married life, because I reflect on
these spots where death occurred, subsequently an investigation occurred, and
these places are marked in time for me. I often wonder,
(01:07):
even in towns I've never been to. I'll drive through
and think about houses and locations, and I think, has
there ever been a death investigation that's been handled there?
Because you know, places hold stories, they hold stories, they
hold on to history, and you never know what you're
going to find when you open any door. And for
(01:30):
me and those that work in the field of death investigation,
they are little surprises around every turn of the knob.
I'm Joseph Scott Morgan and this is body Bags. Yeah, Dave,
(01:51):
I got to tell you, brother. I you know, Kim
and I will go over to Atlanta. We'll go home
to New Orleans, you know, every know, and then to
visit family. But when we do go to Atlanta, she's
brought it to my attention on number of number of
occasions where she'll say, you know, every time we come
(02:13):
over here, you always say I had a homicide there,
suicide there, motor vehicle accident there, or just some kind
of bizarre industrial accent or anything. And that's the way
you kind of mark it out in time and reflectively.
At this point in my in my life when when
I think about these things, I don't so much think
(02:34):
about the dead that were there, because they're gone. I
think about my actions in that space. Did I do
everything I should have done as a death investigator? Was
I thorrow? Was I paying attention to detail? Was I,
as I say, up to snuff on my job? Because
you know, you you reflect on those things, and you know,
(02:58):
you know death is so fine, and you know death
scenes are very final as well. You you know, I
often say that once you cross over a threshold into
a home where death has occurred. You can only cross
over that threshold once for the first time. That's a
bit confusing, maybe, but you can't go back and gather that.
(03:19):
So you have to be prepared when you walk in,
when you're going to do the assessment of the remains
that you find in the house.
Speaker 2 (03:26):
I always think about you driving down the road, kind
of like in Captain America. But as he's on his
way to be turned into Captain America, he's the small,
skinny guy and he's going down the road and he
tells the woman he's with. He says, you know, I
got beat up in that alley way, got beat up
in that stairwell.
Speaker 1 (03:45):
You know.
Speaker 2 (03:45):
He's just pointing out all these different places where events
had happened to him. I think it makes sense that
that's how you go through it, and it does take
you to that next level of did I do these
things right?
Speaker 1 (03:58):
There is.
Speaker 2 (04:01):
In our lifetime a couple of crimes of the Century
trials of the century, one of them of course being
the O. J. Simpson trial, and there was a guy
named Dennis Fung. Dennis Fung collected evidence at the scene
at both at Bundy and Rockingham. He was there at
the scene for Nicole and Iron Goldman and then at
(04:25):
OJ's house, and he collected a lot of this evidence.
And during the Trial of the Century Barry Shck grilled
him really hard about his collection techniques. And my thought
in all of this is that you do only get
one by.
Speaker 1 (04:44):
To the apple. Yes, you do.
Speaker 2 (04:46):
After that, it's all downhill from here. You mess it
up at the beginning. You might set a murderer free.
You approach it like that every minute now you go to.
Speaker 1 (04:57):
Him that that could potentially drove you to sanity if
you did that. What you try to do is just
imagine that you try to stick with a recipe, and
I was. We designed this national national curriculum for death
investigators many years ago, and the kind of theme that
(05:18):
we ran with was every scene, every time, and it
didn't matter. And the old catchphrase was it didn't matter
if you were in Manhattan, Kansas or Manhattan, n yc.
If you stuck to this recipe, these basics along the way,
then it's going to be in your best interest to
(05:39):
do this, because you're not going to stumble if you
just got this kind of But you know, the thing
about it is we're humans. So you you're going to
bring all of your crap that's going on in your
mind and everything else around it into that environment, and
it suddenly becomes a not so pristine procedural at that
(06:01):
point in time because you're influenced by do I have
enough money in the bank to pay my bills this month?
My daughter's got a dance recitle. I really like to
be at all these things are distracting, and so yeah, hey,
and back to den Swung. I'm glad you brought him up.
There's one thing that I always found fascinating about some
(06:22):
of those media images of dentists out there at the scene.
I urge anybody to look at this. He's walking around.
He's wearing a taibek suit and he's got on like things,
got shoe covers on. And what are the type k
suit suit we call bunny suits. Many times there are
those white suits that they're disposable, you zip them up,
(06:44):
and horrible to work in. I mean you lose like
five five pounds of water weight, you know when you
They're horrible. I mean it's just absolutely horrible. And don't
even get me started. I've got friend, I've never done this,
but I've got friends that are investigators that they all
they would do was work meth scenes and they would
have to wear a full a full rig that's different
(07:08):
than the Taveek suit. And they actually had you know,
a respirator a fan at the top of the thing.
