January 21, 2026 • 22 mins
Content Warning: This episode contains discussion of death of individuals. If you’re sensitive to this topic, this episode may not be for you.
The line between curiosity and catastrophe is thinner than most people expect. In this episode of Mayhem in the Morgue, Chief Medical Examiner Dr. Kendall Crowns uses a series of foraging mistakes to show how curiosity, mixed with a hint of bravado, can turn lethal when people rely on folklore, hearsay, or incomplete information. From toxin- secreting toads and misidentified “magic mushrooms” to a drowning case complicated by zebra mussels and cyanotoxins, each case tracks the same pattern: confidence first, consequences later.
Highlights
• (0:00) Welcome to Mayhem in the Morgue with Dr. Kendall Crowns
• (0:30) A radio story from Arizona: people reportedly licking toads to get high
• (1:00) A high school “toad hunt” in Kansas goes sideways with the wrong species and 24 hours of vomiting
• (2:30) Colorado River toad, 5-MeO-DMT, and why "toad licking" is dangerously misunderstood
• (5:45) Case one: a 20-year-old “confirms” magic mushrooms with library photos and dries a batch for tea
• (7:30) Psychedelic tea results in vomiting and GI complications, followed by multiorgan failure and death
• (12:45) Case two: a drowning case is complicated by foreign shells in the airway and stomach
• (15:15) Zebra mussels and cyanotoxins enter the investigation
• (22:00) Closing warning: all mushrooms are edible, some only once
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.
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Have a question for Dr. Crowns? Submit them to mayheminthemorgue@gmail.com
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 once again discusses the depths of individuals. If
this sort of thing upsets you, may its suggest you
read a book, maybe something like Cannery Row Well you
may have in the morning with their host, doctor Kider
Crowns today's episode Foraging Misadventures. When I was driving to
(00:29):
work the other day, I heard his story on the radio.
It was about individuals in Arizona that were reportedly licking toads. Evidently,
recent unseasonal monsoonal rains in Arizona had caused an increase
in the appearance of this particular toad. The toads had
come out of their ground habitats to breed in the
puddling water. People believed that if they catched these toads
(00:52):
and licked them, they would get high. When I heard this,
it reminded me of a couple of my high school
friends from years ago. They were really into drugs, and
they were really into hallucinogenic drugs and often talked about
finding new ones. And somehow they had heard a story
about toads that if you licked them you could have
a crazy hallucinogenic experience. Where they found this information out
(01:16):
about these magical toads I still don't know to this day,
but I know they went on a hunt to find
one of them in the wilds of Kansas, and they
were definitely armed with bad information because they caught a
couple of the toads and attempted to lick them and
ended up throwing up for about twenty four hours. They
showed my other friends and I the toads that they
(01:37):
had caught. They were large, light yellow toads with dark
green spots that were outlined by a lighter color. They
had a large lump between their eyes and numerous warts
on their body. Comparing them to pictures in a book,
it appears they had caught a great plane's toad, which
is very common in Kansas and not known to secrete
(01:59):
halloo synogens. It is instead known for secreting a toxic
substance known as buffo toxin. And they were lucky that
all they did was get nausey and vomiting, because if
this toxin is in high enough levels, it can actually
make you go into heart failure. I had forgotten about
this until I heard this radio show all these years later,
and I thought, are these indeed the magical toads my
(02:22):
friends were looking for and after a little research I
found out they just might be. The mythical toad from
my high school friend's quest is known as the Sonara
Desert toad or Colorado River toad. It is a large
olive green to brownish gray toad with relatively smooth skin
(02:44):
and prominent prodiglands behind each eye in some large wartz
on its hind legs. It can be found in Colorado, California,
New Mexico, and Arizona, but definitely not Kansas. So my
friends had been doomed to failure from the start. This
toad is special because it secretes a toxin from its
(03:05):
parodi gland, known as five methoxy dimethyl trip tomine, which
is a neurotoxin and actually, in humans, a powerful hallucinogenic
which can cause audio and visual distortions, alter your perception
of time, as well as amplifying emotional states and feeling
of awareness. It can even make you feel like you've
(03:25):
been reborn. The effects can last for an hour and
leave the user with an altered mood in perception and
so really, can you go on a magic carpet ride
by catching one of these toes and having a good lick?
I had to find out the answer to this question,
and the answer is possibly, but not by directly licking them.
