Mayhem in the Morgue | Alcohol, Meth, or Showing Off for Women?

Content Warning: This episode contains graphic descriptions of fatal injuries and autopsy findings related to a fireworks-related death. If you’re sensitive to detailed accounts of trauma, please proceed with caution.

 

What happens when alcohol, bravado, and high-powered explosives mix? In this explosive episode of Mayhem in the Morgue, Chief Medical Examiner Dr. Kendall Crowns breaks down a July 4th case that began with fireworks and ended in fatal blunt force trauma. What seemed like a freak accident soon turned into a full-blown forensic experiment, complete with shattered ribs, broken equipment, and one very disgruntled physicist.

 

Highlights

• (0:00) Welcome to Mayhem in the Morgue with Dr. Kendall Crowns
• (0:15) The fatal trifecta: alcohol, meth, or women?
• (1:00) Fireworks 101 — and why they don’t belong on your chest
• (2:00) A party turns tragic
• (2:30) Autopsy reveal devastating internal injuries
• (3:30) The physicist with a luggage scale
• (4:30) Broken scales slow-mo failures and scientific dead ends
• (5:00) Enter Bonnie: the PhD student with the right tools
• (6:15) Blistered thumbs and the final answer — 90mph to the chest
• (7:00) The final cause: intoxication, bravado, and a deadly decision

 

About the Host: Dr. Kendall Crowns

Dr. Crowns is the Chief Medical Examiner for Travis County, Texas, and a nationally recognized forensic pathologist. He las led death investigations in Travis County, Fort Worth, Chicago, and Kansas. Over his career, he has performed thousands of autopsies and testified in court hundreds of times as an expert witness. A frequent contributor to Crime Stories with Nancy Grace, Dr. Crowns brings unparalleled insight into the strange, grisly, and sometimes absurd realities of forensic pathology.

 

 

About the Show

Mayhem in the Morgue takes listeners inside the bloody, bizarre, and often unbelievable world of forensic pathology. Hosted by Chief Medical Examiner Dr. Kendall Crowns, each episode delivers real-life cases from the morgue, the crime scene, and the courtroom. Expect gallows humor, hard truths, and unforgettable investigations, ranging from courtroom drama to deaths that even seasoned pathologists struggle to explain.

 

Connect and Learn More

Learn more about Dr. Kendall Crowns on Linkedin, catch him regularly on Crime Stories with Nancy Grace and follow Mayhem in the Morgue where you get your podcasts.

 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
This episode discusses the death of an individual in their
subsequent autopsy. If things like this upset you, this is
not the episode for you. Welcome to Mayhem in the
World with their host Doctor Kendall Crowns. My wife once

(00:22):
asked me we're the most common things associated with people's deaths,
and my response to her was alcohol, methamphetamine use, and
showing off for women. So today we're going to play
a little quiz called is it alcohol, meth or women.
So this case occurred on a July fourth evening. This
scene was a thirty year old male. He was out
on a lake with friends. They were firing off fireworks

(00:45):
and having a good time. At some point in the evening,
this scene decided to pick up a fireworks mortar and
launch it off his chest. So let's stop right there.
For those of you unfamiliar with fireworks, a fireworks mortar
is a consumer firework that uses launch topes, which are
commonly called mortars. These are fiberglass, pressed wood, or cardboard
or plastic. They are a long tube with a flat

(01:08):
base at the bottom. What the mortars are used for
is to launch the mortar shells, which can be spherical
or cylindrical and they can be almost two inches in length.
They have a lift charge that launches the firework into
the air and also lights a time delay fuse which
after a period of time, lights what is called the break,
which is a bursting charge in stars and the stars

(01:29):
are the colorful things that fall from the sky. The
ones that the deceiton was using were sixty gram mortar shells,
which means sixty grams of chemical composition, which includes gunpowder.
Just for reference, a shotgun shell has about twenty eight
grams of gunpowder. So these aren't fireworks you want to
fool around with or do something crazy. So let's get

(01:49):
back to the story. So he launches his fireworks off
his chest. The fireworks shoots out across the lake and explodes,
and everybody's like, oh, that was crazy, And they turn
around and the scenees laying on the ground unresponsive. Emergency
medical services is called and when they arrived, he did
not have a pulse and he was declared dead at
the scene. He was brought to the medical Examiner's office

(02:10):
and I performed an autopsy on him. He is a
well developed all Nurshmail. He looked his age of thirty
years old. He had a large abrasion on his chest
on the left side, overlying his heart as a surrounding bruise. Internally,
underlying this abrasion, there was a fracture of the sternum,
which is the mid portion of new chest play and
fractures of the left ribs, a laceration of the heart,

(02:31):
contusions of the lungs, and bleeding in the sac surrounding
the heart, which is called the para cardium. So he
had a hemo pear cardium and bleeding in the chess
cavity which is achemothorax. He had no other evidence of
injury and no other natural disease processes. So his cause
of death was blonde force injuries and his manner of
death was accident. His toxicology findings will discuss shortly. So

