December 17, 2025 • 26 mins
Content Warning: This episode contains graphic descriptions of death, decomposition, and violence. If you’re sensitive to these topics, this episode may not be for you. i
In this episode of Mayhem in the Morgue, Chief Medical Examiner Dr. Kendall Crowns revisits a case from his years at the Cook County Medical Examiner's Office in Chicago. He recounts a death investigation that began as a routine toxicology review and led him into the crumbling towers of Cabrini-Green. When an apparent overdose raised suspicions of carbon monoxide poisoning, Dr. Crowns joined his chief and co-fellow deep inside a housing project marked by gang control, decaying high rises, and the eerie legacy that inspired Candyman.
Highlights
• (0:00) Welcome to Mayhem in the Morgue with Dr. Kendall Crowns
• (0:15) Inside Chicago's Cook County Medical Examiner's Office and Chicago's scale of urban death investigation
• (2:00) A 30-year-old man found dead in his apartment: no injuries, no drugs in sight
• (4:15) How carbon monoxide poisons the body and produces its “cherry red” signature
• (8:00) The chief's rule: always test for CO to prevent future deaths
• (9:45) The M80 ride to Cabrini-Green and its violent reputation
• (16:45) The reality of “elevator pirates” and life inside the decaying towers
• (18:00) Entering the apartment: crowded room, cigarette smoke, and confusion
• (22:45) The basement inspection and the sewage-soaked search for a CO leak
• (25:00) The chief's conclusion: secondhand smoke and cocaine toxicity
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.
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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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Today's episode discusses the death of an individual. If this
sort of thing upsets you, this is not the episode
for you, but listen anyway. You might like it. Well.
You may have an in law with their host. Doctor
Kinder crowns today's episode Cabrini Greens I spent nine years
(00:25):
working for the Cook County Medical Examiner's Office in Chicago, Illinois.
Cook County is the second most populated county in the
United States, second to Los Angeles. It has a population
of five point one eighty three million people, of which
two point seven two million live in the city of Chicago.
Chicago is made up of over two hundred neighborhoods, all
of which have their own unique identities and quirks. We
(00:47):
would get cases from all over the county in the
city and there'd be different things every day, but a
lot of them were homicides, mainly multiple gunshot wounds. I
did a lot of these in my time there at
Cook County. The thing is, though, that gun violence in
Texas has less shootings but a wider variety of different
types of guns. They have shotguns, hunting rifles, assault rifles,
(01:09):
weird semi automatic guns, black powder guns, and the list
goes on and on, whereas in Chicago it was always
nine millimeter handguns. But I digress. The case I'm going
to talk about today came from a large Chicago neighborhood
known as the Near north Side. It's located in central Chicago,
bordered by Lake Michigan, North Avenue and the Chicago River.
(01:32):
Incorporates well known landmarks like the luxury shopping of the
Magnificent Mile, the tourist trap of Navy Pier, and the
Wrigley Building. It also incorporates smaller neighborhoods like the Gold
Coast and River North that have luxury and very affluent
homes and apartments. When most people think of Chicago, this
is the area they're thinking about. The case occurred in
(01:54):
late October and temperatures were starting to drop into the forties.
That is set was a thirty year old mail He
was found by his roommate lying unresponsive on a mattress
on the floor of his shared apartment. The apartment was
secured and there was no witnesses to how and when
he died. The roommate said he was last seen alive
eating cereal at a round two am. Later that day,
(02:17):
at noon, he was found unresponsive. Emergency medical surfaces were
alerted and when they arrived they declared him dead at
the scene. His friends denied drug use, he had no
known medical history, and there was no drug paraphernalia found
at the scene, and autopsy was performed the next day.
His external examination showed that he was a well developed,
well nourished male who didn't have any injuries or deformities
(02:40):
or anything out of the ordinary. He was completely normal,
and his internal examination showed that he had Palmer congestion
edema or fluid on his lungs. We usually find this
with drug overdoses, but it can be part of heart
failure and drownings as well. But he wasn't found in
the water and he didn't have heart failure. It was
more likely than not it was a drug overdose, even
(03:00):
though his friends denied he was using drugs. To figure
out the cosmn or death, toxicology testing would have to
be performed. We usually did a standard TOXLOVIC panel that
included cocaine, alcohol, harowind, and methenphetamine, among other things, and
would typically take sixty eight weeks. One other test was
added on and that was a carbon monoxide level in
(03:21):
the blood. If you don't know much about carbonoxide, it's
a colorless, odorless, tasteless gas that's slightly denser than air.
Hundreds of people die every year from non fire related
carbon monoxide poisoning. Accidental carbon monoxide poisonings can occur for
a wide variety of reasons, falty furnaces, dryers or hot
water heaters, birds nests and chimneys, or exhaust tubes, in
(03:44):
the use of an oven or grilled to try and
heat the home. Suicides are usually seen with indoor grill use,
or using the car exhaust with a tube from the
exhaust pipes snaked into the car, or sitting in an
enclosed garage running the car. Sitting in the car isn't
always a suicide, though a case only during the colder
times of the year. People would sit in their car
trying to warm it up or go out to the
garage to have a sexual liaison in the car while
(04:07):
it's running to keep warm, and in both these situations
they get overwhelmed by the carbon monoxide and die. But
it's an accidental depth and in Chicago we'd often see
an upswing in these cases, especially during the colder months,
because if it would really get cold in Chicago, to
the point that it would hurt to breathe and tears
would freeze in your eyes. You might be wondering, how
does carbon monoxide kill well. Carbon monoxide has a higher
(04:29):
affinity towards hemoglobin, which is an iron containing protein in
your red blood cells. It plays a crucial role in
transporting oxygen from the lungs to the tissues and carbon
dioxide from the tissues to the lungs. The higher affinity
of carbonoxide means carbon monoxide is two hundred and fifty
to three hundred times more likely to bind hemoglobein than oxygen,
and it will actually displace already bound oxygen from the hemoglobin.
