Dead Center

by Shiya Ribowsky

  There were several clues. The decedent had been a relatively young man, in his forties, and he was slender and appeared to be in good physical condition—not a likely heart attack victim. Moreover, he had died under the sink; even people who have suffered massive heart attacks usually have enough strength and time left to stagger out of such confined spaces before they succumb.

  Going through my usual routine, I went over the scene, examined the body, and found nothing. Nevertheless my inner alarm bells would not stop ringing. Something was wrong here, and I needed to find out what that was. To put an end to my lingering doubt, I did something that I would not have been able to do when I was a more junior MLI-II: I used my senior status to ask my colleague Nick Fusco to come out to the scene. Nick was not an MLI or an ME but an architect who served as OCME’s facilities manager. By my work, I had, I believe, earned enough respect from him that he agreed to meet me at the death scene.

  Soon after he arrived at the scene, he ratified my guess that this was no natural death. He took apart the dishwasher, and in doing so, discovered that when the handyman was wiring the dishwasher into the wall, he had “juiced the ground.” In other words, the handyman had electrically grounded the machine the wrong way, ensuring that if he touched both the exterior metal case of the dishwasher, and something else that was metal or conductive, he would complete an electrical circuit through his own body and electrocute himself.

  Nick suggested that I examine the body for signs of electrocution. There were no outward signs on the body, except for a slightly suspicious mark high on the shoulder where it met the neck. After Nick made the area safe, I crawled under the sink and arranged myself into the position in which the foreman said he found the body. In that cramped position under the sink, I found that my neck was pressed against the waste pipe of the sink. With my right hand, I reached out and could easily touch the outside of the dishwasher. These must have been the two points through which the handyman’s body had created a circuit: hand on the dishwasher, neck on the damp waste pipe under the sink…and ZAP! But this was still a guess on my part. To obtain more information, the body had to be taken back to the OCME and its tissues put under a microscope.

  When we used the microscope to examine what lay underneath the bruised skin of the neck area, the cells there displayed nuclear streaming—the nuclei were not in their usual circular central position in the cells but rather appeared in an elongated position and were lined up facing in a single direction rather than in the usual random pattern. This is why the condition is known as streaming. It is a hallmark of electrocution.

  Based on these findings, we were able to rule that the handyman had died from accidental electrocution, but our job wasn’t finished. We went back to the apartment building and, sure enough, found that all of the other recently installed dishwashers had been wired in the same dangerously wrong way, and if they were left that way, they could have eventually electrocuted the tenants. We saw to it that all of the building’s dishwashers were properly rewired by a licensed electrician. The handyman who had been installing the dishwashers had not been a licensed electrician, and his ignorance of proper procedure had cost him his life.

  We took some satisfaction from our sleuthing and prevention work in the dishwasher case, and my friend Nick was proud to add to his business card the phrase “Forensic Architect.”

  The case was concluded, but two aspects of it continued to bother me. Why hadn’t the cops investigated the possibility that the handyman’s death had been something other than a natural death? More important, why had they accepted the EMS’s assertion that there was no trauma and used that as license to leave the scene? I could only conclude that the cops had been primarily interested in finding out whodunit and establishing whether there had been foul play. Once the detectives in this case had concluded there was no foul play, and thus no perp to chase and collar, they had lost interest.

  I was much more bothered by the lack of assigned responsibility for the handyman’s death. OCME issued a death certificate ruling the death accidental, and certainly it could be argued that the handyman’s death was his own fault and no one else was to blame. But I thought this death had occurred in circumstances that warranted broader investigation. To my knowledge, no police or other authorities investigated whether the owner of the building had tried to keep expenses down by hiring an unlicensed handyman to install the dishwashers rather than using a licensed (and more expensive) electrician. Part of the problem was that no existing investigative body had the proper mandate to look into this death. Only on Law & Order do DAs follow a death back to people at the corporate or other remote levels who might be held responsible. Life ought to imitate art in this instance—doing so might save a few lives.

  There was absolutely no publicity whatsoever about the handyman’s death case. I didn’t mind its absence, even if I thought OCME did deserve some pats on the back for solving it and saving the lives of future tenants who might have been accidentally electrocuted. At the end of the day, that’s our job, one of the many ways in which we work to preserve public health.

  Preserving public safety is an often-overlooked component of what we do at the OCME. Indeed, most people are unaware that many public-health safety innovations and breakthrough research emerge from information collected from death investigators. The OCME participates in the Medical Examiner and Coroner Alert Program (MECAP), a national program that informs authorities and manufacturers about product and therapy safety matters. Many of the safety devices and innovations used every day all over the world—seatbelts, bicycle helmets, child-proof pill bottles, warning labels on toys that contain choking hazards—come in part or in whole from the work of MEs and coroners all across the United States who collect information after a tragedy to help prevent a similar one from occurring. This program has had some great successes—like prodding manufacturers of electronically operated garage doors to install a safety device that prevents those doors from slamming down unexpectedly and killing people, and similar devices to stop car windows from closing when they meet resistance, so as not to garrote a child. Like making certain that the slats on a baby crib are close enough together so that they cannot catch a baby’s head in them and strangle the baby to death. Like lobbying to make smoke and carbon monoxide detectors mandatory equipment in multifamily dwellings.

