Coroner's Journal

by Louis Cataldie

  It’s called cognitive emotive dissonance. You know it cognitively. It’s a dangerous place. But emotionally you can’t make the connection that it’s really happening.

  I thought of the people driving by right now, unaware that one block off the boulevard, two kids killed another kid in broad daylight. I reflected on how insulated we become in our own little worlds, and how false that security is.

  Tyrone was a skinny kid—a skinny kid with two bullet holes in his chest. There was hardly any bleeding, which told me he had died quickly—probably a hole in his heart. I noted a tattoo on his right shoulder and asked the detective if it had any particular significance.

  “Yeah. Seen it before. Gang tattoo.” His matter-of-fact response was chilling. This would likely mean gang retaliation and more kids being murdered.

  There was an empty gun magazine at Tyrone’s feet. I could tell without touching that it belonged to a Browning 9mm semiautomatic pistol. The pistol was nowhere to be found. Tyrone had several rounds of 9mm ammunition in his front pocket. No two of the cartridges were of the same brand or bullet design. I suppose he had acquired them individually, whenever the opportunity presented itself.

  The detective was also going through his paces. He had been in homicide for many years and he was familiar with this neighborhood, or “hood.” He knew the drill cold. This would not be a mystery for long. Someone would talk. Hell, he figured to have this one wrapped up by sunset.

  I asked the detective for an opinion about the pistol magazine. He said that one of the shooters had probably taken Tyrone’s gun. Or someone else had come along after the murder and picked up the gun. “Of course, it ain’t that hard to buy a stolen gun up in this area.”

  People were beginning to gather. The news media arrived. Tyrone was the star attraction today. I cringed at the thought of his mother being informed that her teenage boy was dead. Hopefully, we would tell her before she saw it on TV. But both the detective and I knew that the grapevine—the underground telegraph, or “the drums”—would have already gotten the information to her. As we stood there rehearsing how to break the news to her, she probably not only knew her son was dead but also who had murdered him. We also knew that it was best to move Tyrone’s body to the morgue as soon as possible, because things tend to get really crazy out here when a kid has been murdered.

  Even though I was green to the ways of city life, I didn’t see a drug dealer shot by rival gang members, nor do I today. I see a skinny kid with two bullet holes in his chest. I see a scrawny little teenage boy dressed like any other—no gang colors, just a white T, shorts, and a ball cap. I see him often.

  A QUARTER-INCH FROM FREEDOM

  “We got a house fire, Doc—over on Monet—Mall City—they’re still fighting the fire. . . .”

  The knot starts to grow as soon as I hear the words “house fire.” I’ve been to too many of these, I guess—but one is too many. The knot turns to nausea as the next anticipated words reach out through the phone and slap me—“There’re two children trapped inside . . .”

  Shit! . . . I’m angry, and the visuals of previously burned children rush up from the inner recesses of my brain, and the haunting intensifies . . . the dead children call out, and the call echoes in my brain . . .

  “We’re still here, you know, and we always will be.”

  I pause for a moment. Why am I doing this again? I feel guilty about questioning myself.

  It’s about nine P.M. in the fall of 2002, almost three full weeks before trick-or-treaters raid the neighborhood. As I turn onto Cézanne Avenue, I see the flashing lights about six or seven blocks down. The outskirts of the crowd begin at about three blocks out. The main crowd has gathered and is five deep at the crime-scene tape barrier. It’s muggy and the acrid smoke assaults me. The media is here and we exchange a wave to the tune of “Lemme know what you find, Doc.”

  There they are, the “usual suspects,” as they say. One of my investigators has arrived and is standing by the coroner van. Hoses are stretched across the parking lot. Smoke is still seeping out of a hallway. One has but to trace the smoke to the crime scene. A cascade of water is pouring out of the building and onto the parking lot. Of course, all electricity has been cut to the apartment complex.

  Should have put boots on. Nice job, Lou. Oh well. Too late now.

  The detectives are in a huddle with the firemen and the arson investigators. We exchange greetings and I get the rundown. At any fire, FD sets up an incident commander. The police are there to determine if it’s negligent homicide or, worse, “intentional.” The detective begins: “Okay, here it is. Mom leaves the two kids alone—she says for just a few minutes. We strongly question that, of course. The place catches on fire. We have two dead children in the corner of the living room. We think the fire started in the bedroom because of the fire damage—well, you’ll see for yourself. . . . Actually, we don’t know if we are going to charge the mother with negligent homicide.”