(04:53):
And once it binds to the hemoglobin, it's very hard
to get off. And now your red blood cells are
no longer carrying oxygen, and you become hypoxic and you
basically suffocate or asphyxiate from the lack of oxygen getting
to your tissues and brain, and then you die in
your blood. When the carbon monoxide level starts building up,
you start having flu like symptoms, You get achy tired,
(05:14):
and as it progresses, you become more and more dizzy
than you start vomiting, then you might hallucinate and eventually die.
In fact, it has been reported that some ghost stories
from houses are actually due to hallucinations from carbon monoxide leaks. Normally,
the carbon monoxide level in your blood in a non
smoking person in a non polluted area is under one percent,
(05:34):
but that's not the city of Chicago. For people who
live in an urban area like Chicago or other areas
that have high pollution, your blood carbon monoxide level can
get up to five percent. If you're not a smoker,
you can get up to ten percent, and smokers, firefighters,
tollbooth operators, diesel engine operators are anything that has combustion
that creates carbon monoxide around it. Anything above ten percent
(05:57):
is considered carbonoxide poisoning, but mild symptoms are usually beginning
at this level unless you've had a long term, slow
exposure to it, and when it gets up to twenty percent,
it is considered a severe poisoning. At twenty five percent,
it can become fatal, and the fatal ranges from anywhere
from twenty five to eighty five percent of carboxy hemoglobin
(06:18):
in the blood. I have never seen above eighty five percent,
but there is always a chance for that to happen.
The wide range of what level will kill you is
because it depends on your health status and your age.
Usually fetuses, babies, elderly people, people with chronic conditions like COPD, diabetes, obesity,
heart disease are more susceptible to lower levels of carbon monoxide.
(06:41):
The people that die at the higher levels are usually
the people who are very healthy, young, and fit. The
carbon monoxide test isn't always ordered. If you were found
at a scene where there's no chance of carbon monoxide,
like you're outside or driving a motorcycle, we don't order
it because it's going to be negatives and why waste
the money. But if you're in an enclosed space or
even driving automobile, because sometimes automobiles are leaking carbonoxide, we
(07:05):
will order the test. It will also be ordered if
findings during autopsy give you a suspicion of carbon monoxide,
and this is usually because of the postmarm mobidity. After
you die, your heart stops beating and your blood pools
and the dependent portions of your body. It's usually purple
in coloration, but different things can change the color from
purple to something else, And when there's carbon monoxide, it
(07:26):
can be a bright red coloration, which is described in
the literature as cherry red. Few other things make the
lividity this color, and those are cyanide in cold exposure,
but usually it's carbon dioxide. And when you open up
the body, the organs, the muscles all have this very
vibrant red coloration to them. It's like they're on Technicolor overdrive.
(07:48):
And when you look at the blood it looks like
cherry syrup. So when you see these findings, you usually
think of carbon monoxide and you run the test. The
last reason that we would often order carbon monoxide in
Cook County was because of the chief. He always said
that finding carbon monoxide was the one time a medical
examiner can actually prevent deaths because other people could be
(08:09):
living in the house and not as susceptible to the
carbon monoxide as the person who died, but the carbon
monoxide leak would still be there and the carbon monoxide
levels would still be getting higher and higher, and it
would eventually kill the other people in the house. So
if we find it, we could prevent someone from dying.
His favorite example was a church rectory where someone was
preying in this one particular room and was found dead,
(08:31):
and they did an autopsy but didn't run a carbon
monoxide and missed the fact that he had died from this.
Another person went in the room and then they were
found dead, and another person was found dead, and eventually
someone was like, well, wait a second, let's run a
carbon monoxide test. And when they ran this test, after
three people had died, they found that each and every
one of them had been exposed to carbon monoxide from
(08:52):
a leaky pipe underneath the podium and the rectory. So
the chief always said he was not going to have
that happen at his office, and we would run the
carbon monoxide if there was any suspicion. Carbon monoxide testing
actually reports the percent of carboxy hemoglobin in your blood.
It's also a rapid test that can be performed quite quickly,
(09:12):
giving your results back in that same day. And on
this case, we ran the test and we got the
carbon monoxide level back before noon, and his level of
carbon monoxide was in the high teens, which meant it
wasn't a severe poisoning, but it was a poisoning nonetheless,
and it was high enough to be worrisome. Because of
that result, the Chief told my Kofell and I we
(09:34):
should all go to the scene and see if we
could figure out what the source of carbon dioxide was
and make sure there wasn't a leak, and if there was,
we could have warned the other people in the apartment.
As part of my fellowship, the Chief would occasionally take
my Kofell and I to various scenes and this was
one of them. And when we would go, he would
drive us in a big black Crown Victoria with a
(09:54):
black interior that had a government license plate of M eighty.
Is a beast of a car. Looked like a tank.
It probably had bulletproof windows as well. I don't know
that for a fact, but you know it looked like
that type of car something the CIA would be driving
when they're protecting the president in the late nineteen nineties.
And because of its license plate, we always referred to
(10:15):
the car as the M eight And during my fellowship
I took many an excursion in the M eight with
the Chief Medical Examiner and my co fellow, And in
preparation for this excursion, he told me to get the
camera gear and for my co fellow to find out
where the exact address was when she got the address.
Like I said, it was on the near north side
of Chicago, but it wasn't along the Magnificent Mile or
(10:38):
in any of the luxury homes or apartments. It was
at Cabrini Green's, an infamous public housing complex that I
had heard stories about, mythologic stories of all the gangs
and the killings and everything evil that had occurred there.
I had never been there, but it held this place
in my mind, a place of like nightmares, somewhere that
(10:59):
no one ever wanted to go, and if you did
go there, it was highly unlikely you would get out alive.
But the reality of Cabrini Greens was that it was
a housing complex created by the Chicago Housing Authority. It
was named after Francis Xavier Cabrini, who was an Italian
American nun canonized for her work with the poor. It
(11:19):
was built on seventy acres of land that previously had
the nickname of Little Hell due to the presence of
flames from the nearby gas refinery. It was built in
three sections during nineteen forty one, nineteen fifty eight, and
nineteen sixty two. Some of the buildings were made with
red bricks, getting the nickname of Reds, and other buildings
were made with concrete and given the nickname Whites. It
(11:42):
included row homes, two to three story low rises, and
twenty one buildings that were up to nineteen stories tall.