In fact, what most people do is extract the five
(03:47):
methoxydimethyl trip to meine and make it into a paste
and smoke it or do other things with it, but
not lick the toad. Problem with licking the toad is
the substances they are releasing, or when they are captured
by a predator, picked up in a dog's mouth or
something like that, and they release these substances as a
(04:08):
fear response, and they don't regulate how much they release,
and so you never know how much you're going to
get when you attempt to lick one, and if you
get too much of the toxin, it can actually cause
you to have a seizure, go into a coma, and
even die suddenly. Plus they secrete other toxins as well,
which are cardiac glycosides which can cause gastrointestinal issues like
(04:33):
lousy and vomiting and diarrhea, And they can also be cardiotoxic,
which means it results in poisoning of your heart. And
these toxins can cause your heart to slow down, cause
a regular heart rates or dysrhythmias, which can result in
sudden death. From an article I read, it's stated toad
poisoning comes with a high mortality rate, So if you're
(04:56):
into licking toads, it's a risky endeavor that can result
in death, and I wouldn't recommend it. Often when people
experience nature, they take in the beauty, they see, the sights,
they smell the smells, they take scenic pictures. They don't
seek out peril or things that can result in disastrous consequences.
(05:16):
But some people, often males, actively seek these things out
and more often than not, their actions result in a
free trip to the morgue. And also, we will be
playing a double header of everybody's favorite true crime game show,
Is It Alcohol, Meth or Women? So get your scantron
(05:38):
answer sheets out, sharpen your number two pencils, and have
your answers ready at the end of each case. So
let's get started. The first case we'll be discussing. As
a twenty year old male, he loved to go hiking
in the forest and experiencing nature firsthand. And on his
latest hike, he saw what he thought were magic mushrooms.
(05:58):
He went to the library, looked them up, studied pictures
and flipped through many books on mushrooms, and it was
certain he was right. He told his friends he had
discovered magic mushrooms, and he was certain of it because
he had seen pictures in the library. And he said
he was going to go back out there and harvest them,
and asked if they wanted to come along, to which
(06:20):
they all said no, and he said, well, okay, he
would bring them back to share with them and they
would all have a great party. The problem is, though
a lot of mushrooms can look alike, mushrooms are the
member of the Kingdom fungi, which is one of the
largest most diverse groups of organisms, second only to insects.
It has been estimated that there are more than ten
(06:41):
thousand species of mushrooms found in the United States and
the area he was living in in the state of Illinois,
there are at least two thousand species that can occur,
and some of them are edible, and some of them
are deadly, and those deadly ones are fairly similar in
appearance to the safe ones. Steak can have horrible consequences.
(07:04):
When he went out, he ended up finding his quarry.
They were growing in abundance in the wet Illinois woodlands,
popping up on the rotting wood of fallen trees. He
picked dozens of mushrooms and brought them home. He then
dried them out over the next few weeks. Excited about
the possibilities of what was going to happen, and he
told his friends he was going to make a killer's
(07:25):
psychedelic tea and all his friends could come over and
drink his tea and have a crazy, wild party. When
he felt the mushrooms were sufficiently dry, he ground them up,
put them in boiling water, and made them into a tea.
He called his friends and invited them over to partake
in his concoction, but no one wanted to, and he
(07:47):
responded to them with, well, I guess that's more for me.
And he drank his magic elixir and he was disappointed
because nothing happened. Everything was just normal. He didn't hallucinate
or anything. After several hours, though, something did occur. He
began vomiting, and then he began having explosive diarrhea. This
(08:09):
was not the experience he was hoping for, and this
continued for about a day or so, and after it ended,
he called one of his friends and told him how
sick he had been, and they told him, do you
think it was the mushrooms? And he said, it's a
possibility that maybe he had gotten the wrong type of
mushrooms and he wasn't going to try them again. And
(08:29):
his friend told him, well, maybe he should go to
the hospital and get checked out, and he said no,
he was doing better now and he was okay, so
he didn't need to go to the doctors. A day
or two later, he didn't show up to his job
and one of his friends went to check on him.
They had a key to his apartment and when they entered,
they found him on his bed. He was still alive,
but unresponsive and his skin was bright yellow. The friend
(08:54):
called emergency medical services. They responded and took him to
the hospital, where he was found to be in life
her and renal failure. He was admitted to an ICU,
put on a ventilator, and slowly progressed to multi organ
failure and eventually died after several days. At autopsy, he
had mark jaundice and scleral ictorus, which means his skin
(09:16):
was highlighter yellow, as well as the whites of his eyes,
and this is evidence of liver failure. Internally, there was
palmony congestion and edema, which is fluid on his lungs.
His liver was softened in necrotic with areas of hemorrhage,
so basically the tissue was dead and there were small,
pinpoint particular hemorrhages along his kidneys and on the mucosa
(09:37):
of his stomach. He died from multi organ failure, it
was obvious, and the reason his organs went into failure
was most likely due to the mushroom concoction that he
had drank. So the question became what mushrooms were they.