And you talk about sweating to death and you're having
to first off, the thing could blow up on you,
and secondly, you're having to pay attention to evidentiary considerations
the hair the dot. Yeah. Yeah, So back to Dennis.
If you see, like there's a couple of those images
where you can see him in we'll say the bunny suit,
(07:31):
you know, that's out there, and the detectives that are
out there are in their street clothes and they're traveling
over the same area. And I'm thinking, what's the point
And there's actually an image of one of the corner
investigators and they're they're pushing, pushing the gurney. I guess
(07:54):
it has to be well, I guess it could be
either uh, well, it could be either one of the victims,
but she has no protection on either, you know, and
they're pushing the scurny, you know, through that area and
that sort of thing. So I don't know, and sometimes
those things can be taken out of context, but always
thought light, you know, every scene, every time. Yeah, it's
(08:15):
good for the goose, is good for the gander. You
apply these techniques at every moment.
Speaker 2 (08:20):
But Joe, what about staying on that very quickly because
that case was so big? Yeah, you know, and even today,
television shows and specials that focus on that crime, whether
it's focusing on OJ Simpson as a person or as
the crime as a double homicide, whatever it is, gets
huge ratings. And there is yet another documentary on Netflix
(08:43):
right now, which is why this is top of mind
for me. But one of the things that took place
show and I wonder how many times you've had to
deal with this at the crime scene because there was media,
there were people standing by looking. I know you have
LOOKI lose at every crime scene.
Speaker 1 (08:57):
Yes you do.
Speaker 2 (08:57):
But the police actually ordered somebody to grab a blanket
from inside the house and spread it over the body
of Nicole Brown Simpson because her body was in a
position where the media could get video of it, and
he didn't want that, so they grab a blanket from
inside the house and cover her body immediately. Is from
(09:21):
inside her home. It could have any number of people's
DNA on it from the standpoint of all the people
who have ever been inside that house, including the guy
who becomes your big suspect O. J.
Speaker 1 (09:33):
Simpson just could And I got to tell you that
same issue arose in Trayvon Martin as well. Wow. Really yeah?
And you know how you treat the body transfer if
you're covering, because look, I mean we got to face it.
I mean people, there are very few people out there
(09:54):
that are let me see, how can I say this.
There's different levels of comfort, psychological comfort. So as a practitioner,
if you're psychologically comfortable with being around a dead body,
you probably want that that's an asset. You're not distracted,
you're not terrified, you're not put off your game at
(10:16):
all because you know you're there to work to death.
But general public are very uncomfortable seeing dead bodies and
they have a real hard time day putting two and
two together. I think, like, why do we leave bodies uncovered?
That seems just lay people, you know, have people laying
(10:37):
in the middle of the road, And yet it does
get to a point many times where's very it becomes disrespectful.
But there's also things that we're thinking about, is like
transfer of evidence and all those sort of things. So
you know, you have to matter because the investigator's perception
is different than the general public that might be. You
know used term lookie Lou, and I love that term,
(10:59):
where they're watching everything that you do and you know
they're there, and I've had people screaming outside the tape
us to cover him up. You're being disrespectful. His mom's
here and you know, or his cousin's here or whatever
it is, and they're screaming back and forth and they
(11:20):
don't have they're caught up in that moment. They don't
really have an understanding of the bigger picture. You know,
we're trying to do this first off without contaminating the
body because the body's pristine at that point, and we
have our own reasons for not covering the body immediately.
But that's where, you know, the assessment of the remains
(11:40):
really comes in. And that's one of the things I
wanted to talk talk about to try to help help
our friends understand why it is that we do what
we do. You know, at a scene, and particularly it's
one thing to assess a body. Dave at at the
morgue in a very protected environment. But that doesn't, in
(12:05):
my opinion at least doesn't have as much value as
that initial assessment that you haven't seen. And again it's
back to a word that you and I use a
lot in its context. When you have a body that's
in the morgue is completely out of context. Okay, you've
got a body in the field. And when I say
in the field, I mean like indoor outdoor scene. You've
(12:26):
got it in context at that point. So you have
to observe the body at that moment to time and
be able to appreciate what may or may not have happened.
(12:51):
Whenever you approach human remains in the field from a
medical lead perspective, there's a way that we have to
go about assessing them that's going to And it's just
understand if you've I urge anybody, if you've never watched
(13:14):
ballroom dancing, it seems like an odd, odd kind of
segue here, but ballroom dancing, watch how the partners move together.
