Dead Center

by Shiya Ribowsky

  After my two shifts, I was debriefed by the AG’s office, who then prepared to go in, arrest Smith for, among other things, practicing medicine without a license, and close the operation.

  I was never sure about what happened next, because the AG’s office did not keep me in the loop, but I do know that Smith got away. Somehow, he either got word of the impending raid, or figured out that I had been a plant, and decided to decamp. He went aboard his yacht, slipped the moorings, sailed off, and has not been heard from again. As far as I know, he was never prosecuted, but that particular Medicaid mill was closed; and this intrepid undercover went back to work in the ME’s office, somewhat the worse for wear.

  While these undercover operations constituted the extent of my time working on the enforcement side of the law, my career continued to produce encounters with the DA’s office. When I received my promotion to MLI-II, it meant more than just being able to work without supervision; it also meant that I had finally reached the level where it was acceptable for me to testify in criminal court cases. While it would seem to be a fairly routine responsibility for an investigator, in truth, this was a serious matter with consequences that would reflect on not just my reputation and that of the OCME but also on the defendant’s freedom and the ultimate justice for the victim.

  Before testifying in court for the first time, I was filled with nervous anticipation. Waiting outside the courtroom to be called as a witness, I felt my hands go cold and my mouth dry up. I expected to enter a perfectly groomed courtroom, with dark wood-paneled walls and vaulted ceilings, where no less than Clarence Darrow would speak for the defense, and Law & Order’s Jack McCoy would represent the prosecution; for the judge, I pictured in my mind’s eye a stern yet lovable Fred Gwynne, reprising his judicial role in the movie My Cousin Vinny.

  After arriving at that first courtroom, my expectations were mightily disappointed. To my inexperienced eye, the hall of justice seemed shabby, and the judge, lawyers, and other staffers appeared bored and perfunctory in the exercise of arcane rituals that I mostly couldn’t follow. Over the years, though, by taking part in and observing many trials, I learned that while most of New York’s real-life courtrooms are nowhere near as well appointed as the courts seen in Law & Order, and while the personnel staffing them may not be as exciting to watch, they get the job done. I understood why the Manhattan DA’s office ranks among the best in the United States and learned that what I had mistaken for perfunctory effort was actually a display of competent professionalism, as the assistant DAs went through the innumerable steps necessary to bring an alleged perpetrator to justice.

  In that first trial, I was called as a Fact Witness, testifying to the provenance of blood I had drawn for DNA testing. In New York County courts (and, I am sure, in most other jurisdictions), in order to have an object or record admitted into evidence, its pedigree or provenance—from whence it came—must be demonstrated. This means that someone has to say, under oath, or be otherwise able to prove, where the evidence came from, and where it has been, each step of the way, from the moment it was found until this very moment when the evidence is being offered to the court. Often there is a chain-of-custody record, and it suffices. But many times, establishing the pedigree of a particular piece of evidence requires witness testimony, and that was to be my job in this first trial.

  The night before I was to testify, I was sleepless, imagining the fierce barrage of questions I would receive from the pitiless defense attorney. In truth, my debut was straightforward and matter-of-fact. It went like this: “Yes, I drew that blood, I gave the blood to that detective, and yes, that’s my signature on the envelope seal.” The evidence was admitted into the record, and I was dismissed without as much as a raised eyebrow from the defense attorney. I left the courtroom with a new perspective on my relative importance in the grand design of the criminal justice system.

  Of course, getting physical evidence admitted into a trial isn’t the only thing done by Fact Witnesses. Actually, most of the testimony in ordinary trials is delivered by Fact Witnesses who say such factual things as “I saw Johnny shoot Jimmy.” Fact Witnesses testify to what they saw, or heard, or know to be true because they have first-hand knowledge of it. What Fact Witnesses do not do, cannot do, is render an opinion. That privilege is reserved for the Expert Witness.