We sent the death investigators back out to the apartment
to see if they could find the mushrooms that he
had consumed. They did find them in the trash that
(10:00):
is Setent had gone out in the woods to find
a particular mushroom known as a liberty bell or liberty cap,
and these are the magic mushrooms that everybody knows. They
are little brown mushrooms with a distinctive conical or bell
shaped cap that contain the psychoactive compounds psilocybin, silocin in baosysteine,
(10:20):
and these compounds can cause visual distortions, mood elevations, and
auditory hallucinations. After being dried. Magic mushrooms can be consumed.
They can be cooked up, put in food, crushed into seasonings,
and of course made into a tea. But he didn't
find those mushrooms. What he found wasn't liberty bells, but
(10:42):
instead mushrooms with the scientific name of Gallerina marginata, which
has the ominous name of funeral bell mushrooms. These are
relatively small, rusty brown mushrooms that can have caps that
are broadly convex to flat to slightly be l shaped,
which makes them easily mistaken for liberty bells. Funeral bells
(11:05):
do not contain silocybin, but instead contain the most potent
mushroom toxin known, which is called amatoxin. Amatoxin poisons the
body by causing damage to liver cells, resulting in cellular necrosis,
which then results in acute liver dysfunction and liver failure.
Amatoxin is responsible for ninety percent of mushroom poisonings worldwide.
(11:30):
Its thermo stable, which means cooking it won't destroy it,
nor just freezing. A single mushroom can contain up to
fifteen milligrams of the toxin and zero point one milligram
per kilogram can be fatal to humans. For perspective, one
hundred and eighty pounds individual is roughly eighty two kilograms,
and that means eight point two milligrams would be fatal,
(11:52):
which is a little over half a mushroom. After the
identity the mushrooms was confirmed, the cause of death was
determined to be amatoxin toxicity and the manner of death
was determined to be accident. Case closed, So pull out
your answer sheets and mark down your answers. Was it alcohol,
(12:13):
meth or women. The answer to this case is it
was women. He was trying to impress some of the
women at work with his forestry knowledge and his fancy
psychedelic concoctions, but he had picked the wrong mushrooms and
thankfully the women he was trying to impress didn't come over,
so we didn't get multiple deaths. The rest of his
drug screen was negative, no alcohol, no math, amphetamine, even
(12:36):
no marijuana. It was just his poor foraging skills that
resulted in his death. This case was a twenty eight
year old meal who was swimming in a lake with
his friends. His friends witnessed him to start struggling to
stay afloat and he went under water and didn't resurface.
(12:57):
His friends panicked. They began swimming and looking for him,
and they eventually found him after several minutes deep under water.
They pulled him ashore and began performing cardipolinary resuscitation and
called nine one one. Emergency Medical services arrived and took
the CPR over and he was eventually airlifted to a hospital.
They had gone return of spontaneous circulation, so his heart
(13:20):
was beating, and a CTA of his head was done,
but it showed he had hypoxic ischemic injury, which means
his brain had not gotten enough oxygen and was basically dead.
A ct of his chest and abdomen showed extensive changes
of his lungs consistent with drowning, and also foreign bodies
in his mouth, the bronchi of the right love of
(13:42):
his lung, and in his stomach. He was placed on
a ventilator and admitted to the ICU, where he continued
to decline and eventually was pronounced dead. I performed his
autopsy and he was a well developed, well nourished male,
appearing the reported age. He had swelling of his brain
or cerebral edema in fluid on his lungs or polmeriadimo.
(14:02):
All these findings are consistent with drowning. When I opened
up his stomach, it contained numerous intact and crushed shells.
I cleaned them up and looked at them more closely,
and they were zebra muscle shells, and I instantly knew
what they were. The shells were also located in esophagus,
and bits and pieces of the crust strup shells were
(14:23):
embedded in the roof of his mouth and in his
gums and tongue. Evidently, while he was out with his friends,
he had decided to consume zebra muscles raw and chew
them and crunch their shells. We had the death investigators
do follow up questioning, and when they questioned his friends
that were at the scene, no one claimed to have
(14:44):
seen him eat anything. But it was obvious he had
done this intentionally. But why law enforcement came up with
the theory that the zebra muscles could have gotten into
his mouth and stomach after he died. But the thing
about it is is he didn't die initially, he was
on respond and also he wasn't underwater long enough for
the zebra muscles to even gotten on his body or
(15:07):
moved in because they don't move that fast, and there
had been no passive flow of water into his airway,
and because they were crushed up, he obviously had chewed them.
And again the question is why, before we go further,
let's talk about zebra muscles, because they did play a
role in this Seedon's death. Zebra muscles are fingernails sized
(15:28):
mullusks that are native to the fresh waters in Eurasia.
Their name comes from their dark zigzagging stripes on each shell.