It's quite amazing. You know they know or figure skating
or whatever. And imagine that at a scene you've got
(13:35):
multiple people trying to dance to the same tune and
not bump into each other. And it's very delicate, very
very delicate, you know, because if you're figure skating or
doing pairs, or if you're ballroom dancing, you know, back
to what you said earlier, there's no chance that if
you screw up, you're going to let a killer run
(13:55):
run free. And you know there's no penalty other than
points and maybe your pride. I don't know. I can
neither skate nor ballroom dance. I hope to learn how
to ballroom dance someday, you never know. Kim's been trying
to talk me into it. But I have had to
do a dance at crime scenes where and many times
(14:16):
these spaces are very very tight. Okay, I reflect back
times I've crawled under houses, and you really get to
know the people you're working with because your eyed eye.
If you've ever been in a crawl space in a house,
first off, I don't like going in them because I'm
claust phobic, But then put other people in there, and
(14:36):
you've got a body that's buried beneath the floorboards or
whatever the case might be. And yeah, John Wayne Gacy
was not the first person to do that. By the way,
and it's been done many times after him, and it
was done many times before him. So you have to
work in these tight spaces. You really have to know
what you're doing. And one of the first things that
you do as a medical legal death investigator when you
(14:57):
show up at the scene, even though somebody is telling
you that a subject is deceased, well, you've already formed
that in your mind as you're you know this, this
idea has been put forward, You've been told that they're deceased.
You're the one that's going to have to verify this
(15:17):
and write it down. I'm going to do my own examination.
So there's like, really briefly, there's what we refer to
as the seven cardinal signs of death, and they're very
easy to understand. So number one lack of respiration, And
how can you assess that You look. You can literally
(15:37):
look if you get adjacent to the body and try
to see if their chest is rising and falling. And yes,
I've come across people that actually care carry mirrors in
their bags to see if it will fog up. I've
never done that, but there are people out there that
do it. That's the old you know, that's the old
way of doing it. Lack of detectable pulse and heartbeat.
(15:58):
Now that is something I will do. I will go
with a gloved hand and I will check for a
KARATEID pulse because it's the easy it's for me. I
know that people in the medical field will probably they'll
have their their preference. I've checked for karates. I don't
go for the risk because if I can get exposure,
if I can have access to the neck, it makes
(16:22):
it easier. And generally the detectable pulse that you fill
in the croat, it is much more robust, say, than
trying to manipulate the risk. And particularly with the dead,
if you're an evidentiary consideration, you don't want to move
the arms because it takes them out of there, you know,
in their prisonine state. So yeah, you check for depect
(16:43):
detectable pulse and you know, maybe a heartbeat, check see
if the pupils are fixed, you know, non responsive to light.
Do that. And here's one that many people don't think about.
Our friends that are paramedics certainly know this, and nurses too,
uh is unresponsiveness to painful stimuli where uh, you know,
(17:09):
you do a sternal rub with a gloved hand, you
take your your knuckles and you rub it hard on
stern them and most of the time, you know, there's
a h a response to that. There's also something else,
and again I'm not a big fan of this, but uh,
(17:31):
touching the eyes because if somebody who is alive, they're
going to respond, unless they've got some kind of deep
neurological problem, they're going to they're going to respond. I mean,
you know, anybody's listening to me right now. If you
just try to take the tip of your finger and
touch your eyeball without you know, retracting in some way,
(17:52):
you know, it's pretty amazing that you can do that.
But most people are going to respond to it and say, well,
that sounds kind of odd. Morgan, you go around opening eyes.
You know, most most of the dead that I came
across didn't have their eyes closed. And that's that's a
little thing. You know. I think that everybody assumes that
people close their eyes when they die, and that's not
(18:15):
the case. I'd say it was probably sixty forty for me.
Sixty percent of the cases I worked their eyes were open.
I didn't. You know, people don't always close their eyes
and That's another thing that troubles people that are out
at scenes. I found, particularly with new cops, they'll say,
aren't you going to close their eyes? You know? And
(18:37):
again a Hollywood thing. You know where you take and
you can do this, you know where they'll they'll pull
the eyelids down and that sort of thing because it
makes them. It makes people feel uncomfort Look, I'm uncomfortable
with people staring at me in the first place in
life that are alive. And you can imagine individuals how
uncomfortable it makes them so. And the other thing that
we do is is is checked for cold skin. What
(19:02):
do you mean by cold skin? Well, even if you've
got surgical gloves on, when you put your hand on
the dead and at jack say, I teach my students
because they're young, they don't. Most of them have never
been around death in their life. There's the kind of
cold that mama warns you about when your kid put
(19:23):
a jack, don't put a hat on. That sort of
thing that's cold. And if you've ever had a spouse
that says, come here, I want you to feel something.
They put their hands on your face after you've been outside,
and of course you retract that's a particular kind of
cold that is an environmental cold. But I submit to
(19:47):
you that if you have, if you've never touched the dead,
there's a coolness that the dead have that's unlike anything
else that you'll ever remember. Uh uh, it's it stays
with you. And so we check the body and generally
(20:09):
in the past we've said, cull to the touch, warm
to the touch. The warmer the body is, the higher
the probability is that they haven't been dead that long.