  Later on, as a natural result of my MLI-II work on a case, I was called by the DA’s office to testify for the first time as an Expert Witness. The prosecutor needed my testimony about the victim’s time of death so that he could then elicit testimony that would place the defendant at the scene at around that same time. But for me to testify as an expert, since I had never done so before, I would first have to be qualified. This would occur, during the trial, in front of a jury; the process is called voir dire. In it, the prosecutor would present me and explain to the court why I should be permitted to testify as an expert. The defense attorney would also have an opportunity to try to discredit me, and thus prevent me from testifying or leave a doubt in the minds of the jurors as to what I would say when testifying.

  To my surprise, I was not nearly as nervous as I had been prior to my testifying the first time as a Fact Witness. Perhaps that was because, by this point, I had given testimony in a number of trials, or perhaps it was due to my feeling of confidence that I was, by now, indeed, quite an expert in my job. The prosecutor elicited my experience through his questioning: my training in medicine as a PA, my training at the ME’s office as an MLI-I, and my independent work as an MLI-II who had already, I testified, investigated hundreds if not a thousand death scenes.

  Then, the defense attorney, as I had expected him to, challenged my credentials, and I raised the ante, saying that I had already investigated more homicides in my relatively brief career as an MLI than most homicide detectives do in their entire careers.

  He was unable to dispute that, but in his parting shot at me, the defense attorney uttered something like, “Yeah, yeah…but you’re not a doctor.”

  I know an opening when I see one. Did this attorney think he was the first person to needle this nice Jewish boy from Brooklyn about not being a doctor? “No, I’m not a doctor, but you’re not a doctor either,” I responded.

  The jury guffawed, and I think even the judge chuckled, but he cautioned me to confine myself to responding to the questions, not to commenting.

  “Respectfully, judge, I am being responsive. My point is that this attorney does not need to be a doctor to do what he does, and I don’t need to be a doctor to do what I do. In fact, I am fully qualified to do what I do. The city’s administrative code says that MLIs are to be PAs, and I have all the proper training and credentials to perform as an MLI-II. The job is specifically made for a PA and not for a doctor.”

  At this point, the judge qualified me as an expert with no further questioning. He also instructed the jury that I was an expert, that they were to consider my testimony as they would that of any other expert, and that they were not to hold it against me that this was the first time I’d be testifying as an Expert Witness.

  Thereafter, I testified as an Expert Witness in a number of cases. In a few, I provided crucial testimony that helped lead to a conviction—for instance, in the case that Perry Mason would no doubt refer to as the “box of diapers” homicide.

  The incident took place at a bodega (a neighborhood convenience store), and began just after midnight in the Washington Heights section of Manhattan, when a new father was sent out of his apartment by his wife to buy diapers for their infant. He went to the bodega and found one lone box of Pampers on a shelf. He grabbed it. Another customer in the store claimed that it was his box to buy, that he had just put it down for a second while fetching a soft drink. The two fathers quarreled. The soda-grabber left the store, but came back a few moments later, aimed a gun at the new father, who was by then at the register with the diapers, and killed him with a single shot to the head.

  When I arrived, I found the decedent lying near the counter, hi
s body angled away from the door, and an undisturbed pool of blood surrounding his head on the floor. The box of Pampers was still on the counter, waiting for checkout. The employee behind the counter told the cops the story of the altercation, and what I found while examining the scene corroborated his account and more.

  The shooter was soon arrested and charged with murder.

  I was asked by the DA’s office to testify at his trial. Although it had seemed to me earlier like an open-and-shut case, what with the physical evidence and the testimony of the store employee, it was not because the defense was arguing that the shooter had killed the new father in self-defense. The shooter’s attorney contended that either the police or EMS had moved the body to the position in which it had been found—that the decedent had actually been shot closer to the door, where the alleged struggle had taken place, and had later been moved to the site next to the counter and cash register.