At its peak, it was home to fifteen thousand people
living in three thousand, five hundred apartments. Originally, Cabrini Greens
was aimed to create a vibrant, affordable community for people
of Chicago, but over time it fell into disrepair due
(12:02):
to political reasons socioeconomic reasons, reasons far too complicated for
this podcast, and it also gained a very violent reputation.
It had been the subject of TV shows like The
Evans Family on Good Times. In the nineteen seventies, it
became the backdrop for the first movie of the horror
movie franchise, Candy Man. The director of the movie, Bernard Rose,
(12:24):
stated he chose Cabrini Greens because it was a place
of such palpable fear. Cabrini Greens was predominantly controlled by
a Chicago area gang known as the Gangster Disciples. In
my time in Chicago, I became very familiar with the
Gangster Disciples and their aggressive marketing strategies. They are a large,
well organized gang that operated out of Cabrini Greens, with
(12:45):
their principal criminal activities being homicides, drug dealing, assault, aggravated battery,
armed robbery, arson, auto theft, theft, extortion, kidnapping, money laundering,
and mortgage fraud. The drug dealers at Cabria Greens actually
worked in shifts and worked twenty four hours a day
in these buildings. At some point, it was reported in
(13:07):
the nineteen nineties that the Gangster Disciples even made their
gang members come out in the courtyards to do exercise
on a daily basis. The Gangster Disciples colors are blue
and black. They use upward facing pitchforks, six pointed stars,
hearts with wings and tails and horns, and three point
crowns as their tagging symbols. They also used the numbers
(13:27):
seven to four, which signified the letters G and D
I knew wearing a Seattle mariner's hat with the downward
facing pitchfork or wearing something with Sparky the Sun Devil,
the mascot from the University of Arizona, which has a
downward facing pitchfork, were used by rival gangs to show disrespect. Wow. Wow.
(13:49):
So that's where we were heading to, the mythologic, dangerous
Cabria Greens, controlled by an even more dangerous and violent gang.
The chief told them that the Chicago Police Department would
meet us there at noon. I had gathered up the
camera gear into a large black duffel back with a
long black strap, and my cofellow had gotten pins, paper
(14:12):
and clipboards for us to use. We loaded up into
them eight and headed out. I sat in the back.
As we crossed the Chicago River, you could see the
gray and white concrete high rises or whites of Kabrini
Greens looming in the distance. They got bigger and bigger,
and as we got closer and pulled into the courtyard,
there was something else going on. Cabrini Greens was in
(14:34):
the process of being demolished, and it had been going
on since nineteen ninety five. There was rubble piles of bricks, concrete,
and twisted steel and other debris from demolished buildings littering
the area. There were partially demolished buildings exposing the interiors
in staircases. It looked like a war zone. The particular
building we've pulled up to was one of the nineteen
(14:56):
story whites. It had square windows, some of which were
shuttered and covered in plywood, and some were broken out
with black scorch marks surrounding them on the sides of
the building that went up to the next floor. I
was told the scorch marks were caused from when an
apartment caught on fire and burned up, but because the
apartments were made of concrete, it usually didn't burn the
other ones, which was a bonus, I guess. The exterior
(15:18):
porches were covered in chainling fences that I was told
were installed in the seventies because drug acts had a
tendency to fall from the porches, and also the gangs
used them to throw people off from. With the stark,
gray white buildings, square windows, and chainling fences, it looked
like a giant prison. It was a little afternoon and
there were no people to be seen anywhere. It was
(15:38):
overcast outside, and everything was gray in coloration. There was
a vacant, rusting metal playground next to the area where
we parked. It looked like something out of a future apocalypse,
devoid of children. The Chicago Police Department officer was already
there waiting for us, sitting in his vehicle, running it
to stay warm. The Chief Medical Examiner got out to
talk to him for a while. My cofellow and I
(16:01):
waited in the M eight when he walked up to
the officer's car. The officer got out and he was
probably six foot six or even taller, maybe weighing three
hundred to three hundred and fifty pounds. He looked like
a football lineman. He was just massive. He was wearing
his big black Chicago policeman's jacket. He had on his
Chicago policeman's hat with its distinctive black and white scillitoe
(16:23):
tartan along the hat band, and he had a big,
bushy mustache. When he stood next to the chief, he
made the Chief look like a child. The Chief and
him discussed things for a while, and then the Chief
motioned to us to get out of the car and
we headed towards the building. We went through the door
as it had bars on them, into the main lobby area,
where we met the superintendent, the bookman at the building.
(16:46):
The Chief informed him why we were there and what
our plans were. The superintendent didn't look like he cared.
He said, well, the gang that runs the building had
members that would sit on top of the elevators and
when people would get in, they would push through the
ceiling and jump down and rob them. To combat this,
they had just disabled the elevators to prevent this from
happening again, and I thought, works for me, And this
(17:06):
became yet another reason why I don't like elevators. I
have never heard of elevator pirates before and never seen
them since. But you never know, and so it's usually
better to just take the stairs. The apartment that the
Seaton died on was on the tenth floor, and we
walked up the ten flight of stairs, and on the
stairs there was trash and condoms and needles lying around,
(17:27):
And when we finally got up to the tenth floor,
the officer opened the door and we stepped into the hallway.
The hallway seemingly stretched on for miles, and it had
no lights, and there was a singular window at the
other end, so it was very dimly lit. The lights
that were supposed to be lighting the hallway were either
broken or stolen, who knows, but they weren't working. So
(17:47):
here we were in this dimly lit hallway, and we
looked for the apartment, which was about midway down the hall,
and when we got to the apartment, the police officer
stepped up to the door and started pounding on it
and said, Chicago police, open up. And after a couple
seconds you could hear, very faintly from inside the apartment
someone saying who who is it. The chief had been
(18:08):
standing next to the officer, but at that moment he
stepped out of the doorway to the along the side
of the wall. The officer again pounded on the doorway
and again said Chicago police, open up. And at the
end of that second statement, all the other apartment doors
began opening, and people began piling into the hallway. There
was confusion and people asking what was going on, and
(18:31):
some of them looked like zombies. And one guy in particular,
dressed in a black overcoat, no pants, bread sacks on
his feet, came shuffling over to my cofellow and I.