And so, but there is a coolness to the skin
that's perceptible, you know that you can you can appreciate.
And of course the presence of some of our decompositional
factors you know that we've we've talked about with riger
(20:31):
mortis and live or mortise, are they present, because that's
not going to be present in the living. Uh. And
of course over signs of decomposition, you know, if there's
signs of maggot activity, you know, the train has left
station long ago, and so those are those are some
of the basics that we look for.
Speaker 2 (20:50):
Back to riger mortis, Yeah, how quickly does that set in?
And I know that there's not an exact time, but
from the time a person actually breathes their last and
the time that they begin to get stiff to where
you can tell, yeah, how long.
Speaker 1 (21:08):
Heat influences a lot. I've seen it begin to set
in in the small muscles of the face within two hours,
I think is the probably the quickest I've actually seen it.
Now there's something going on at a chemical level. It's
(21:28):
going on, you know, and it's just when is it
going to manifest itself? Right? And that's you know, and
it is a benchmark. It's certainly more reliable. Riger is
actually more more reliable than algar. Algor mortis is a
measurement of body temperature, which is so skew the data
(21:50):
is almost, as far as I'm concerned, is almost worthless.
Riger is a good indicator. I think post warm lividity
is even a better indicator of most mortem interval because
it's completely gravity dependent. Uh, and you see it pretty quickly,
you know. So, but but er, you know, riiger can't
set in, and it's going to set in in the
(22:10):
small muscles and then uh be appreciable. And so it's
happening everywhere simultaneously, you know, the jaw, even the eyelids.
The eyelids little muscles around the eyelids. They develop riger
in there too, and if you really got fone tuned
with it, you can actually there's a resistance when you
try to open the eyelids. So you're going through all
(22:32):
of this to try to understand what the status of
the body is before you ever get ever gone.
Speaker 2 (22:40):
To a scene where they said, Joe, this guy's dead.
He's been, he's gone, and you go over there and
start looking and maybe he's not. But they've been walking
around while they're waiting for you, thinking this guy's dad.
Speaker 1 (22:53):
Yeah, not me. I have colleagues that had that happen.
Actually in Atlanta, a guy cut his wrist in a
warm back and he was sitting up in this bathtub
that was filled with bloody water. It was it was
horrible and as a matter of fact, my colleagues had
gotten there, and this is back when we still took polaroids.
(23:16):
It scenes. They took polaroid photos and thirty five millimeters
of this guy in the bathtub, and a forensic pathologist
that was in training actually went over to the bathtub
to do check for the cardinal signs of death, you know,
which is kind of standard stuff that we do and
went over and touched went to actually check for a
(23:38):
karate because his head was above the water so and
his hands are sitting up on the edge of the
of the bathtub. And this individual noticed that the subject's
hand went up moved responding. Now, the police and the
(23:59):
EMTs had been out there before us, obviously because they
called them, and the old investigator that had companied the
old investigator had accompanied the young doctor out there. The
doctor was in training. This individual told the investigator that
(24:20):
this guy's alive, and the investigator was shocked because this
is not something that happens, you know. You hear all
these stories about people waking up in a body bag,
of people waking up in coolers, and the reason there's
those cases are so shocking is because they rarely have
ever happened, and when they do, it's terrifying, you know,
it's the stuff of nightmares. And this investigator, this old
(24:46):
investigator started chewing ass at that moment Tom and didn't
stop for almost an hour. Relative to the police officers
outside the door, he got in his face like a
Marine Corps drill instructor using a knife, hand and everything,
you know, screaming at him, getting them to start rolling
(25:08):
the ems back out there. The same crew came out.
You know what turned out this was like it was
like at the height of AIDS and they had not
bothered to stick their hands into the bloody water and
their EMT's. Dude, the air EMTs and stories actually got
(25:33):
a happy ending. They extricated guy, took him to the hospital,
sewed his wrist up, hung multiple units of blood on him.
Once he got stabilized, they sent him a psychiatric unit
and he got into treatment after that, survived that he
(25:54):
was that close to it.
Speaker 2 (25:55):
I say, if not for a training, if not for
somebody in training being told to follow the rules after
everybody's already dismissed it, Yeah, if not for that, and
so you kind of credit the person who sent the
trainee over there to check on everything.