  Given what I’ve conveyed earlier in this book about EMS’s willingness to disturb a homicide scene in a vain attempt to resuscitate a dead body, there could have been good reason to accept the defense’s contentions. However, the evidence did not support the defense’s contention. Having done my work at the death scene carefully, I was able to show in the courtroom, with the aid of photographic blow-ups and diagrams, what had actually happened in the bodega. If you stood the father up, I told the jury, you would find him at the counter, with his body turned in the direction of the door, where the shooter had entered. He had fallen directly backward under the impact of the bullet.

  In addition, there were no powder burns on the decedent’s clothing—which meant that he and the shooter had been at least thirty-six inches apart—providing evidence that they had not struggled and that the shooter had been far enough away so that he did not have to defend himself against the new father’s purported attack.

  I also demonstrated other evidence from the scene that further belied the shooter’s claim of self-defense. There were no bloodstains close to the door, where they would have had to be if there had been a struggle. The only blood (aside from modest spatter on the aisle behind the decedent) was pooled under the victim’s head, which similarly argued against the body having been moved by the cops or EMTs. Finally I showed the jury that the pool of blood beneath and around the victim’s head had perfect margins and told them that once such a pool is formed, it cannot be disturbed and then put back together again without breaking the meniscus (the almost invisible but palpable outer shell of a liquid). “You can’t collect blood and push it back into shape,” I said to the jury. “It smears.” I asked them to recall seeing drops of their own blood fall from finger-pricks or other injuries; those drops remain intact until disturbed, but once violated, they couldn’t be moved without smearing.

  With those words, the jury understood that the new father could not have died while attacking the shooter, rejected the defendant’s claim of self-defense, and convicted him of murder.

  Frequently, the beginner MLI-IIs are handed the cases that appear to be routine and don’t require a veteran’s eye for detail. While this was initially the drill for me, as I became a more experienced and seasoned MLI-II, more of the curious and unusual death scenes came my way.

  On one such occasion, I was called to a pizzeria that was located on a busy crosstown street in mid-Manhattan. The owners had decided to make a backyard palazzo for outdoor dining, and the contractor whom they hired to dig up the spot had soon turned up bones—lots of bones. Gigantic bones, some twenty to thirty inches long and nine to ten inches in diameter. Bones so big that the contractor and the restaurateurs thought they might belong to dinosaurs.

  Though these remains were clearly not human, the drill in New York City is, if you find bones, you call the ME’s office. Summoned to the scene by police, I was immediately able to verify the bones were not human. And our anthropologist was later able to confirm that they belonged to a large species of hog.

  One of the basic facts about Manhattan is that each building site has been used for four or five different purposes in the city’s nearly four centuries of existence. Examining the historical records of the building, we shortly learned that at the turn of the twentieth century, the restaurant’s site had been the location of a butcher shop. Evidently the butcher had carved up the hogs on the site and buried the meatless bones in the backyard. I was told that the cache of bones went down twenty feet.

  The owners of the pizzeria, I think, must have been disappointed that the bones were not those of dinosaurs, whose presence might have added a certain cachet to the palazzo.

  In truth, finding bones in New York City is not that unique. Whether they’re left out on the street or buried in the ground, they seem to turn up regularly. Perhaps the most amusing bone case I was ever called out on involved a collection of bones found on the street in a black plastic bag. Recently, a dead baby had been discovered in such a bag on a New York street, and the tabloids and the local television news were full of the tragedy. And, as often happens when something of that nature is publicized, in the weeks after the event, people’s eyes were sharpened for such an occurrence, and we got many calls on similar-looking problems.

  It was another one of those blistering hot days in the city. A small crowd had gathered, kept from an area near the side of a building by yellow tape. I found a rookie cop, as usual, sitting alongside the bag of bones, sweating, nervous, and glad to see me. His look told me that he thought this could be a homicide—which would mean lots of paperwork and other botheration.