They have a distinctive flat bottom shape to their shells
as well that allows them to sit flat against solid surfaces.
They are not native to North America and evidently arrived
here in nineteen eighty six and the ballast of Transatlantic
(15:51):
ships delivering goods to the US. And when the ships
entered into port, they would dump the ballast tanks and
the larvae got free and took hold in the Great Lakes.
And after this they spread throughout the US and appear
in lakes and streams almost everywhere. And they accomplish this
by adhering to boats that wearing contaminated waterways that were
(16:12):
then taken to uncontaminated waterways, releasing the mollusks into a
new territory. The United States Geologic Survey as Scientific Bureau
with the Department of Interior says they do not recommend
that zebra muscles be eaten by people, but fish and
ducks eat them and don't die, so they aren't necessarily harmful.
(16:32):
But zebra muscles are so small that you would have
to eat a lot of them to be able to
become full, and you'd have to be pretty hungry to
want to eat them. Zebra muscles reproduce rapidly and quickly
take over waterways in which they invade their filter feeders
and can filter up to a leader of water an hour,
and there'll be thousands of them filtering the water, and
(16:54):
this changes the ecosystem of the waterway that they are
in and promotes the growth of a lot of different things,
particularly harmful organisms. In this particular lake the individual was
swimming in when he died, the zebra muscles had promoted
the growth of cyanobacteria, also known as blue green algae.
At that time of the year, there had been several
(17:14):
large blooms of blue green algae, especially in this lake.
There were warnings put out because several dogs, in particular labradors,
had been playing in the lake and had died from
their exposure to the algae. Cyanobacteria are the most toxic
algae group in freshwater lakes, rivers, and ponds. Their blooms
can look like iridescent slicks or mats of blue green
(17:36):
algae in the water, they can produce toxins known as
cyanotoxins that can cause illness. Common cyanotoxins include microcystins, anotoxins, saxotoxins,
and nodularans. These toxins can cause effects in the human
body that range from neurologic problems, liver failure, and irritation
of the skin, and when the toxins get high enough
(17:57):
in the water, it can pose severe health problems for
people as well as birds and animals, and birds that
can result in avian vacular myelinopathy. This disease causes birds
to crash into objects, lose coordination, fall from the sky,
and exhibit tremors. One interesting fact is a similar neurotoxin
(18:18):
called domic acid, produced by the diatom of the genus
pseudo Nitzchia, caused something similar to avian vacular myelinopathy in
birds in Monterey Bay, California, in nineteen sixty one. It
caused the birds to crash into cars and houses and
other things, as well as fall from the sky seizing
(18:38):
when they were on the ground. This incident was widely
publicized and it became the partial inspiration for Alfred Hitchcock
to write his avian fueled horror movie The Birds. Cyanotoxins
also claimed canine victims due to their propensity to not
care what water they drink and their love of swimming.
The dogs drink the contamina water or lick their skin
(19:01):
covered with the itchy algae and then die from seizures
related to the neurotoxins. Humans can get exposed as well
by swallowing the contaminated water while swimming or eating contaminated
fish or muscles, and you can absorb it through direct
contact with skin. Symptoms and humans can vary depending on
what particular cyanotoxin was at the highest level and when
(19:22):
the individual gets exposed to it. With this case, there
was no real reason why he suddenly started struggling in
the water, so it was made pending because he ate
the zebra muscles and it was so unusual. I really
thought he was going to have methamphetamine in his blood.
I had to send out his gastric contents to an
outside lab to get special tests for the cyanotoxins, and
(19:44):
we waited after a few weeks as toxicology finally came
back and he was found to have several cyanotoxins, specifically microsystems, anatoxins,
and saxotoxins, and these toxins were associated with him consuming
the zebra muscles. The levels that were found in his
gastric contents were not high enough to have a lethal exposure,
(20:05):
but they could have been enough to cause him to
become compromised in the water, resulting in him starting to
struggle to stay afloat and eventually going underneath the water
and drowning. So his cosy death was made drowning with
a significant contributing factor of cyanotoxin toxicity, and the manner
death was made accident due to the fact that he
was probably not forced to eat the muscles, and this
(20:27):
was probably something he did on his own. Till case
closed and once again pull out your answer sheets and
what was your answer? Was it alcohol, meth or women
and the answer is and once again it was women.
Other than the cyanotoxins found in his system, he showed
no drugs or alcohol in his toxicolity. He ate the
(20:49):
zebra muscles completely sober, and the assumption can be made.
The swim group he was swimming with also had several
women in it, and he was probably trying to impress
them with his ability to eat something disgusting. As an aside,
one of the guys I knew in high school, one
of the toad liquors he liked to vomit to impress girls.