Speaker 1 (26:10):
Yeah, yeah, the rules. Yeah yeah, you have to and
you never you know, it's it's an adage to this
the oldest time. You know, don't believe anything you hear
or what you're told. Yeah, he's dead, and that from
that moment time for me, when I would do an
assessment at the scene, I would begin to think about
(26:31):
that that case in particular, because I didn't know what
I was going to walk into you know. Now, I've
had cases over the years where you know, somebody is
of course I've had these, but you go out and
somebody is like, you know, substantially decomposed and you're not
necessarily you know, leaning into the whole, you know, cardinal
(26:52):
signs of death thing at that point in time. But
even with you know, the elderly, when we would go
out to scenes where we have an apparent natural death,
where people say this is a natural death before you
get out there and you're doing the assessment on some
(27:13):
eighty year old memo that's laying in the bed. Well,
what do the elderly always complain of, Well, they complain
of being cold, right, so their skin can be cool
to the touch, right, they go into these deep sleeps
that they're hard to rouse from, you know. And so
I always had that specter in the back. I didn't
want to be the guy that had a body zipped
(27:34):
up in a body bag and then next morning they
pull them out of the cooler. The bag is unzipped
and the person is struggling to breathe. They've been in
a cooler all night long, probably suffering from hypothermia. But
there's in a bag. No, you know, I mean that's
for me, that's the stuff of nightmares. Professionally, Yeah, hey,
let me ask you.
Speaker 2 (27:55):
Yeah, okay, when you get to a crime scene, Joe,
from the very big there is a chain of command
of who is in charge at the scene. Yes, So
when when you arrive, yeah, are you now do you
come in because there is a body that's that's dead,
Do you then become the person in charge of the
(28:18):
scene for right now until the body is gone.
Speaker 1 (28:21):
Yep. As long as the body is there, you run
the scene. And that's that's an old adage and it's
actually written into law and certain and in certain jurisdictions,
it's kind of an understanding. Now, many times you'll have
police departments that will literally wait until the last minute
(28:42):
to call the corner. A lot of that has to
do with distrust. They don't view the corner as being
on the inside of you know what we you and
I have come to refer to as the investigative bubble,
and so they will do everything that they can to
avoid having the corner out there early. However, this is
(29:02):
a problem with that. First off, many of the departments
that you work that you work with when it comes
to homicide investigators. I would there was a period of
time in Atlanta where I would look up at a
homicide scene and there'd be some new kid that's standing there,
and they refer to themselves back then as the Hat Squad.
(29:25):
There used to be a television show where the Hat Squad,
you know, where they would wear these snap brim hats,
and they adopted that, and that was kind of this
sign you know that they're a homicide investigator, and they
were the only ones that wore these hats. Well, every
time I'd look up at a scene for a period
of time, there was a new kid wearing a snap
brim hat. He had no experience at all as a
(29:46):
homicide investigator. So the one constant in the universe, in
the world of death is the investigator of the corner investigator,
because you're always there. You know, we don't change jobs.
We don't move from homicide to burglary to armed robbery.
We don't get a promotion to lieutenant. It's just it's static.
We've got a very tiny rank structure. Chief investigator, senior investigators, investigators,
(30:14):
investigative assistants. In some jurisdictions, Chicago was famous for that
for a while, you know. So our rank structure is
very you know, and we're there to be death investigators.
With police departments, many times you'll have people that will
pass through as homicide detectives and by the time they
(30:34):
get to the end of where they're really good at
being a homicide detective, the department says, Okay, you're going
to be promoted or we're going to move you over
to another place, and you've lost all that knowledge. So
my whole point of this is that we're kind of
the I'm more of a fan of being out there early,
being part of the team. And in Atlanta that was case,
(30:56):
I mean, they would call us out. Really in New
Orleans that was the case. We'd be a part of
the investigator process. But you hear horror stories all over
the place where you know, the police will delay, you know,
in summoning the corner or the emme to come out,
and sometimes that's that's they need to bear that burden rightfully,
(31:19):
you know, because there are people that have not been trained.
They don't know where to put their feet, they don't
know what to do, they don't know they don't know
their place. Because everybody's got a place you know in
the environment. You don't do it by yourself. You can't
do it. You might think you can do it, but
you can't because there's too many moving parts. But you
(31:40):
have a specific job when you go out there. And
for me, it was the assessment of the remains and
trying to determine who they are immediately or get a
clue as to who they are. Might not know definitively
because I've had in cases I don't believe in driver's
licenses for firm ideas as starting place. I trust no
(32:02):
government document that I found with a body, because there
is too easy to be counterfeited. It's too easy. We
had these notorious identical twins in Atlanta that they were
never part of a death investigation, but they would notoriously
and cops would talk about them like it was some
kind of legend. They would swap each other's driver's licenses
(32:25):
all the time and you couldn't tell one from the other.
Teachers had the same experience with identical twins as well.
It's just that that part is in the criminal element.