He was bug eyed, with crazy hair and a long,
disheveled beard, and he walked up to me and got
really close, and he said, Hey, what's going on here?
And I said I don't really know, to which he
(18:54):
stood there and stared, just watching the spectacle, and he
kept getting closer and closer, looking at my big black
bag full of camera equipment. And while he was doing that,
more and more people started filling the hallway, and the
officer started pounding on the door again and saying, Chicago police,
open up. And my new friend said to me, hey, man,
(19:15):
what's in the bag. And just at that moment, the
door of the apartment we were trying to enter opened
just a crack, and a person sat again, who is it.
The officer pushed his shoulder into the slightly opened door
and said Chicago police were coming in, and he pushed
the door open and and he went with the chief
Medical examiner right behind him. My co fellow was between
(19:36):
me and the door, and she turned around and said
to me, oh, man, what do we do? Her eyes
were Widewood's tearor. We were being quickly swallowed up by
the people that were coming out of the rooms filling
the hallway. The disheveled man attempted to grab my bag
with the camera gear. I was watching the door to
the room that the chief and the police officer had
gone into slowly closing, and the faint glimmer of light
(19:58):
disappearing quickly the doorway. I said to her, I don't know,
but we're following the guy with the gun, and I
pushed her through the door and we came stumbling into
the room and collided with the back of the massive
police officer, who didn't even move or notice that we
ran into him. The door shut behind us, stopping the
day walkers from following us in. As my eyes adjusted
(20:19):
to light, I saw the chief standing in front of
about ten people. He was explaining who we were and
why we were there. We were standing in a main
room of the apartment with all the people in it.
It seemed really small. The occupants all looked a little
confused about what he was saying. They asked some questions
about why we were there and was someone getting arrested,
to which the Chicago police officer responded and said, not yet,
(20:42):
let the doctor speak. The chief asked to be shown
where the deceased was found, and one of them said, well,
over there in the closet. He opened the door and
there was a filthy mattress with another individual sleeping on it.
The chief asked, excuse me, could you move? The man
woke up and was startled to see the chief meta
examiner of Cook County and a Chicago police officer standing
(21:03):
over him, and he said, oh, what's going on? And
the officer said move out of the way now, to
which he did. He stumbled into the main room and
sat down with the other people. The chief looked around,
looked at the mattress and said, oh, interesting, and wrote
some things down. While he was doing this, I noticed
all the people in the apartment were actually smoking, and
(21:24):
there was a dense fog of smoke filling the entire apartment.
Ashtrays were full of cigarettes everywhere, the walls were stained
with nicotine stains, and smoke was so thick that it
stung my eyes and throat and made it a little
hard to breathe. The chief made a quick look around
the rest of the apartment. He made a couple of notations,
and then suddenly said, thank you for your time. And
(21:45):
he turned to my co fellow and the Chicago police
officer and myself and said we're done here. Let's go.
I asked, do we need to take any pictures? And
the chief said, no, let's go. We've got what we needed.
The people still looked confused. They didn't know what was
going on, but there wasn't going to be any more
explanation the officer opened the door into the hallway that
(22:06):
was now packed with people trying to figure out what
was going on and why the police were there. The
officer said, out of the way and proceeded to push
through them, with the chief medical Examiner quickly following behind him.
My koe Fell and I this time ran after them
and didn't linger, but we continued down the hall through
the sea of people and made it to the stairwell door.
The officer pulled the door open and held it open
(22:27):
for us, and once we got in, he came in
behind us, told the people to move on and not
follow us, and close the door, and we started down
the stairway. The superintendent met us at the base of
the stairs and he asked if we had gotten everything
we needed, and the chief said no, I would like
to see the boiler room or where you have the
hot water heaters in the air handling units. The superintendent said, well, okay,
(22:50):
I can show you where that is. We headed towards
another stairwell that headed to the basement, where once again
we descended another group of very dirty stairs and entered
into this dark, poorly lit basement in the bowels of
the building. The perfect place to be murdered by the
candy man. It was huge, with an intricant pipe system
running overhead. A gray, white foaming ooze dripped from some
(23:12):
of the pipes onto the floor. The air smelled like
feet in feces and was thick and was hard to breathe.
The superintendent walked us up to these big industrial machines
and he and the chief talked for a while. I
couldn't hear anything because of the noise of the surroundings,
and so I have no idea what they were saying.
The chief and the superintendent looked at the air handlers
(23:33):
and the heaters, and they all seemed to be in
good working order. And at some point the white foamy
substance dripped onto my head. Thankfully I was wearing a
black knit cap so it didn't get directly on me.
My cofellow tapped me on the shoulder and said, dude,
some of that crap got on you. And the superintendent
overheard this and he said, oh, yeah, those are sewage pipes.
(23:54):
We always have a problem with those leaking. At that moment,
I knew I had some sort of bodily ways on me,
and really there was nothing I could do about it,
so it's just like being at work. At least it
was on my cap and wasn't on my head. The
chief medical Examiner walked around, checked the heaters, looked at
the superintendent, talked some more, asked about routine maintenance and
things of that nature, and after about fifteen minutes he said,
(24:18):
well that's interesting. We're done here and I asked again,
do we need to take pictures? And he said no.
We walked back outside to the empty courtyard. The chief
thanked the police officer. The officer said, you got what
you needed, doc, and the Chief said, I do believe
I have. Thank you, and we got back into the
mad and headed back to the office. As we were
(24:38):
driving back, the Chief said to my Kofell and I,
what did you think about what we saw? We were
both a little bit lost for words because neither of
us had ever experienced anything like that before. And the
Chief said, well, what do you think the cause of
the carbon monoxide was? It was pretty obvious. Neither one
of us came up with a good explanation, and he
finally said, did you see the amount of cigarettes in there?
(25:00):
And how dense the smoke was and how poorly ventilated
the apartment was and how many people were smoking, And
then he said, that's what the elevated carbon monoxide level
was from. It was the fact there was a room
full of people constantly smoking, and that's why his carbon
dioxide was a little higher than normal. It wasn't a leak,
it was just people smoking. A few weeks later, the
(25:22):
drug testing came back and the deceson was full of
cocaine and we had the answer. Caused death, cocaine toxicity,
manner death accident and had nothing to do with carbon monoxide.