  New York City is big—really big. One way to fathom just how huge this sprawling metropolis is comes from having intimate contact with its hundreds of miles of train tracks. New York’s subway system is so vast that it contains nearly as many stations as all the other subway systems in the country combined. During an average workday in the city, more than twelve million people will be hurrying about, each seemingly intent on getting where they need to go and not paying very much attention to what’s going on around them or who might be in their way. The wonder is not that we have traffic and pedestrian fatalities but that we don’t have more than we do.

  New York is also a destination city; more than forty million visitors each year come through the Big Apple, and, statistically, if you get that many visitors, some of them are going to die. Some tourists even arrive dead.

  I’ve had to investigate transportation-related deaths of every variety, including those of pedestrians, bicyclists, and of course riders in planes, trains, and automobiles—not to mention boats. With the exception of the Bronx, all of New York City is located on islands, and we have quite a number of docks, piers, and shipyards; many major cruise liners regularly visit the city. The city’s labyrinthine transportation system has been the scene of some strange deaths. And the stranger they were, during my years as a supervising MLI, the greater the likelihood that I would be the one called to the scene.

  My least favorite deaths are those in the subway. I’ve always hated New York’s subways, probably because I lived for four years in Montreal and there saw what a subway system should be like. By comparison, New York’s system is simply abysmal. I am told that it has gotten better since the late
1970s and 1980s, when I rode it to and from school and referred to it as the world’s longest urinal. I stopped taking the subway around the time I graduated from PA school and vowed never to ride it again. Busses work just as well, and they don’t smell as bad. Fortunately, in my job at OCME, I had a car to take me around the city, so just about the only times I went down into the subway was when someone was hit by a train.

  Something about the death of a person struck by a train captures the very root of horror in our imaginations. Among the earliest film footage ever shot was that of a helpless woman bound to the tracks, while nearby the evil villain with the unbelievably long, waxed mustache chortled and gleefully rubbed his hands together. In current movies as well as in the silent film era, the damsel in distress is inevitably rescued in the nick of time by the hero—who must have been resting in the makeup trailer during the cases I was called on to investigate. In reality, instead of being bound to the tracks, the victim in most subway deaths falls or is pushed off the platform and is unable to get out of the way of the oncoming train. It is every commuter’s worst nightmare.

  One of the most horrible such deaths I’ve ever had to deal with was that of a young female visitor to the city who was pushed off a subway platform by a deranged homeless man into the path of an onrushing subway train. Her body was burned by the third rail and crushed by the train—charred and mangled beyond belief, indeed beyond recognition as human and female. Detectives at the scene assured me that witnesses stated that the victim was a woman, but when I examined the remains at the scene, the only way I could tell that she had been a woman was by some long hair and scraps of her underwear. Seeing her mutilated body on the tracks is one of the awful pictures that I carry in my head. It haunts me to this day.

  The case received a tremendous amount of media attention, perhaps because the victim had been a vibrant, beautiful young woman with a promising life ahead of her. She had come to New York to seek her fortune and instead had met an awful end. She personified for me all the horror of sudden, terrible death in the subway. As I said, I hate the subway.

  One of the scariest places I’ve ever been was a subway side tunnel, off the main track and seldom used. It was seventy feet below street level, dark, damp, and infested with vermin, garbage, and every other kind of filth. We’d been called to the scene because a routine maintenance crew, in checking the area, had noticed a foul stench, followed their noses, and found a body. (That must have been fun.) When I was given the call sheet for the case, I had been somewhat amused by the cops’ report of “decomposed man, struck by train,” which had made me imagine a dead and decomposed man walking like a zombie along the tracks until he was struck by a train. Actually, a poor derelict who was making his home in one of the innumerable unused tunnels deep in the subway system had been hit by a passing train, and had been knocked into a side tunnel, where he died, perhaps a month before he was found. The exact PMI was hard to determine because rats had been feasting on him.

  While trains do kill people, it is rare that one arrives in the city with a dead body aboard. This is not so with planes and boats. The most interesting, non-crash-related plane death our office ever handled involved a dead woman in the seat of an airplane that had recently landed at JFK Airport from the Caribbean island of Jamaica. The decedent was a little old woman in a floppy hat, and she was so advanced into rigor mortis that it was difficult to remove her from her seat. Which raised the obvious question: How long had she been dead? The plane trip from Jamaica took five hours, and full rigor usually requires about twelve hours to set in.