It was kind of funny, you know when you think
about it, But you know when you begin to kind
of toss us around your mind. You're thinking, oh, wow,
you know, this is kind of it's a place to start,
(32:46):
but you have to know your spot in the pecking
order relative to death investigation and relative to the part
you're going to play when you're assessing a body. And
it's kind of amazing and you know, looking back over time,
and it's not that I'm anything special, it's just that
(33:11):
when it comes time to actually view the body and
assess the body at the scene, everybody that was doing
something else suddenly appears at your shoulder as you're knelt
over the dead body. Yeah, it's a weird thing. I
(33:44):
don't know how many of y'all can identify with this.
Have you ever? Have you ever been like at the
office at your job, either you're working under a car maybe,
or you're working in a bank or maybe I don't know.
I mean what you do. Maybe you're cooking and suddenly
you draw a crowd and people are looking over your
(34:04):
shoulder as you're writing like on a computer and everything's
appearing on screen and everybody's watching. You take that and
translate that into death investigation, because when you're the neo
and you're at at a scene, you're probably knelt over
(34:24):
the body bodies, assuming the bodies on the on the
ground right. You could be either in a house or
out out in the forest or wherever, and you're about
to examine this body. Suddenly it's the old Davis, the
old uh, the old ef Hutting commercial. You know, Younger
people are not going to understand that. Do your favorite,
do yourself a favor, Look up ef Hutting YouTube. Just
(34:47):
go check that out and you'll see what I'm saying.
When he speaks, he's listened. And so it's almost like
it's the final Christmas Christmas present, you know, and everybody
wants to watch you and the wrap because they're sitting
on hens and needles here. They want to know. They
want to try to understand the mechanism of death because
it might not necessarily be obvious. People think it's always obvious.
(35:08):
It's not. They won't see if there's anything visible. And
one of the things you have to fight when you're
doing an assessment, particularly on a homicide scene, is undressing
the body of the scene. It is. It's one of
the biggest no nos you can commit because you're so
(35:28):
you so much want that knowledge at that moment time,
because everything's revolving around the body.
Speaker 2 (35:33):
And why that would be the case, why would you
do that? Well, you can't imagine.
Speaker 1 (35:37):
Yeah, and so with clothing, for instance, let's just say
we've got multiple gunshot ones okay, okay, and clothing. The
fabric of clothing moves differently from a rest of a body. Okay. Famously,
Trayvon Martin the black hoodie. Okay, that black hoodie fell
away from his body when he was shot by George
(36:00):
zimmer Zimmerman. So it fell away. He had an underlying
garment that was underneath that, but that that hoodie was
so big, you know, it fell away from that kid's
body and he's above George Zimmerman. Well, you lose all
relationship between the clothing. And if you disrupt that clothing,
(36:22):
even by unbuttoning a shirt, okay, now you've miss aligned
the buttons. Perhaps, are you going to go back and
re button it? Well, if I have to go back
and rebutton it, technically you're altering evidence at that moment
in tom Wow, because if the if the shirt was
buttoned when you got there, Okay, you photographed that shirt
(36:44):
being buttoned when you got there, before you ever touched
the body. Suddenly in the next images the bodies the
shirt is unbuttoned at the scene and you think that
I know, people, I can I can hear it right now.
People are saying that doesn't matter. Wrong, it does matter
because you people can actually say you're altering evidence at
(37:07):
that point in time. You want to try to do
the assessment at the scene to try to Now. Sometimes
gunshot wounds, stab wounds are very obvious. You can appreciate them.
I've appreciated them dozens of times. Okay that scenes and
been able to, you know, formulate something about range of fire,
the type of instrument that's being used, that sort of stuff.
(37:28):
But you don't many times you'll have these outside voices.
That's why I like to work alone. You have these
outside voices that are saying, well, can you pull that
shirt up a little bit more, or let's pull his
pants down because there's something right here, or you know,
let's take the shoe off. The worst cases are I'm
(37:50):
thinking a couple of cases of impalements that I've had
over the years where you've had this huge object that
is sticking it's sticking out of the body and you
want to first off, people find it offensive to see
something sticking out of a body. I understand completely. But
(38:12):
if somebody's impaled like on a tree branch which I've had,
rebar which I've had, a fence post which I've had,
I'm not going to pull that thing out of the
body at the scene. I've had somebody killed with an arrow,
and as many cowboy pictures as I've watched over the
course of my life, and I've seen some guy snap
(38:33):
the thing off, you know, and pull appreciate out through
the other side dramatically. I'm not taking that out of
the body. I'm not going to adjust the body in
any way. Now. For instance, I had a guy that
was impaled on a center post chain link fencing on
I and the thing hit him square between the eyes,
(38:56):
and he had aluminum post. I guess it's aluminum. It
has run out of the back of his head and
there's a core brain sample back down range of his
head and the car kept moving forward. One of the
most bizarre things I've ever seen. So I've got a
link the pipe hanging out of the back of his head,
I've got it protruding from the front of his head.
