By the time CSU finished and invited me in, I had donned the white Tyvec overalls, hood, and booties that we wear at every homicide scene so as not to track in new evidence. I ducked under the yellow tape stretched across the apartment door and entered the scene. The decedent lay supine on the floor of a rear bedroom. A brief survey of the scene and a first glance at the body seemed to support the cops’ belief that two shots had been fired—there were two holes in a wall of the bedroom, and the decedent had two apparent gunshot wounds. The large pool of blood underneath him seemed also to buttress their belief that one shot had gone through his chest, out his back, and then into the wall, and that the second had grazed the victim’s head as he went down, and then also had gone on to hit the wall. When I examined the decedent, though, I found something that the detectives and CSU had not seen.
But I wasn’t quite ready to delve into it, yet. First I had to figure out the approximate time of death. Neighbors had told detectives of hearing an altercation earlier in the day and of loud popping sounds from the apartment. I began my examination of the body by ascertaining the state of the decedent’s rigor, livor, and algor mortis, which verified a decedent time of death consistent with the neighbors’ recollections.
Then I turned my attention to his wounds. I quickly confirmed that the head wound was superficial and would not have killed him. A shallow graze over his right temple, it had torn through the skin on an upward angle; this led me to suspect that the decedent had been ducking or falling at the time that bullet struck. Next were the torso wounds. There were two, one in the chest and the other was where I suspected it would be, in his back.
Thus far, all evidence continued to support the initial assessment of two shots, both hitting the victim and then the wall. But I had learned the hard way, over the years, not to judge too quickly, and so I continued my examination.
Before inspecting the chest wound itself, I looked at the surrounding skin and clothing, searching carefully for signs of fouling (soot) or stippling (embers). The presence of one or both of these types of gunpowder residue would indicate that this had been a close or contact gunshot. While there had been no such deposits on the victim’s head, I found a small amount of stippling on the front of the decedent’s button-up shirt, around the hole the bullet had made as it entered the victim’s chest—but I found no fouling.
Fouling is the name given to the ash produced from completely burned gunpowder, ash that settles on the skin or clothing around an entrance wound, but only does so when the muzzle of the gun is less than one foot from the victim. Very lightweight, the ash cannot travel in the air more than a foot or so without being dispersed. Moreover, once it settles onto a surface, it can be easily disturbed, and an investigator must take care not to accidentally wipe off this often vital evidence. Stippling is a term describing dark little pinpoint burns that look like black pepper and surround a wound if the muzzle flash of the gun was within three feet of the victim. Stippling occurs because small chunks of burning gunpowder follow the bullet out of the gun as though they were tiny satellite bullets, and embed themselves into the skin or clothes of the victim. Unlike fouling, which drifts like a cloud, the heavier embers that cause stippling travel at great speed, for up to three feet from the gun, and once embedded on a surface are much more difficult to remove.
The presence of stippling on the decedent’s shirt, combined with the absence of fouling meant that the muzzle of the gun had been between one and three feet away from the victim at the time that shot was fired. Things were getting interesting.
Now I could finally examine the torso wounds. The first thing to establish was precisely where the bullet had entered and exited. It was a no-brainer that the hole in the decedent’s chest was the entrance wound, since it was surrounded by stippling. But even had the stippling not been present, I could have deduced that the hole in the chest was the entrance wound because its margin was defined by a characteristic abrasion ring that hallmarks an entrance wound. When a bullet enters flesh, the skin around the entrance spot is “shored,” that is, the underlying tissue braces the skin so that, as the bullet drags the skin into the underlying tissue, it produces a rim of bruising around the entrance spot. An exit wound usually appears different: since there is no underlying tissue layer to similarly cushion the skin, the bullet exits by stretching the skin until it tears through. The resultant wound is usually slitlike and has no bruised margins.