And that was it. Case closed. I went to Cabrini
Creens a few other times for other cases, but I
never went back inside the buildings. That was my one
(25:42):
and only toe. Cabrini Greens itself has gone now in
twenty eleven, the last buildings were torn down. The seventy
acres of Little Hell was once again changed and underwent
significant redevelopment, being replaced by mixed income housing. And it
is always in the city of Chicago. Progress continued, ever
changing and making Chicago never the same. And that brings
(26:08):
us to the end of the episode. I hope you
learned something like bread sacks are not just for bread,
and I hope you were entertained until the next time
Today's episode discusses the death of an individual. If this
sort of thing upsets you, this is not the episode
for you, but listen anyway. You might like it. Well.
You may have an in law with their host. Doctor
Kinder crowns today's episode Cabrini Greens I spent nine years
(00:25):
working for the Cook County Medical Examiner's Office in Chicago, Illinois.
Cook County is the second most populated county in the
United States, second to Los Angeles. It has a population
of five point one eighty three million people, of which
two point seven two million live in the city of Chicago.
Chicago is made up of over two hundred neighborhoods, all
of which have their own unique identities and quirks. We
(00:47):
would get cases from all over the county in the
city and there'd be different things every day, but a
lot of them were homicides, mainly multiple gunshot wounds. I
did a lot of these in my time there at
Cook County. The thing is, though, that gun violence in
Texas has less shootings but a wider variety of different
types of guns. They have shotguns, hunting rifles, assault rifles,
(01:09):
weird semi automatic guns, black powder guns, and the list
goes on and on, whereas in Chicago it was always
nine millimeter handguns. But I digress. The case I'm going
to talk about today came from a large Chicago neighborhood
known as the Near north Side. It's located in central Chicago,
bordered by Lake Michigan, North Avenue and the Chicago River.
(01:32):
Incorporates well known landmarks like the luxury shopping of the
Magnificent Mile, the tourist trap of Navy Pier, and the
Wrigley Building. It also incorporates smaller neighborhoods like the Gold
Coast and River North that have luxury and very affluent
homes and apartments. When most people think of Chicago, this
is the area they're thinking about. The case occurred in
(01:54):
late October and temperatures were starting to drop into the forties.
That is set was a thirty year old mail He
was found by his roommate lying unresponsive on a mattress
on the floor of his shared apartment. The apartment was
secured and there was no witnesses to how and when
he died. The roommate said he was last seen alive
eating cereal at a round two am. Later that day,
(02:17):
at noon, he was found unresponsive. Emergency medical surfaces were
alerted and when they arrived they declared him dead at
the scene. His friends denied drug use, he had no
known medical history, and there was no drug paraphernalia found
at the scene, and autopsy was performed the next day.
His external examination showed that he was a well developed,
well nourished male who didn't have any injuries or deformities
(02:40):
or anything out of the ordinary. He was completely normal,
and his internal examination showed that he had Palmer congestion
edema or fluid on his lungs. We usually find this
with drug overdoses, but it can be part of heart
failure and drownings as well. But he wasn't found in
the water and he didn't have heart failure. It was
more likely than not it was a drug overdose, even
(03:00):
though his friends denied he was using drugs. To figure
out the cosmn or death, toxicology testing would have to
be performed. We usually did a standard TOXLOVIC panel that
included cocaine, alcohol, harowind, and methenphetamine, among other things, and
would typically take sixty eight weeks. One other test was
added on and that was a carbon monoxide level in
(03:21):
the blood. If you don't know much about carbonoxide, it's
a colorless, odorless, tasteless gas that's slightly denser than air.
Hundreds of people die every year from non fire related
carbon monoxide poisoning. Accidental carbon monoxide poisonings can occur for
a wide variety of reasons, falty furnaces, dryers or hot
water heaters, birds nests and chimneys, or exhaust tubes, in
(03:44):
the use of an oven or grilled to try and
heat the home. Suicides are usually seen with indoor grill use,
or using the car exhaust with a tube from the
exhaust pipes snaked into the car, or sitting in an
enclosed garage running the car. Sitting in the car isn't
always a suicide, though a case only during the colder
times of the year. People would sit in their car
trying to warm it up or go out to the
garage to have a sexual liaison in the car while
(04:07):
it's running to keep warm, and in both these situations
they get overwhelmed by the carbon monoxide and die. But
it's an accidental depth and in Chicago we'd often see
an upswing in these cases, especially during the colder months,
because if it would really get cold in Chicago, to
the point that it would hurt to breathe and tears
would freeze in your eyes. You might be wondering, how
does carbon monoxide kill well. Carbon monoxide has a higher
(04:29):
affinity towards hemoglobin, which is an iron containing protein in
your red blood cells. It plays a crucial role in
transporting oxygen from the lungs to the tissues and carbon
dioxide from the tissues to the lungs. The higher affinity
of carbonoxide means carbon monoxide is two hundred and fifty
to three hundred times more likely to bind hemoglobein than oxygen,
and it will actually displace already bound oxygen from the hemoglobin.
(04:53):
And once it binds to the hemoglobin, it's very hard
to get off. And now your red blood cells are
no longer carrying oxygen, and you become hypoxic and you
basically suffocate or asphyxiate from the lack of oxygen getting
to your tissues and brain, and then you die in
your blood. When the carbon monoxide level starts building up,
you start having flu like symptoms, You get achy tired,
(05:14):
and as it progresses, you become more and more dizzy
than you start vomiting, then you might hallucinate and eventually die.