  I ask, “Where is the mother?” Of course what I really mean is: What is her affect? Is she duly upset? Is she loaded on alcohol or drugs? Is there a history of call-outs to this address? Is there any case file with child protection? Was someone else living in the house—a husband? A boyfriend? Does he have a record?

  “She’s hysterical and in the back of one of the units. We are taking her downtown but she can’t really tell us much right now,” he responds.

  I explained my position: “Here’s the deal for me. I am going to ‘post’ both of them in the morning. I’ll do X-rays to rule out fractures and the like. I’ll be looking for fresh fractures which might indicate recent trauma, and I will be looking for old fractures that might indicate a pattern of abuse. I’ll also get some blood chemistry to check for smoke inhalation and toxicology. Right now, I’ll hold them in the cooler until you complete your investigation and we complete ours. We can get together in the morning to decide where we go from there.”

  We agree to the plan, break the huddle, and go to work.

  The investigation will include all of the above and will ultimately be reviewed by the state child-death review panel. Maybe we can avoid similar tragedies.

  The apartment opens into a breezeway. The door was locked when the firemen arrived. There was a large glass picture window that is now a gaping hole—probably shattered by the firemen, or perhaps by the intense heat within the apartment, as the kids were being literally cooked.

  In the corner, by what was the picture window, are two small children. The older child, maybe four years old, is a boy. He is covering his little sister, who is about one or two years old. At least that is my guess. The flashlights give little detail—or too much. The steam is still coming up from the burned furniture and the water is several inches deep and black. It smells of burned wood and textiles and burned flesh.

  The light beams hang in the air because of all the smoldering materials, many of them carcinogenic—part of the job. Just because the fire is out or under control doesn’t mean the smoke has cleared. The FD has a huge fan going via their noisy generators. It helps some. We are standing in a couple of inches of water and wondering if some stray electrical current is going to make us the next victims.

  It stinks. The smell of cooked human flesh only becomes more intense when we disengage the two little corpses from each other. No one says a word—the furrowed brows and grim facial expressions say it all. The corpses are handled ever so gingerly—a last act of guardianship over these bodies. It’s about honor, respect, and spiritual values.

  The little bodies are stiff and hot to the touch. It appears as though the brother was indeed trying to protect his sister. They are frozen in time, like the bodies at Pompeii consumed by Mount Vesuvius when it erupted.

  The little girl is not as burned as the boy. His body and a pillow offered some protection to her. All of us want to think that he was trying to protect his sister. It’s part of trying to lessen the horror for her, hoping that someone would champion her, since her mother obviously
had not done so. Maybe it is the responders wanting to think that deserted kids somehow get by taking care of each other, or wanting to think that the little girl received some comfort, hope, a semblance of protection that made her death less horrific for her. Maybe it’s just that everyone needs a hero and we all tend to look for one. The Hero with a Thousand Faces comes to mind. I don’t know. It is what it is.

  We will never really know. I can only imagine the fear and horror these two babies must have gone through. I envision them trying to get the door unlocked and then having to retreat to the corner of the room. Screaming for their mother and dying there in the corner, just a thin glass pane away from safety. What is that . . . a half-inch? A quarter-inch of glass away from being burned alive? Questions that will never be answered come to the forefront of my thoughts, but the big one is: Why? A quarter-inch and they are out of harm’s way. It’s like being tormented or taunted—such a violent, undeserving ending. In that split second, questions that span the time of our existence on this planet rush forth—questions of religion and spirituality. But . . . deal with it later. Back to work, Cataldie!

  We pick them up, put them in the child body bags, and take them to the van. There is something innately wrong with even having child body bags. That always bites at me.

  We call it decompression. A term we took from deep-sea divers. When you are under so much pressure for so long, you need time to decompress before you go back into your real world or into your “normalcy.” So, like a diver, you need to come up slowly and stop at checkpoints to adjust along the way back up. Our checkpoints might be going to the Waffle House to talk before going back home. It’s a way of trying to leave the job at the job. In reality it just allows you some functionality. You never totally leave it—“it” being the job and some horror or tragedy you just dove into and came out of. Decompression helps, because if you don’t decompress the pressure builds, and the explosion is released, accidentally, sideways on an innocent target. Let me give you an example. I have a really rough day. I walk in the door. De asks me: “How are you, sweetheart?’