But when I turned over the dead musician, I found that the wound in his back looked almost identical to the entrance wound in front. This back wound also had the classic abrasion ring. After pondering this for a moment, I had a hunch. Using my gloved hand to push aside the pooled and partially coagulated blood under the victim, I found in the parquet floor beneath his body, a tiny pockmark, so small that if I hadn’t been looking for it, it might have escaped detection. Eureka! The wound on the decedent’s back was indeed an exit wound, but a very special type—a shored exit.
The unusual exit wound and the slug that would later be dug out of the floor underneath the pockmark (the bullet from a third shot) established something very important to the investigation: The victim had been shot while lying on the floor. How did I know? Because as this third bullet exited, the floor had braced the skin on the decedent’s back, and the skin was dragged into the floor, causing damage identical to that of an entrance wound.
Now I was ready to reassess the scene. Fortified with the knowledge that three shots had been fired, I was able to reconstruct the likely sequence of events. The first shot had been taken from more than three feet away from the victim. It had grazed the decedent in his head, knocking him down, and then buried itself in the wall. The shooter then fired the second shot, also from some distance away, a shot that missed the falling victim entirely and also ended up lodged in the wall. I knew those first two shots had to have been fired from at least three feet or more away because they left no powder burns on the victim. Another clue to the distance was that the second shot missed completely. Even a five-year-old would have been able to hit a grown man from a distance of three feet. After the first two shots, the shooter had strolled closer to his victim who was by then lying helpless on the floor, dazed, possibly unconscious from the head wound, and he fired the third and final bullet into his victim’s chest—a fatal shot in more ways then one since it left the clue that would prove to be the shooter’s undoing.
With a new understanding of the sequence of events in hand, including that there had been three shots, the cops put their suspect in the “box” at the station house and told him a white lie. They said he had missed a witness who had been hiding in a closet at the time of the shooting. The cops reconstructed the murder scene for the suspect: “You came in; the two of you had an argument; there was a scuffle; your first shots knocked him down, and then, while he was on the floor, you fired into his chest, killing him.”
It was the detail of the singer having shot his victim while on the floor that pushed the suspect to believe the police did have a witness who could later testify against him in court. In reaction, he confessed to the murder then and there, in the hope of obtaining a better plea deal from the prosecutors.
This “trouble in the band” case occurred during the early 1990s, a time when there were many murders in New York City, and cops, EMS, and OCME personnel considered Harlem to be homicide central. On another sweltering hot July morning, I was called to a homicide scene in a Harlem housing project. Housing projects in New York City were dismal and sad places; at night they could be downright scary. We MLIs hated being called to housing project death scenes because invariably the body would be on the top floor and the elevator would not be functioning.
If a Harlem housing project call came in at night, often we would not go directly to the scene, but instead to the local precinct and pick up a police officer to escort us to the body. Yes, there was a cop sitting with the DOA waiting for us. But getting up to where the body was sometimes meant traveling through some of the roughest
turf in the city’s crack wars, which at the time was the major source of the city’s homicide problem. Desk sergeants at precincts would not dole out cops for such escort duty without exacting their pound of flesh. Whenever I’d walk into a precinct at 2:00 A.M. and ask for an escort to a death scene, the sergeant would always produce the smallest female officer on duty, and say, “Officer, will you please escort this much-larger-than-you man to the DOA?” I took their ribbing and kept a smile on my face, because if I was going to walk up fifteen flights of very scary, poorly lit housing project stairs at 2:00 A.M., I wanted to be walking behind anyone who had a gun.
That morning the case to which I was called required no escort because the victim was found during daylight hours, in a ground-floor stairwell. He seemed very young to me, with a face not yet ready to shave, maybe fifteen or sixteen. He had several bullet holes in him, two condoms in his back pocket, and a scattering of crack cocaine vials lay on the floor around him. On this particular day, I was being trailed by two PA students who were rotating through our office from somewhere in the Midwest, and also by a roving reporter for Advance, a monthly magazine for PAs. Because the initial report was sent out over police radios as a double homicide (the other victim had been taken to a nearby hospital in hopes of saving her, which the hospital personnel were unable to do), television crews had also responded and were waiting outside the building. Also present were the usual thirty to forty police personnel who tend to swarm at crime scene like this one; and of course, this being New York City, a large and boisterous crowd had gathered, easily three hundred strong.