(21:10):
He won time, drank an entire two liter bottle of
strawberry pop and yes I say pop, not soda or coke,
and vomited in front of a group of girls at
a mall late on a Friday night. I can still
see him wearing his ACDC Fly on the Wall T
shirt with the sleeves cut off, bent over puking up
(21:30):
bright pink fluid that splattered all over the white and
brown tile of the mall floor. I can also remember
the horrified expressions on the girl's faces before they quickly
ran off, screaming and saying, how discussing we were as
far as I know this tactic never worked for him,
and after high school I lost track of him. I hope,
wherever he is that he's found someone that understands him
(21:54):
and accepts his crazy hijinks, and I hope he's happy,
and that brings us to the end of the episode.
I hope you learned something like all mushrooms are edible,
some only once, and I hope you were entertained until
the next time.
Today's episode once again discusses the depths of individuals. If
this sort of thing upsets you, may its suggest you
read a book, maybe something like Cannery Row Well you
may have in the morning with their host, doctor Kider
Crowns today's episode Foraging Misadventures. When I was driving to
(00:29):
work the other day, I heard his story on the radio.
It was about individuals in Arizona that were reportedly licking toads. Evidently,
recent unseasonal monsoonal rains in Arizona had caused an increase
in the appearance of this particular toad. The toads had
come out of their ground habitats to breed in the
puddling water. People believed that if they catched these toads
(00:52):
and licked them, they would get high. When I heard this,
it reminded me of a couple of my high school
friends from years ago. They were really into drugs, and
they were really into hallucinogenic drugs and often talked about
finding new ones. And somehow they had heard a story
about toads that if you licked them you could have
a crazy hallucinogenic experience. Where they found this information out
(01:16):
about these magical toads I still don't know to this day,
but I know they went on a hunt to find
one of them in the wilds of Kansas, and they
were definitely armed with bad information because they caught a
couple of the toads and attempted to lick them and
ended up throwing up for about twenty four hours. They
showed my other friends and I the toads that they
(01:37):
had caught. They were large, light yellow toads with dark
green spots that were outlined by a lighter color. They
had a large lump between their eyes and numerous warts
on their body. Comparing them to pictures in a book,
it appears they had caught a great plane's toad, which
is very common in Kansas and not known to secrete
(01:59):
halloo synogens. It is instead known for secreting a toxic
substance known as buffo toxin. And they were lucky that
all they did was get nausey and vomiting, because if
this toxin is in high enough levels, it can actually
make you go into heart failure. I had forgotten about
this until I heard this radio show all these years later,
and I thought, are these indeed the magical toads my
(02:22):
friends were looking for and after a little research I
found out they just might be. The mythical toad from
my high school friend's quest is known as the Sonara
Desert toad or Colorado River toad. It is a large
olive green to brownish gray toad with relatively smooth skin
(02:44):
and prominent prodiglands behind each eye in some large wartz
on its hind legs. It can be found in Colorado, California,
New Mexico, and Arizona, but definitely not Kansas. So my
friends had been doomed to failure from the start. This
toad is special because it secretes a toxin from its
(03:05):
parodi gland, known as five methoxy dimethyl trip tomine, which
is a neurotoxin and actually, in humans, a powerful hallucinogenic
which can cause audio and visual distortions, alter your perception
of time, as well as amplifying emotional states and feeling
of awareness. It can even make you feel like you've
(03:25):
been reborn. The effects can last for an hour and
leave the user with an altered mood in perception and
so really, can you go on a magic carpet ride
by catching one of these toes and having a good lick?
I had to find out the answer to this question,
and the answer is possibly, but not by directly licking them.
In fact, what most people do is extract the five
(03:47):
methoxydimethyl trip to meine and make it into a paste
and smoke it or do other things with it, but
not lick the toad. Problem with licking the toad is
the substances they are releasing, or when they are captured
by a predator, picked up in a dog's mouth or
something like that, and they release these substances as a
(04:08):
fear response, and they don't regulate how much they release,
and so you never know how much you're going to
get when you attempt to lick one, and if you
get too much of the toxin, it can actually cause
you to have a seizure, go into a coma, and
even die suddenly. Plus they secrete other toxins as well,
which are cardiac glycosides which can cause gastrointestinal issues like
(04:33):
lousy and vomiting and diarrhea, And they can also be cardiotoxic,
which means it results in poisoning of your heart. And
these toxins can cause your heart to slow down, cause
a regular heart rates or dysrhythmias, which can result in
sudden death. From an article I read, it's stated toad
poisoning comes with a high mortality rate, So if you're
(04:56):
into licking toads, it's a risky endeavor that can result
in death, and I wouldn't recommend it. Often when people
experience nature, they take in the beauty, they see, the sights,
they smell the smells, they take scenic pictures. They don't
seek out peril or things that can result in disastrous consequences.