In fact, it has been reported that some ghost stories
from houses are actually due to hallucinations from carbon monoxide leaks. Normally,
the carbon monoxide level in your blood in a non
smoking person in a non polluted area is under one percent,
(05:34):
but that's not the city of Chicago. For people who
live in an urban area like Chicago or other areas
that have high pollution, your blood carbon monoxide level can
get up to five percent. If you're not a smoker,
you can get up to ten percent, and smokers, firefighters,
tollbooth operators, diesel engine operators are anything that has combustion
that creates carbon monoxide around it. Anything above ten percent
(05:57):
is considered carbonoxide poisoning, but mild symptoms are usually beginning
at this level unless you've had a long term, slow
exposure to it, and when it gets up to twenty percent,
it is considered a severe poisoning. At twenty five percent,
it can become fatal, and the fatal ranges from anywhere
from twenty five to eighty five percent of carboxy hemoglobin
(06:18):
in the blood. I have never seen above eighty five percent,
but there is always a chance for that to happen.
The wide range of what level will kill you is
because it depends on your health status and your age.
Usually fetuses, babies, elderly people, people with chronic conditions like COPD, diabetes, obesity,
heart disease are more susceptible to lower levels of carbon monoxide.
(06:41):
The people that die at the higher levels are usually
the people who are very healthy, young, and fit. The
carbon monoxide test isn't always ordered. If you were found
at a scene where there's no chance of carbon monoxide,
like you're outside or driving a motorcycle, we don't order
it because it's going to be negatives and why waste
the money. But if you're in an enclosed space or
even driving automobile, because sometimes automobiles are leaking carbonoxide, we
(07:05):
will order the test. It will also be ordered if
findings during autopsy give you a suspicion of carbon monoxide,
and this is usually because of the postmarm mobidity. After
you die, your heart stops beating and your blood pools
and the dependent portions of your body. It's usually purple
in coloration, but different things can change the color from
purple to something else, And when there's carbon monoxide, it
(07:26):
can be a bright red coloration, which is described in
the literature as cherry red. Few other things make the
lividity this color, and those are cyanide in cold exposure,
but usually it's carbon dioxide. And when you open up
the body, the organs, the muscles all have this very
vibrant red coloration to them. It's like they're on Technicolor overdrive.
(07:48):
And when you look at the blood it looks like
cherry syrup. So when you see these findings, you usually
think of carbon monoxide and you run the test. The
last reason that we would often order carbon monoxide in
Cook County was because of the chief. He always said
that finding carbon monoxide was the one time a medical
examiner can actually prevent deaths because other people could be
(08:09):
living in the house and not as susceptible to the
carbon monoxide as the person who died, but the carbon
monoxide leak would still be there and the carbon monoxide
levels would still be getting higher and higher, and it
would eventually kill the other people in the house. So
if we find it, we could prevent someone from dying.
His favorite example was a church rectory where someone was
preying in this one particular room and was found dead,
(08:31):
and they did an autopsy but didn't run a carbon
monoxide and missed the fact that he had died from this.
Another person went in the room and then they were
found dead, and another person was found dead, and eventually
someone was like, well, wait a second, let's run a
carbon monoxide test. And when they ran this test, after
three people had died, they found that each and every
one of them had been exposed to carbon monoxide from
(08:52):
a leaky pipe underneath the podium and the rectory. So
the chief always said he was not going to have
that happen at his office, and we would run the
carbon monoxide if there was any suspicion. Carbon monoxide testing
actually reports the percent of carboxy hemoglobin in your blood.
It's also a rapid test that can be performed quite quickly,
(09:12):
giving your results back in that same day. And on
this case, we ran the test and we got the
carbon monoxide level back before noon, and his level of
carbon monoxide was in the high teens, which meant it
wasn't a severe poisoning, but it was a poisoning nonetheless,
and it was high enough to be worrisome. Because of
that result, the Chief told my Kofell and I we
(09:34):
should all go to the scene and see if we
could figure out what the source of carbon dioxide was
and make sure there wasn't a leak, and if there was,
we could have warned the other people in the apartment.
As part of my fellowship, the Chief would occasionally take
my Kofell and I to various scenes and this was
one of them. And when we would go, he would
drive us in a big black Crown Victoria with a
(09:54):
black interior that had a government license plate of M eighty.
Is a beast of a car. Looked like a tank.
It probably had bulletproof windows as well. I don't know
that for a fact, but you know it looked like
that type of car something the CIA would be driving
when they're protecting the president in the late nineteen nineties.
And because of its license plate, we always referred to
(10:15):
the car as the M eight And during my fellowship
I took many an excursion in the M eight with
the Chief Medical Examiner and my co fellow, And in
preparation for this excursion, he told me to get the
camera gear and for my co fellow to find out
where the exact address was when she got the address.
Like I said, it was on the near north side
of Chicago, but it wasn't along the Magnificent Mile or
(10:38):
in any of the luxury homes or apartments. It was
at Cabrini Green's, an infamous public housing complex that I
had heard stories about, mythologic stories of all the gangs
and the killings and everything evil that had occurred there.
I had never been there, but it held this place
in my mind, a place of like nightmares, somewhere that
(10:59):
no one ever wanted to go, and if you did
go there, it was highly unlikely you would get out alive.
But the reality of Cabrini Greens was that it was
a housing complex created by the Chicago Housing Authority. It
was named after Francis Xavier Cabrini, who was an Italian
American nun canonized for her work with the poor. It
(11:19):
was built on seventy acres of land that previously had
the nickname of Little Hell due to the presence of
flames from the nearby gas refinery. It was built in
three sections during nineteen forty one, nineteen fifty eight, and
nineteen sixty two. Some of the buildings were made with
red bricks, getting the nickname of Reds, and other buildings
were made with concrete and given the nickname Whites. It
(11:42):
included row homes, two to three story low rises, and
twenty one buildings that were up to nineteen stories tall.
At its peak, it was home to fifteen thousand people
living in three thousand, five hundred apartments. Originally, Cabrini Greens
was aimed to create a vibrant, affordable community for people
of Chicago, but over time it fell into disrepair due
(12:02):
to political reasons socioeconomic reasons, reasons far too complicated for
this podcast, and it also gained a very violent reputation.