  I opened the bag, stuck in my gloved hand, and pulled out a bone. It was large and could have been a section of thighbone, but I wasn’t certain. However, the bone was covered with a certain dark brown patina, as though it had been painted with shellac, and it had a peculiar odor. I pulled out a few more bones of similar size, and they all had the same odor and patina. The rookie cop, curious, had edged quite close to me.

  I turned to him and said, “If this is a homicide, then we’re looking for Emeril Lagasse.”

  He didn’t get the joke, so I explained. The Food Network show host and star chef uses a lot of hickory smoking in his barbecue and other preparations in his cooking. The bones in this instance, too, had been smoked with hickory—not for human taste buds, however, but for the delectation of dogs. I had seen many similar cases: each year, we actually receive a number of similar calls in which large bones, usually bovine, are dumped on the street, usually after a dog has chewed them.

  I always kept an open mind, though, because the bones did not always turn out to be cattle. One day we received a call about a finding of bones that sent me out to Governor’s Island. This island, off the south end of Manhattan, was then owned by the federal government and used by the Coast Guard. To reach it, you had to take a ferry from Lower Manhattan, which I did—a nice trip on a nice day. The island is an historic site. It has several complexes of buildings on it, including an old fort and even a small nine-hole golf course. There were also a number of parking lots, and the Coast Guard had been digging a trench for an electrical conduit through one such paved-over parking lot when they turned up some human-looking bones and called the police. (Even though a Coast Guard facility is federal property, the local police and OCME have jurisdiction over dead bodies.) Naturally the police called us, and when I debarked the ferry, I was met by Frank Libby, a Coast Guard chief warrant officer, who escorted me over to the site and filled me in on how the bones had come to be found.

  The hole in the parking lot was quite long and about four feet deep, and I spent several hours hanging upside down, looking into it, brushing soil away from the bones and gingerly exposing them. They were, indeed, human bones and from more than one body. Upon closer inspection, it became obvious to me that these bones were not modern. There were no coffins; either there had never been any or they had rotted away long ago. There was no dental work on the teeth in the skulls, which placed the period of the deaths before modern dentistry. Augmenting that notion was a long-barreled
, small-chambered pipe that I found near the bones, which looked to be Dutch—after all, New York had once been Nieuw Amsterdam, and Governor’s Island had been one of the first Dutch outposts here. With these clues in hand, I dubbed the remains archaeological and suggested that the Coast Guard have a museum look into them.

  The Museum of Natural History was called, and their staff eventually took quite a few skeletons from the trench. The bones were determined to have most likely come from a Dutch hospital on the site in the 1600s, possibly the victims of tuberculosis or another wasting disease.

  EIGHT

  AFTER A FEW years as an MLI-II, I became a senior or supervising MLI. This new designation was an in-house title only, since the city had not yet gotten around to creating the actual title of MLI-III. Official or not, in this capacity I was responsible for supervising the work of the MLI-Is, scheduling all of the Manhattan MLIs, training newly hired MLIs and MEs, and acting as a clinical “preceptor” to the droves of residents, medical students, and PA students who rotated through our office. Last but not least, I was also getting to handle some interesting and unusual cases.

  One of these didn’t initially present as all that unusual to the detectives who first investigated it. The death scene was in a high-rise apartment building that had been undergoing renovation. A handyman had been installing dishwashers in a line of apartments up and down the building, and as he was installing the ninth dishwasher that day, he died, right under the sink. A few hours later, the construction foreman overseeing the renovations found him and called 911. EMS pronounced him dead at the scene. And even though they did not attempt CPR (because he was already exhibiting rigor mortis), they did—as usual—disturb the scene by pulling him out from under the sink. The NYPD detectives, learning from the EMT that the body had no visible trauma, concluded that the death was from a heart attack, and left the scene. When I looked around, I felt there was just something wrong with this judgment. Over the years, I’d developed what old-hand MLIs call “scene instinct,” which in this instance was reminding me that natural heart attack death scenes feel different from those of workplace accidents. And this one felt like the latter.