(02:56):
I had the cause of death, I had the manner
of death, but I didn't understand how did this fireworks
mortar cause his death. I wanted to find out what
kind of force was involved? So how could I do that?
So what I thought was I would approach the local
university where I work and go to their physics department.
I met with one of the physics professors and He
told me that he could help me out and figure

(03:17):
out what this recoil force was, and I bought some
more fireworks mortars. He and I met at a police
training center that had a large open field. When he
showed up on that day and got out of his car,
he walked over and the equipment he brought with him
was a luggage scale, and I said to him what
is that. He goes, well, this is a scientific instrument.
I go, well, it looks like a luggage scale, and
he said, well, it might be a luggage scale, but

(03:38):
it'll be able to measure the force. It'll be able
to do what we needed to do. This luggage scale
looked like a fancy weight scale. It was made out
of metal and it had a dial where you could
see the amount of weight that was on it. But
there was no way of calculating that weight unless we
were looking right at it. And there was no way
I was going to stand next to it when those
fireworks launched. So first thing I said to him was, well,

(04:00):
how are we going to document how much force there was?
And he said, well, let's just set up a camera
right next to it. We had two cameras at the time,
so okay, we could set one up, but I was
a little concerned about it getting damaged, and how were
we going to slow it down enough to be able
to see this dial move. We set it up, We
launched the first mortarshell, and the explosion happened. The mortarshell
shot into the air, and the mortar itself shot off

(04:22):
the scale and fell on the ground. When the physicists
and I walked over, the scale was severely dented and broken,
and he became very angry and said, well, that stupid
firework just broke my scale. I can't believe this. And
I said to him, I go, well, are we going
to even be able to measure anything? He goes, I
don't know. I'm done. This is ridiculous. He picked up
his broken scale and left. We looked at the video

(04:43):
from that one firework launch. It was so fast there
was no way you can even read the dial even
when we slowed it down. So I had to find
someone else to help me. I went back to that
university and I approached a mechanical engineering professor. He told
me that he could help, and that I shouldn't have
used a physicist because the physicist wouldn't have been able
to figure that out anyway, and engineers were better for
the job, so he assigned to work with me a

(05:06):
PhD student by the name of Bonnie, and Bonnie and
I had a meeting and we discussed how we could
measure this recoil force and what she came up with
is she could make a force plate which was made
from metal, had sensors put in it, and then had
the sensors connected to a computer which had very long
wires so you didn't have to be next to the

(05:27):
firework when it launched. So it was incredibly safe and
it was well constructed. So with Bonnie's help and her
force plate, I purchased more fireworks, and this time we
asked the fire Marshal if we could use an area
to fire off the fireworks. He said that we could
use a fireman's training station which had a nice large
open field, but his one request was that he could
watch the fireworks be launched as well and invite whomever

(05:50):
he wanted, which I had no problem with. So at
noon on a nice sunny day, we went to go
launch these fireworks. The fire Marshal and his five friends
showed up complaining that we were launching fireworks in the
middle of the day, and there wasn't going to be
any fancy show, and that was kind of dumb. I
explained to him we weren't there for the fireworks. We
were there to collect data, which he understood, of course,
but he was still disappointed. Bonnie set up her force plate,

(06:13):
hooked it up to a computer. We were about ten
yards away from the mortar and the force plate, so
we were in a nice safety zone. So I began
launching the fireworks and Bonnie began collecting the data. We
launched off so many fireworks that day. I actually had
a blister on my finger from using a lighter over
and over and over. And after about three hours of
launching fireworks, we had collected the data that we needed.

(06:34):
Bonnie processed the data and came up with the following findings.
The recoil force of the fireworks mortar was equivalent to
being hit in the chest by a baseball thrown at
ninety miles per hour, which is a significant amount of force.
So I had my answer. When the firework launched, the
recoil force went back into the decedent's chest, fracturing his
sternamin ribs and pushed the broken bones into his heart,

(06:55):
lacerating his heart which caused bleeding. So with that information,
I was satisfied with what happened. Case closed. So it's
time for everybody to check their answers. And what was
your answer? Was it alcohol, meth or was it women? Well,
it's a trick answer. It's to the above. It was
alcohol and women. His alcohol level was zero point two

(07:19):
two percent in the blood, which means he roughly drank
about eleven beers within the hour before his death. The
other thing is is there was women at the lake too.
He was trying to impress them by showing them how
hard he was by launching this firework off his chest,
and in his attempt to show off to women and
being intoxicated, he ended up dead. And closing. Remember always

(07:41):
use fireworks appropriately because they aren't very dangerous. And for
your men out there listening to the show, most women
aren't very impressed by you doing dumb things, so just
don't do it. Well. That brings us to the end
of the episode. I hope you learned something and I
hope you were entertained. Next time,