It was a bloody scene inside that stairwell, and there was not much room to move around, so by the time I finished examining the victim, I had gotten some of his blood on the sleeves of my shirt. I exited the building and headed toward the police CSU van where I knew I could find a hydrogen peroxide solution that would take out the bloodstains before they set. Since I had blood on me, the television cameras, hungry for interesting pictures, swung in my direction. They were still focused on me cleaning up at the back of the van when two shots rang out. I cursed at myself for not wearing my bulletproof vest on a hot day and hit the deck, as did nearly everyone else in sight, except of course for the two corn-fed, young female PAs-in-training. Being from the rural Midwest, they did not recognize the sound of a gun firing in an urban setting, and I yanked them down beside me.
Then I heard a car door slam shut and a car peel away. I continued to listen, but heard no more shots. Although it seemed almost inconceivable, another murder had just taken place, this time in front of three hundred witnesses, as well as thirty or forty police officials and at least three television news crews. After I ascertained that no more shots were coming, I headed across the street, in the direction from which the sounds had come.
The shooter was already gone, having jumped into a waiting car to escape, but here was the new victim, sagging on the sidewalk, in the process of expiring. I rushed toward him, thinking perhaps that I might attempt resuscitative efforts, but one look at the very large holes in the center of his chest told me that this young man was not going to need my rusty clinical skills. He expired before I actually reached his side.
I was kneeling at the body, perhaps ten seconds later, when a plainclothes cop came over, holding out his old-fashioned six-shooter, pointed toward the sky in a ready position in case the bad guy came back. I recognized the plainclothes cop from previous cases: a deputy police chief in charge of Manhattan North’s detective division. He looked down at me, and at the body, and quipped, “Great response time from the ME’s office.”
Later I learned that the third victim was believed to be the rival gang member who had shot the two in the stairwell and had foolishly gone back to the scene of the crime to watch the hullabaloo. Apparently, as he was gloating, a member of the first victim’s gang had taken revenge for their deaths.
This was not the only time I heard shots fired while out on a case or the only time that those shots resulted in my next scene investigation. The homicide rate in the city was skyrocketing, and we at the OCME were being pushed to our limits in dealing with it. For five years in the early to middle 1990s, I put in an average of eighty hours a week as an MLI-II: The crack epidemic was making the city’s homicide rate soar to more than two thousand a year, but at the same time the city was under a hiring freeze, which prevented OCME from hiring more MLIs to handle our large caseload.
The three victims in the “stairwell-and-sidewalk” case were casualties of that crack epidemic.
Crack cocaine is a terrifyingly addictive drug that is, unfortunately, easy and cheap to make. It produces walking zombies, burned-out people. Studies have shown that a person can become addicted after taking a single dose. During those years of the mid-1990s, we would often be summoned to a crack house, an abandoned building, warehouse, or apartment that had become the location where crack addicts obtained and used their poison—and where, on a regular basis, they perished. In earlier eras, there had been opium dens, but compared to crack houses those opium dens had been orderly, controlled, still-human places. Everything in a crack house that could be sold for money had been sold, so inside there was usually no electricity, no heat, no light, no furniture except for a moldy mattress or two, and, likely as not, no intact windows. You entered a crack house and smelled immediately the mingled scents of urine, feces, vomit, sweat, and despair. There we would find emaciated bodies of addicts dead from overdoses, violence, malnutrition, or diseases that could have been treated but instead had been neglected.
Once, we found an addict’s body in an advanced stage of decomposition in a public housing stairwell; the housing authority police swore that it had not been there the previous day, when they had done their “vertical patrol,” so we had to assume it had come from some interior, crack-house apartment, and that its stench had finally become too much for the other denizens. This was not difficult to believe, as often the bodies found inside the crack houses had obviously been there for quite some time before anyone was motivated enough to alert authorities to their presence.