(05:16):
But some people, often males, actively seek these things out
and more often than not, their actions result in a
free trip to the morgue. And also, we will be
playing a double header of everybody's favorite true crime game show,
Is It Alcohol, Meth or Women? So get your scantron
(05:38):
answer sheets out, sharpen your number two pencils, and have
your answers ready at the end of each case. So
let's get started. The first case we'll be discussing. As
a twenty year old male, he loved to go hiking
in the forest and experiencing nature firsthand. And on his
latest hike, he saw what he thought were magic mushrooms.
(05:58):
He went to the library, looked them up, studied pictures
and flipped through many books on mushrooms, and it was
certain he was right. He told his friends he had
discovered magic mushrooms, and he was certain of it because
he had seen pictures in the library. And he said
he was going to go back out there and harvest them,
and asked if they wanted to come along, to which
(06:20):
they all said no, and he said, well, okay, he
would bring them back to share with them and they
would all have a great party. The problem is, though
a lot of mushrooms can look alike, mushrooms are the
member of the Kingdom fungi, which is one of the
largest most diverse groups of organisms, second only to insects.
It has been estimated that there are more than ten
(06:41):
thousand species of mushrooms found in the United States and
the area he was living in in the state of Illinois,
there are at least two thousand species that can occur,
and some of them are edible, and some of them
are deadly, and those deadly ones are fairly similar in
appearance to the safe ones. Steak can have horrible consequences.
(07:04):
When he went out, he ended up finding his quarry.
They were growing in abundance in the wet Illinois woodlands,
popping up on the rotting wood of fallen trees. He
picked dozens of mushrooms and brought them home. He then
dried them out over the next few weeks. Excited about
the possibilities of what was going to happen, and he
told his friends he was going to make a killer's
(07:25):
psychedelic tea and all his friends could come over and
drink his tea and have a crazy, wild party. When
he felt the mushrooms were sufficiently dry, he ground them up,
put them in boiling water, and made them into a tea.
He called his friends and invited them over to partake
in his concoction, but no one wanted to, and he
(07:47):
responded to them with, well, I guess that's more for me.
And he drank his magic elixir and he was disappointed
because nothing happened. Everything was just normal. He didn't hallucinate
or anything. After several hours, though, something did occur. He
began vomiting, and then he began having explosive diarrhea. This
(08:09):
was not the experience he was hoping for, and this
continued for about a day or so, and after it ended,
he called one of his friends and told him how
sick he had been, and they told him, do you
think it was the mushrooms? And he said, it's a
possibility that maybe he had gotten the wrong type of
mushrooms and he wasn't going to try them again. And
(08:29):
his friend told him, well, maybe he should go to
the hospital and get checked out, and he said no,
he was doing better now and he was okay, so
he didn't need to go to the doctors. A day
or two later, he didn't show up to his job
and one of his friends went to check on him.
They had a key to his apartment and when they entered,
they found him on his bed. He was still alive,
but unresponsive and his skin was bright yellow. The friend
(08:54):
called emergency medical services. They responded and took him to
the hospital, where he was found to be in life
her and renal failure. He was admitted to an ICU,
put on a ventilator, and slowly progressed to multi organ
failure and eventually died after several days. At autopsy, he
had mark jaundice and scleral ictorus, which means his skin
(09:16):
was highlighter yellow, as well as the whites of his eyes,
and this is evidence of liver failure. Internally, there was
palmony congestion and edema, which is fluid on his lungs.
His liver was softened in necrotic with areas of hemorrhage,
so basically the tissue was dead and there were small,
pinpoint particular hemorrhages along his kidneys and on the mucosa
(09:37):
of his stomach. He died from multi organ failure, it
was obvious, and the reason his organs went into failure
was most likely due to the mushroom concoction that he
had drank. So the question became what mushrooms were they.
We sent the death investigators back out to the apartment
to see if they could find the mushrooms that he
had consumed. They did find them in the trash that
(10:00):
is Setent had gone out in the woods to find
a particular mushroom known as a liberty bell or liberty cap,
and these are the magic mushrooms that everybody knows. They
are little brown mushrooms with a distinctive conical or bell
shaped cap that contain the psychoactive compounds psilocybin, silocin in baosysteine,
(10:20):
and these compounds can cause visual distortions, mood elevations, and
auditory hallucinations. After being dried. Magic mushrooms can be consumed.