It had been the subject of TV shows like The
Evans Family on Good Times. In the nineteen seventies, it
became the backdrop for the first movie of the horror
movie franchise, Candy Man. The director of the movie, Bernard Rose,
(12:24):
stated he chose Cabrini Greens because it was a place
of such palpable fear. Cabrini Greens was predominantly controlled by
a Chicago area gang known as the Gangster Disciples. In
my time in Chicago, I became very familiar with the
Gangster Disciples and their aggressive marketing strategies. They are a large,
well organized gang that operated out of Cabrini Greens, with
(12:45):
their principal criminal activities being homicides, drug dealing, assault, aggravated battery,
armed robbery, arson, auto theft, theft, extortion, kidnapping, money laundering,
and mortgage fraud. The drug dealers at Cabria Greens actually
worked in shifts and worked twenty four hours a day
in these buildings. At some point, it was reported in
(13:07):
the nineteen nineties that the Gangster Disciples even made their
gang members come out in the courtyards to do exercise
on a daily basis. The Gangster Disciples colors are blue
and black. They use upward facing pitchforks, six pointed stars,
hearts with wings and tails and horns, and three point
crowns as their tagging symbols. They also used the numbers
(13:27):
seven to four, which signified the letters G and D
I knew wearing a Seattle mariner's hat with the downward
facing pitchfork or wearing something with Sparky the Sun Devil,
the mascot from the University of Arizona, which has a
downward facing pitchfork, were used by rival gangs to show disrespect. Wow. Wow.
(13:49):
So that's where we were heading to, the mythologic, dangerous
Cabria Greens, controlled by an even more dangerous and violent gang.
The chief told them that the Chicago Police Department would
meet us there at noon. I had gathered up the
camera gear into a large black duffel back with a
long black strap, and my cofellow had gotten pins, paper
(14:12):
and clipboards for us to use. We loaded up into
them eight and headed out. I sat in the back.
As we crossed the Chicago River, you could see the
gray and white concrete high rises or whites of Kabrini
Greens looming in the distance. They got bigger and bigger,
and as we got closer and pulled into the courtyard,
there was something else going on. Cabrini Greens was in
(14:34):
the process of being demolished, and it had been going
on since nineteen ninety five. There was rubble piles of bricks, concrete,
and twisted steel and other debris from demolished buildings littering
the area. There were partially demolished buildings exposing the interiors
in staircases. It looked like a war zone. The particular
building we've pulled up to was one of the nineteen
(14:56):
story whites. It had square windows, some of which were
shuttered and covered in plywood, and some were broken out
with black scorch marks surrounding them on the sides of
the building that went up to the next floor. I
was told the scorch marks were caused from when an
apartment caught on fire and burned up, but because the
apartments were made of concrete, it usually didn't burn the
other ones, which was a bonus, I guess. The exterior
(15:18):
porches were covered in chainling fences that I was told
were installed in the seventies because drug acts had a
tendency to fall from the porches, and also the gangs
used them to throw people off from. With the stark,
gray white buildings, square windows, and chainling fences, it looked
like a giant prison. It was a little afternoon and
there were no people to be seen anywhere. It was
(15:38):
overcast outside, and everything was gray in coloration. There was
a vacant, rusting metal playground next to the area where
we parked. It looked like something out of a future apocalypse,
devoid of children. The Chicago Police Department officer was already
there waiting for us, sitting in his vehicle, running it
to stay warm. The Chief Medical Examiner got out to
talk to him for a while. My cofellow and I
(16:01):
waited in the M eight when he walked up to
the officer's car. The officer got out and he was
probably six foot six or even taller, maybe weighing three
hundred to three hundred and fifty pounds. He looked like
a football lineman. He was just massive. He was wearing
his big black Chicago policeman's jacket. He had on his
Chicago policeman's hat with its distinctive black and white scillitoe
(16:23):
tartan along the hat band, and he had a big,
bushy mustache. When he stood next to the chief, he
made the Chief look like a child. The Chief and
him discussed things for a while, and then the Chief
motioned to us to get out of the car and
we headed towards the building. We went through the door
as it had bars on them, into the main lobby area,
where we met the superintendent, the bookman at the building.
(16:46):
The Chief informed him why we were there and what
our plans were. The superintendent didn't look like he cared.
He said, well, the gang that runs the building had
members that would sit on top of the elevators and
when people would get in, they would push through the
ceiling and jump down and rob them. To combat this,
they had just disabled the elevators to prevent this from
happening again, and I thought, works for me, And this
(17:06):
became yet another reason why I don't like elevators. I
have never heard of elevator pirates before and never seen
them since. But you never know, and so it's usually
better to just take the stairs. The apartment that the
Seaton died on was on the tenth floor, and we
walked up the ten flight of stairs, and on the
stairs there was trash and condoms and needles lying around,
(17:27):
And when we finally got up to the tenth floor,
the officer opened the door and we stepped into the hallway.
The hallway seemingly stretched on for miles, and it had
no lights, and there was a singular window at the
other end, so it was very dimly lit. The lights
that were supposed to be lighting the hallway were either
broken or stolen, who knows, but they weren't working. So
(17:47):
here we were in this dimly lit hallway, and we
looked for the apartment, which was about midway down the hall,
and when we got to the apartment, the police officer
stepped up to the door and started pounding on it
and said, Chicago police, open up. And after a couple
seconds you could hear, very faintly from inside the apartment
someone saying who who is it. The chief had been
(18:08):
standing next to the officer, but at that moment he
stepped out of the doorway to the along the side
of the wall. The officer again pounded on the doorway
and again said Chicago police, open up. And at the
end of that second statement, all the other apartment doors
began opening, and people began piling into the hallway. There
was confusion and people asking what was going on, and
(18:31):
some of them looked like zombies. And one guy in particular,
dressed in a black overcoat, no pants, bread sacks on
his feet, came shuffling over to my cofellow and I.
He was bug eyed, with crazy hair and a long,
disheveled beard, and he walked up to me and got
really close, and he said, Hey, what's going on here?
And I said I don't really know, to which he
(18:54):
stood there and stared, just watching the spectacle, and he
kept getting closer and closer, looking at my big black
bag full of camera equipment. And while he was doing that,
more and more people started filling the hallway, and the
officer started pounding on the door again and saying, Chicago police,
open up. And my new friend said to me, hey, man,
(19:15):
what's in the bag. And just at that moment, the
door of the apartment we were trying to enter opened
just a crack, and a person sat again, who is it.