(39:16):
What do you do? You know, I'm not going to
go in there and put my foot on the back
of his neck and pull this thing out like I'm
king Arthur, you know. So we had to get a
torch and cut it on the back end in the
front and then go back to where that skin, bone
and brain core were and cut that bit out and
(39:38):
transport all that back to the morgue so that it
could be appreciated. And that's really an over the top example,
but it's happened multiple times. Your idea is to try
to remove things at the scene, or to try to
You don't want to alter anything. You want to try
to trent and this is a crazy concept. You want
(39:58):
to try to tran support the body back almost as
if it were still at the scene. If the body
body is laying on its side and it's got some
kind of uh uh uh and it's got some kind
(40:20):
of of uh of element that is protruding from the body,
I'm not going to lay the body on its back.
I'm putting the body on its side. If the individual
has their hands tied above their head, I'm not going
to break riger. I'm going to put them in a
bag with their hands still over their head, with their
(40:40):
hands bound. I'm not doing that. I'm not going to
take anything. Here's another thing. We don't remove nooses. That's wow,
and that's we will. We will take the noose off.
Remember we've heard about this, and list will detach it
from the hard point. Remember he had that in his
notes about hard points. We'll detach it from the hard point.
(41:05):
Noose is still going in on the person's body because
I don't want the pathologists to be able to see it,
and they will remove it. There's a very particular way
that you remove a noose and it's kind of fascinating.
Maybe I can get into that some other times. But
you want them to be able to see these things
in place the way you saw them, or is it
close to the way you saw them at the scene.
Speaker 2 (41:28):
You mentioned Trayvon Martin and clothing Joe. Yeah, we're going
to go back to that very quickly because I understand
that once you've identified this person is deceased, they're dead
on scene. Freeze this so we actually have everything that
happened in that moment here. It is right here. But
(41:49):
when you have paramedics showing up and they're trying to
determine or save the life, Yeah, they're going to be
ripping you. They're going to be cutting clothing off and
everything else to try life saving measures.
Speaker 1 (42:06):
And I want them to want to I want to
rip my clothes off if I'm in cardiac arrest, right, yep.
Speaker 2 (42:12):
But when you arrive on a scene where the body
is already gone there, the person is dead, and now
we have a scene, it's a static scene. Nothing is changing.
It serves no purpose other than I guess a question
about trying to figure out what actually took place. You know,
I guess I can't end for the life of me, Joe,
(42:33):
And I know I'm just a microphone guy. Why you
would take any clothing off of a dead body at
the scene.
Speaker 1 (42:41):
It's something that has There are very few reasons why
you would do it. And one of the most troubling
things about the Martin case has to do for me forensically,
not the not everything else. It's that's another person's department. Okay,
(43:04):
that's not what I'm interested. I'm interested in his clothing.
So one of the most troubling things, and you know
this is I'm going back, you know, right now, to
back in time to this is when I got my
start on air, was Trayvon Martin and Jody Areas they
were kind of happening simultaneously, and me and Vinnie Politan
(43:26):
and we actually did a demonstration you can still find
it on YouTube of me on my back with a
plastic simulator gun that we used at Jack State. You know,
we had these mock up weapons. I me laying on
my back in the position that Zerman would have been
(43:47):
firing from, and Vinny literally leaning over me and his
tie falling away from his body. And I was doing
this to demonstrate range of fire and how it can
be when you're trying to assess that, and you know,
particularly as it applies to clothing. So enough of my
rambling there to get back to this point. You can
(44:11):
see these online. I urge everybody to go look at it. Okay,
go look at Trayvon Martin's body in the grass before
they put the yellow blanket on him out of the
back of the trolman's car. That many questions were raised about,
you know, thinking about transfer of evidence and all that.
(44:31):
By the way, they let this kid's body lay out
in the rain for a protracted period of time because
in Florida it rains all the time. In the evenings
and that sort of thing. It's like, I'm thinking, you know,
looking back, and I'm thinking, do they not have tents
in Florida? It just didn't make sense to be you know.
Speaker 2 (44:47):
You got those hurry up tents.
Speaker 1 (44:48):
Yeah. Yeah, well you literally got CSI tents. I mean
they had made especially for this purpose. Anyway, So when
you see his body, he's wearing the hoodie okay at
the scene. Well, one of the most confusing things. And
I'm going to read this verbatim just that you have it.
This is actually from doctor Bow's autopsy report, who, by
(45:13):
the way, was later fired. Doctor Bows actually discusses in
the opening paragraph of his autopsy report and what's referred
to as the external examination. This is when Trayvon Martin's
body has gotten back to the morgue. He actually states,
and I'm quoting here, the body is viewed. Are you
(45:34):
ready for this, Dave unclothed at the scene. Yeah. And
here's the thing about it is the line before that
that opens the thing up is that the body is
secured in a blue body bag with medical Examiner seal number.