They can be cooked up, put in food, crushed into seasonings,
and of course made into a tea. But he didn't
find those mushrooms. What he found wasn't liberty bells, but
(10:42):
instead mushrooms with the scientific name of Gallerina marginata, which
has the ominous name of funeral bell mushrooms. These are
relatively small, rusty brown mushrooms that can have caps that
are broadly convex to flat to slightly be l shaped,
which makes them easily mistaken for liberty bells. Funeral bells
(11:05):
do not contain silocybin, but instead contain the most potent
mushroom toxin known, which is called amatoxin. Amatoxin poisons the
body by causing damage to liver cells, resulting in cellular necrosis,
which then results in acute liver dysfunction and liver failure.
Amatoxin is responsible for ninety percent of mushroom poisonings worldwide.
(11:30):
Its thermo stable, which means cooking it won't destroy it,
nor just freezing. A single mushroom can contain up to
fifteen milligrams of the toxin and zero point one milligram
per kilogram can be fatal to humans. For perspective, one
hundred and eighty pounds individual is roughly eighty two kilograms,
and that means eight point two milligrams would be fatal,
(11:52):
which is a little over half a mushroom. After the
identity the mushrooms was confirmed, the cause of death was
determined to be amatoxin toxicity and the manner of death
was determined to be accident. Case closed, So pull out
your answer sheets and mark down your answers. Was it alcohol,
(12:13):
meth or women. The answer to this case is it
was women. He was trying to impress some of the
women at work with his forestry knowledge and his fancy
psychedelic concoctions, but he had picked the wrong mushrooms and
thankfully the women he was trying to impress didn't come over,
so we didn't get multiple deaths. The rest of his
drug screen was negative, no alcohol, no math, amphetamine, even
(12:36):
no marijuana. It was just his poor foraging skills that
resulted in his death. This case was a twenty eight
year old meal who was swimming in a lake with
his friends. His friends witnessed him to start struggling to
stay afloat and he went under water and didn't resurface.
(12:57):
His friends panicked. They began swimming and looking for him,
and they eventually found him after several minutes deep under water.
They pulled him ashore and began performing cardipolinary resuscitation and
called nine one one. Emergency Medical services arrived and took
the CPR over and he was eventually airlifted to a hospital.
They had gone return of spontaneous circulation, so his heart
(13:20):
was beating, and a CTA of his head was done,
but it showed he had hypoxic ischemic injury, which means
his brain had not gotten enough oxygen and was basically dead.
A ct of his chest and abdomen showed extensive changes
of his lungs consistent with drowning, and also foreign bodies
in his mouth, the bronchi of the right love of
(13:42):
his lung, and in his stomach. He was placed on
a ventilator and admitted to the ICU, where he continued
to decline and eventually was pronounced dead. I performed his
autopsy and he was a well developed, well nourished male,
appearing the reported age. He had swelling of his brain
or cerebral edema in fluid on his lungs or polmeriadimo.
(14:02):
All these findings are consistent with drowning. When I opened
up his stomach, it contained numerous intact and crushed shells.
I cleaned them up and looked at them more closely,
and they were zebra muscle shells, and I instantly knew
what they were. The shells were also located in esophagus,
and bits and pieces of the crust strup shells were
(14:23):
embedded in the roof of his mouth and in his
gums and tongue. Evidently, while he was out with his friends,
he had decided to consume zebra muscles raw and chew
them and crunch their shells. We had the death investigators
do follow up questioning, and when they questioned his friends
that were at the scene, no one claimed to have
(14:44):
seen him eat anything. But it was obvious he had
done this intentionally. But why law enforcement came up with
the theory that the zebra muscles could have gotten into
his mouth and stomach after he died. But the thing
about it is is he didn't die initially, he was
on respond and also he wasn't underwater long enough for
the zebra muscles to even gotten on his body or
(15:07):
moved in because they don't move that fast, and there
had been no passive flow of water into his airway,
and because they were crushed up, he obviously had chewed them.
And again the question is why, before we go further,
let's talk about zebra muscles, because they did play a
role in this Seedon's death. Zebra muscles are fingernails sized
(15:28):
mullusks that are native to the fresh waters in Eurasia.
Their name comes from their dark zigzagging stripes on each shell.
They have a distinctive flat bottom shape to their shells
as well that allows them to sit flat against solid surfaces.
They are not native to North America and evidently arrived
here in nineteen eighty six and the ballast of Transatlantic
(15:51):
ships delivering goods to the US. And when the ships
entered into port, they would dump the ballast tanks and
the larvae got free and took hold in the Great Lakes.
And after this they spread throughout the US and appear
in lakes and streams almost everywhere. And they accomplish this
by adhering to boats that wearing contaminated waterways that were
(16:12):
then taken to uncontaminated waterways, releasing the mollusks into a
new territory. The United States Geologic Survey as Scientific Bureau
with the Department of Interior says they do not recommend
that zebra muscles be eaten by people, but fish and
ducks eat them and don't die, so they aren't necessarily harmful.