The combination of crack/heroin-addled junkies and cigarette lighters makes for a combustible mixture, and every now and then a drug den would go up in flames. Most of the fires were accidental, but sometimes not. On one occasion, I was called to the scene of a fire in a supposedly empty, four-story, walk-up building near Harlem Hospital. The fire department, in the process of putting out the blaze, had discovered a victim, burned beyond recognition, in a second-floor room. Already uptown for another case, I was able to respond within minutes of receiving the call, and arrived to join a meeting, outside the building, of local precinct detectives, fire marshals, and the fire chief in charge. Fire marshals are firefighters who, after serving for a number of years with a regular fire company, have taken additional specialized training in fire investigation. They have police powers and carry guns, and in New York City their jurisdiction extends over all arson-related crimes, including homicides.
Louie Garcia, a field supervisor in the fire marshals unit, gave me the rundown. “One body, charred, second floor; building was condemned but it looks like addicts got in and were using the place for a while.” Along with the detectives, Louie and his fire marshal partner, and the fire chief, I trooped upstairs. The risers on the stairs had burned through, so we walked up by stepping on a turgid fire hose that had been run up the stairs. Smoke was still drifting off the walls, and when we reached the second floor, one of the detectives, in a show of bravado, lit a cigarette off a red-hot metal wall stud. As we neared the body, it was clear that the fire had begun on or around it. The flame and burn patterns pointed out to me by Louie indicated that an accelerant, probably gasoline, had been poured over the body and that the fire had spread from there. The floor under the victim appeared pretty burned through, so I asked the fire chief, “Will that floor hold me?” He replied by stamping his foot hard on the floor and grinning.
I approached the body, and just as I leaned over i
t to begin my examination the entire ceiling above me gave way and came crashing down, knocking me to the floor and directly onto the burned corpse. I was covered in about a foot of plaster and burned wood, but luckily no real heavy chunks hit me.
My colleagues dug me out, and as I straightened up, the fire chief held his hands out as if to deny responsibility and said, “Hey, you asked me about the floor!”
I was okay, so we all had a good laugh and I returned to the business at hand, which was to confirm that this was indeed a homicide. From my on-scene investigation, I was able to determine that the victim had been shot at least three times in the chest.
An autopsy the next day revealed that he had died before the fire was started. Despite the ceiling mishap, I bore no grudge against the fire department, and Louie Garcia and I became fast friends. Over the years, I was pleased to watch Louie’s steady climb to the top job of chief fire marshal for New York City.
During the crack epidemic, a rather chilling phrase came into common use among the members of New York’s criminal justice fraternity—“misdemeanor homicide.” A misdemeanor, of course, is a crime that is not serious enough to be a felony; the phrase misdemeanor homicide denotes a murder that the cops would not treat seriously, such as one in which two crackheads gunned down each other. In those years, the city was averaging six homicides a day, of which maybe three were crack related. It was a soul-numbing parade of violence, and after a few years on the job, I understood why the overworked police did not want to treat all homicides with equal seriousness. I first heard the term in East New York, Brooklyn, on Mother Gaston Boulevard—this plague of homicides often took me beyond Manhattan. A plainclothes police lieutenant, a detective, used the phrase in casual conversation with other cops at a scene at which a drug dealer had been mowed down in a hail of gunfire from an Uzi submachine gun. The phrase made its way into popular culture in 1993, when a fictional detective in the television show Homicide: Life on the Street said the line, “Baltimore, home of the misdemeanor homicide.” I am not sure in which city the phrase was actually coined, but in New York, it became so widely used that it provoked an edict from City Hall: no one who worked for the city, as a cop or in any other capacity, was to use the phrase, ever. It was considered demeaning and racist since the overwhelming majority of the victims of the crack epidemic were black or Latino.
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