The officer pushed his shoulder into the slightly opened door
and said Chicago police were coming in, and he pushed
the door open and and he went with the chief
Medical examiner right behind him. My co fellow was between
(19:36):
me and the door, and she turned around and said
to me, oh, man, what do we do? Her eyes
were Widewood's tearor. We were being quickly swallowed up by
the people that were coming out of the rooms filling
the hallway. The disheveled man attempted to grab my bag
with the camera gear. I was watching the door to
the room that the chief and the police officer had
gone into slowly closing, and the faint glimmer of light
(19:58):
disappearing quickly the doorway. I said to her, I don't know,
but we're following the guy with the gun, and I
pushed her through the door and we came stumbling into
the room and collided with the back of the massive
police officer, who didn't even move or notice that we
ran into him. The door shut behind us, stopping the
day walkers from following us in. As my eyes adjusted
(20:19):
to light, I saw the chief standing in front of
about ten people. He was explaining who we were and
why we were there. We were standing in a main
room of the apartment with all the people in it.
It seemed really small. The occupants all looked a little
confused about what he was saying. They asked some questions
about why we were there and was someone getting arrested,
to which the Chicago police officer responded and said, not yet,
(20:42):
let the doctor speak. The chief asked to be shown
where the deceased was found, and one of them said, well,
over there in the closet. He opened the door and
there was a filthy mattress with another individual sleeping on it.
The chief asked, excuse me, could you move? The man
woke up and was startled to see the chief meta
examiner of Cook County and a Chicago police officer standing
(21:03):
over him, and he said, oh, what's going on? And
the officer said move out of the way now, to
which he did. He stumbled into the main room and
sat down with the other people. The chief looked around,
looked at the mattress and said, oh, interesting, and wrote
some things down. While he was doing this, I noticed
all the people in the apartment were actually smoking, and
(21:24):
there was a dense fog of smoke filling the entire apartment.
Ashtrays were full of cigarettes everywhere, the walls were stained
with nicotine stains, and smoke was so thick that it
stung my eyes and throat and made it a little
hard to breathe. The chief made a quick look around
the rest of the apartment. He made a couple of notations,
and then suddenly said, thank you for your time. And
(21:45):
he turned to my co fellow and the Chicago police
officer and myself and said we're done here. Let's go.
I asked, do we need to take any pictures? And
the chief said, no, let's go. We've got what we needed.
The people still looked confused. They didn't know what was
going on, but there wasn't going to be any more
explanation the officer opened the door into the hallway that
(22:06):
was now packed with people trying to figure out what
was going on and why the police were there. The
officer said, out of the way and proceeded to push
through them, with the chief medical Examiner quickly following behind him.
My koe Fell and I this time ran after them
and didn't linger, but we continued down the hall through
the sea of people and made it to the stairwell door.
The officer pulled the door open and held it open
(22:27):
for us, and once we got in, he came in
behind us, told the people to move on and not
follow us, and close the door, and we started down
the stairway. The superintendent met us at the base of
the stairs and he asked if we had gotten everything
we needed, and the chief said no, I would like
to see the boiler room or where you have the
hot water heaters in the air handling units. The superintendent said, well, okay,
(22:50):
I can show you where that is. We headed towards
another stairwell that headed to the basement, where once again
we descended another group of very dirty stairs and entered
into this dark, poorly lit basement in the bowels of
the building. The perfect place to be murdered by the
candy man. It was huge, with an intricant pipe system
running overhead. A gray, white foaming ooze dripped from some
(23:12):
of the pipes onto the floor. The air smelled like
feet in feces and was thick and was hard to breathe.
The superintendent walked us up to these big industrial machines
and he and the chief talked for a while. I
couldn't hear anything because of the noise of the surroundings,
and so I have no idea what they were saying.
The chief and the superintendent looked at the air handlers
(23:33):
and the heaters, and they all seemed to be in
good working order. And at some point the white foamy
substance dripped onto my head. Thankfully I was wearing a
black knit cap so it didn't get directly on me.
My cofellow tapped me on the shoulder and said, dude,
some of that crap got on you. And the superintendent
overheard this and he said, oh, yeah, those are sewage pipes.
(23:54):
We always have a problem with those leaking. At that moment,
I knew I had some sort of bodily ways on me,
and really there was nothing I could do about it,
so it's just like being at work. At least it
was on my cap and wasn't on my head. The
chief medical Examiner walked around, checked the heaters, looked at
the superintendent, talked some more, asked about routine maintenance and
things of that nature, and after about fifteen minutes he said,
(24:18):
well that's interesting. We're done here and I asked again,
do we need to take pictures? And he said no.
We walked back outside to the empty courtyard. The chief
thanked the police officer. The officer said, you got what
you needed, doc, and the Chief said, I do believe
I have. Thank you, and we got back into the
mad and headed back to the office. As we were
(24:38):
driving back, the Chief said to my Kofell and I,
what did you think about what we saw? We were
both a little bit lost for words because neither of
us had ever experienced anything like that before. And the
Chief said, well, what do you think the cause of
the carbon monoxide was? It was pretty obvious. Neither one
of us came up with a good explanation, and he
finally said, did you see the amount of cigarettes in there?
(25:00):
And how dense the smoke was and how poorly ventilated
the apartment was and how many people were smoking, And
then he said, that's what the elevated carbon monoxide level
was from. It was the fact there was a room
full of people constantly smoking, and that's why his carbon
dioxide was a little higher than normal. It wasn't a leak,
it was just people smoking. A few weeks later, the
(25:22):
drug testing came back and the deceson was full of
cocaine and we had the answer. Caused death, cocaine toxicity,
manner death accident and had nothing to do with carbon monoxide.
And that was it. Case closed. I went to Cabrini
Creens a few other times for other cases, but I
never went back inside the buildings. That was my one
(25:42):
and only toe. Cabrini Greens itself has gone now in
twenty eleven, the last buildings were torn down. The seventy
acres of Little Hell was once again changed and underwent
significant redevelopment, being replaced by mixed income housing. And it
is always in the city of Chicago. Progress continued, ever
changing and making Chicago never the same. And that brings
(26:08):
us to the end of the episode. I hope you
learned something like bread sacks are not just for bread,
and I hope you were entertained until the next time
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