And he gives a seal number which is kind of
like the seal that you see, they're kind of like
(45:56):
the seals that people put on the back of eighteen wheelers,
you know, the doors, and it's got a stamp on
it with a number to say that nobody's broken into
the thing. We do that on bodybacks too, So you
put a seal on the zippers and you hold them together.
So he's admitting that the body has been sealed with
this thing. He states that when he who is the
(46:23):
pro sector in this case, he is the lead medical
legal investigator. He states in his first sentence, the body
is viewed unclothed. The body is that of a normally
developed blackmail appearing stated age of seventeen. Okay, so he
goes through this external examination. Well, the big question that
(46:43):
we many of us had, and still I don't have
a definitive answer, is what happened to the clothing because
the hoodie is never mentioned in the autopsy report, and
the hoodie is I mean, just think, Dave, how many
times did you live on air mentioned the black hoodie?
You know, I mean it every time the case was covered. Well,
(47:07):
it's not mentioned by the forensic pathologist. And why that
is important is that if that hoodie was removed part
of the job of the forensic pathologist is trying to
understand relationship between particularly gunshot ones, between the distance of muzzle,
distance from the end of the muzzle to the contacting
(47:30):
point on the clothing. All right, and this thing is
all about, uh spatial relationship between Zenerman and and Martin.
If Trayvon Martin is bending over, okay, hoodie is large,
it falls away from his body. Well, it's going to
(47:51):
give the appearance that you know, he was shot at
a distance if you don't have the hoodie. And he
actually goes on to describe in his autopsy report that
this gunshot wound appears to be not a close contact gunshot.
(48:13):
Wom fdl E gets the hoodie, they examine it, don't
know how it routed into their hands, and they say,
this is a contact gunfire event. You know where the
muzzle is actually touching the hoodie. Now, look, I'm not
(48:33):
dragging this around and create some kind of conspiracy. I
mean it's there in the report, and it's one of
those big things that you want to know. How is
it that a body makes it back to the morgue
in a sealed, locked body bag and the pro sector
(48:54):
does not examine the clothing because it's their job to
and the clothing. They remove the clothing at the morgue
and then it's turned over, so his spatial relation that
from a contextual standpoint, the pathologist spatial perception here is
going to be all disrupted because that one key, that barrier,
(49:18):
it's a cloth barrier, could hold a lot of answers,
you know, because you're trying to determine range of fire
along with the body and the story you're being told
and so forth and so on, and so it becomes
very problematic. And again, you know, I think that this
is a good example of when you're doing the examination
(49:43):
on the body, when you're going through through positions of
bodies prone, supine, recumbent, you're talking about the relationship between
the body and any other surrounding evidence. You're talking about
the volume of blood that has been spilled at the scene,
(50:03):
You're you know, you're talking about busted furniture that's lying
adjacent to the scene. If that body in its full
context is not examined and documented at the scene as such,
anything that happens downstream from that is going to be
tainted in some way. And that's why it's so very
important for us, you know, to when we're at the scene.
(50:25):
I've always held to the idea that you know, them
investigators are the eyes and the ears of the forensic
pathologists at the scene, because pathologist is not going to
be at the scene. So what you're documenting at scene
is coming back, you know, to the pathologist so that
they can work out this framework. It's very important, you know,
(50:48):
Like the Martin case, it's so complex. In one sense,
it's complex because of the news media and everything that started.
But actually, from a physical science standpoint, kind of simplistic
thing here, and that one big element of that hoodie
falling away, and the sparity between what the doctor's assessment
(51:11):
was and what fd l E firearms examination was completely different.
I mean, if you just read those stories, if you
read those things separate from one another, doesn't make any sense.
Are we even talking about the same case. You know,
the two observations that we're making here. You know, when
you think about the deposition of you know, of gunpowder
(51:34):
on the hoodie and of course the what you're seeing
manifested on the body by virtue of the defect that's
in the body generated by the gunfire from George Zimmerman's weapon.
That's why, you know, contextually is so important that the
a couple of things that the body that you examined
(51:57):
the scene as well document it everything from position to
you know, changes in the body and even to a
certain extent the trauma that you can document without removing
any clothing or changing the body in any way. But secondly,
(52:20):
and more importantly, I think probably can what you say,
can what you see and document at a scene hold
up in court? Is it valid? Is it actually demonstrative
of those events that marked the end of somebody's life.
(52:43):
I think that that's certainly a point to ponder. Is
certainly something that all investigators going forward need to understand
that because what you do, what you do at a scene,
again back to the old threshold, you can never do it.
The first time you cross that threshold is the last
time you will cross that threshold, at least when it
(53:07):
comes to death. I'm Joseph Scott Morgan, and this is
bodybacks
Host
Joseph Scott Morgan
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