  By the time we arrived on the scene, the plane was empty except for a few crew members, the police, the dead passenger, still in her seat in the rear of the plane, and her equally elderly husband, who sat quietly in the first-class cabin where he had been asked to wait. In an interview, he told us a simple but extraordinary story.

  That morning, the last day of their trip to Jamaica, he had awoken in a hotel room to find that his beloved wife of more than fifty years had died in her sleep. He sat on the bed with her for quite a while, trying to decide what to do. The couple was not well off financially, but had saved for a long time to take this trip to the Caribbean. The husband reasoned (correctly) that it would cost many thousands of dollars to have a funeral home prepare and ship his wife’s body back home. But it dawned on him that he had a perfectly good return ticket for her for the flight to New York that was leaving in a few hours. He dressed his wife, and asked the front desk of the hotel to send up a porter with a wheelchair. He dispatched the luggage with the porter, and in the meantime somehow sandwiched her into that wheelchair and took her down to the lobby. Still in the wheelchair, she rode to the airport in a van, her face hidden by the large floppy hat. At the gate, he asked for and received special help in preboarding his “sick” wife who was “sedated and napping.” Helpful flight attendants eased her gently into her seat. (Full rigor had still not set in.) Had his plane not been delayed a few hours in take off, he might have gotten away with the whole deal. But the plane was delayed, so when they finally touched down in New York, she had been dead for so many hours that she was in full rigor mortis, and the napping story had worn a little thin.

  Further investigation revealed that the elderly woman had a history of congestive heart failure and had indeed died of natural causes; OCME issued a death certificate for her and released her body to the husband on the condition that he hire a funeral home to prepare and bury her. Although he must have broken a dozen laws in bringing her to New York, he was not charged or prosecuted for the stunt. To be quite frank, we all admired his moxie.

  New York City sees deaths from car crashes, perhaps not as often as interstate highways do, but often enough, and plenty of pedestrian deaths. More often than not, a pedestrian death happens when a person who took a step or two off the curb into a street as he or she was waiting for a traffic light to change is struck by a truck turning a corner, hitting the person with its back wheels.

  Another type of victim that we see often in the autopsy room is the bicycle messenger. A fixture in Manhattan, these kamikazes on two wheels constantly dart in and out of traffic. Almost every driver, after seeing these bicyclists weave between thundering trucks, buses, and maniacal cabbies, has been known to exclaim, “They must get killed all the time doing that.” Indeed they do—regularly. It’s almost enough to make you want to use the subway.

  Given the volume of traffic-related deaths such as bike messengers, you would presume that OCME would be called to a traffic-related scene investigation every day, but we actually respond to very few. New York City does not allow us to investigate vehicular deaths (traffic accidents) as thoroughly as our counterparts upstate or on Long Island look into deaths on, say, an interstate highway. In this big city, there’s a sense that traffic must be kept moving, that we cannot cordon off the scene for too long, or else we’ll cause gridlock. Accordingly, the OCME is not called to every fatal traffic accident scene; a police department unit, the Accident Investigation Squad, handles most of these.

  This is logical, except that vehicular homicide is one of the easiest forms of murder to get away with. “Oh, no, I didn’t mean to run over her; it was an accident.” Sure, the police department accident investigation teams are good, but they are not as well trained in medical matters as OCME people are, and it stands to reason that since OCME is charged with the responsibility of determining the manner of death, ascertaining it in vehicular deaths should be our responsibility—but it’s not.

  If you’re going to die aboard a ship—and people do die while on cruises, all the time—the Queen Elizabeth II has the nicest little oceangoing morgue in which I’ve ever had tea.

  Most cruise liners have some form of morgue, and many of these are state of the art. The passengers on cruises tend to be middle-aged and older; they dance, exercise, and put themselves through all sorts of unaccustomed exertions after they’ve feasted on food and liquor. On any self-respecting cruise ship, eating is the single
greatest form of activity; the high-fat, high-cholesterol smorgasbord is in action, 24/7. After three or four days of this sort of gluttony, combined with unaccustomed exertion, the potential for guests having either a stroke or a heart attack is high. Though I suppose there are far worse ways and times to die.

  Big cruise ships always have a doctor on board, and an infirmary, so why shouldn’t we expect that such a ship would also contain a small, tastefully appointed, refrigerated morgue that is not, by the way, connected to the refrigerators in which the ship carries its food? I know that cruise lines don’t go out of their way to include such information in their advertising packets, but in truth, cruise ships are floating cities, and actuaries will tell you that if a large number of people are together in one location, particularly if many of them are of a “certain” age, some will die. And the likelihood of someone keeling over while aboard is raised by all that unusual stress that I mentioned. Accurate statistics on how many people die a year aboard cruise ships are very hard to come by, for reasons that you can easily imagine, but between natural deaths, accidents, suicides, and homicides, the per capita death rate on board a large ship is probably no different than that of a major city. We at OCME are regularly called to the docks along Manhattan’s West Side to meet the cruise ships when they arrive with a “special” passenger or two.