(16:32):
But zebra muscles are so small that you would have
to eat a lot of them to be able to
become full, and you'd have to be pretty hungry to
want to eat them. Zebra muscles reproduce rapidly and quickly
take over waterways in which they invade their filter feeders
and can filter up to a leader of water an hour,
and there'll be thousands of them filtering the water, and
(16:54):
this changes the ecosystem of the waterway that they are
in and promotes the growth of a lot of different things,
particularly harmful organisms. In this particular lake the individual was
swimming in when he died, the zebra muscles had promoted
the growth of cyanobacteria, also known as blue green algae.
At that time of the year, there had been several
(17:14):
large blooms of blue green algae, especially in this lake.
There were warnings put out because several dogs, in particular labradors,
had been playing in the lake and had died from
their exposure to the algae. Cyanobacteria are the most toxic
algae group in freshwater lakes, rivers, and ponds. Their blooms
can look like iridescent slicks or mats of blue green
(17:36):
algae in the water, they can produce toxins known as
cyanotoxins that can cause illness. Common cyanotoxins include microcystins, anotoxins, saxotoxins,
and nodularans. These toxins can cause effects in the human
body that range from neurologic problems, liver failure, and irritation
of the skin, and when the toxins get high enough
(17:57):
in the water, it can pose severe health problems for
people as well as birds and animals, and birds that
can result in avian vacular myelinopathy. This disease causes birds
to crash into objects, lose coordination, fall from the sky,
and exhibit tremors. One interesting fact is a similar neurotoxin
(18:18):
called domic acid, produced by the diatom of the genus
pseudo Nitzchia, caused something similar to avian vacular myelinopathy in
birds in Monterey Bay, California, in nineteen sixty one. It
caused the birds to crash into cars and houses and
other things, as well as fall from the sky seizing
(18:38):
when they were on the ground. This incident was widely
publicized and it became the partial inspiration for Alfred Hitchcock
to write his avian fueled horror movie The Birds. Cyanotoxins
also claimed canine victims due to their propensity to not
care what water they drink and their love of swimming.
The dogs drink the contamina water or lick their skin
(19:01):
covered with the itchy algae and then die from seizures
related to the neurotoxins. Humans can get exposed as well
by swallowing the contaminated water while swimming or eating contaminated
fish or muscles, and you can absorb it through direct
contact with skin. Symptoms and humans can vary depending on
what particular cyanotoxin was at the highest level and when
(19:22):
the individual gets exposed to it. With this case, there
was no real reason why he suddenly started struggling in
the water, so it was made pending because he ate
the zebra muscles and it was so unusual. I really
thought he was going to have methamphetamine in his blood.
I had to send out his gastric contents to an
outside lab to get special tests for the cyanotoxins, and
(19:44):
we waited after a few weeks as toxicology finally came
back and he was found to have several cyanotoxins, specifically microsystems, anatoxins,
and saxotoxins, and these toxins were associated with him consuming
the zebra muscles. The levels that were found in his
gastric contents were not high enough to have a lethal exposure,
(20:05):
but they could have been enough to cause him to
become compromised in the water, resulting in him starting to
struggle to stay afloat and eventually going underneath the water
and drowning. So his cosy death was made drowning with
a significant contributing factor of cyanotoxin toxicity, and the manner
death was made accident due to the fact that he
was probably not forced to eat the muscles, and this
(20:27):
was probably something he did on his own. Till case
closed and once again pull out your answer sheets and
what was your answer? Was it alcohol, meth or women
and the answer is and once again it was women.
Other than the cyanotoxins found in his system, he showed
no drugs or alcohol in his toxicolity. He ate the
(20:49):
zebra muscles completely sober, and the assumption can be made.
The swim group he was swimming with also had several
women in it, and he was probably trying to impress
them with his ability to eat something disgusting. As an aside,
one of the guys I knew in high school, one
of the toad liquors he liked to vomit to impress girls.
(21:10):
He won time, drank an entire two liter bottle of
strawberry pop and yes I say pop, not soda or coke,
and vomited in front of a group of girls at
a mall late on a Friday night. I can still
see him wearing his ACDC Fly on the Wall T
shirt with the sleeves cut off, bent over puking up
(21:30):
bright pink fluid that splattered all over the white and
brown tile of the mall floor. I can also remember
the horrified expressions on the girl's faces before they quickly
ran off, screaming and saying, how discussing we were as
far as I know this tactic never worked for him,
and after high school I lost track of him. I hope,
wherever he is that he's found someone that understands him
(21:54):
and accepts his crazy hijinks, and I hope he's happy,
and that brings us to the end of the episode.
I hope you learned something like all mushrooms are edible,
some only once, and I hope you were entertained until
the next time.
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