  And I blast her: “What the hell do you mean by that. I’m shitty. Get off my ass!” I just vented sideways. If you don’t decompress, by talking about it and processing it, it all goes underground and comes out in suicide, addiction, divorce, gambling, extramarital affairs, fighting, and other risky behavior. Critical incident stress debriefing is a similar tool whereby responders gather up after the incident and just share what they saw, heard, smelled, felt, experienced. You don’t have to talk. But you have to go. The only way to take the stigma out of a cop or fireman seeking help sometimes is to make it mandatory—that way you don’t appear to be the weakest link. There is a social worker to facilitate the process.

  It’s about midnight when I get back home. Sleep is not even a remote consideration. I’m way too geared up for that. The household is asleep. My clothes smell of smoke and death. So do I.

  I try to keep quiet, but my pacing about awakens De. She sees the pain in my eyes, smells the smoke, and just sits there with me in the dark living room.

  It is particularly cold in the morgue this morning. Perhaps it’s just the chill of dealing with dead children, but I won’t dwell on the reason. My job is to be professionally objective and get “just the facts, ma’am.”

  We break the coroner’s seal on the bag and the smell of burnt flesh permeates the whole building. I feel the sensation of nausea creeping into the back of my throat. I know how to fight it. Take a few deep breaths and accept the smell. It works for me—most of the time. The horrible odor doesn’t go away. You never get used to it. You tolerate it.

  I’ve bought various sprays that promised to neutralize the smell and not contaminate the evidence—didn’t work. There was one case, however, when I had to put on a fireman’s SCBA oxygen tank. A fat guy died at the Salvation Army. Dead for about a week. Hot room. I smelled him when I got out of my car—in the driveway of “The Sally” and he was in the back upstairs—take it from there. When I tried to move him, he had slippage and his skin came off accompanied by fluids. . . . But ordinarily I just take some deep breaths and dive in. If you blot out the smell, you might miss a smell that is a clue. Nothing works. You just accept it and do your job.

  A random thought wanders through my brain: Though I have been on the job nearly a decade, for the first time I notice the autopsy table is too big for a little four-year-old boy. They don’t come in kiddie sizes. No, and they’re not supposed to.

  He lies there, compliant and awaiting our examination—my euphemism for his autopsy.

  We start: “The body is that of a four-year-old male who died in a house fire . . .”

  Inspection of his little body reveals no evidence of child abuse, and there is soot in his little nose. There is evidence of thermal injury—burns—over about 60 percent of his body.

  Michael Cramer, my trusted forensic pathologist, performs the autopsy. The announcement is made signaling the start of the internal examination. He pierces the stiff body with the scalpel, and begins the typical ritual of our profession—the first cut—except there’s nothing “typical” about cutting open a four-year-old child.

  The scalpel is pushed through the child’s skin and across his little chest and then the “V”-shaped incision is made from the midpoint of that cut, then down to his pelvis—a familiar “Y” pattern made by many in this line of work. No one in the autopsy theater says a word. The silence is unnerving. Even the hard-core veterans are having a hard time of it.

  A dissection of the neck reveals soot in the tracheal area and upper airways. The remainder of the autopsy is “unremarkable,” meaning he was just a healthy kid several hours ago. The knot is back in my gut. A chemical analysis of his blood reveals an elevated carboxyhemoglobin level—that’s the good news. He died of smoke inhalation. Smoke and combustion chemicals including carbon monoxide get into the lungs and cause an acute shortage of oxygen so that the person dies of asphyxia, rather than being burned alive.

  A theory emerges from the FD: the fire started in the bedroom because the little boy was playing with a lighter in the apartment and set a broom on fire. The fire starts and they run into the other room. As the fire increases, smoke forms in a closed environment. The AC may be acting as a mechanical bellows. The children’s eyes start to burn, they inhale smoke and start to cough. Their little airways—about the size of a drinking straw—become irritated; more coughing, and swelling of the airway; soot makes its way into the nose and upper airways; the air is extremely hot now, adding to irritation. The oxygen in the small apartment is being consumed; soon there is none to breathe. If they are still able to scream and cry, their little voices are hoarse and choked. Their shortness of breath increases their panic. They are bewildered, and the low oxygen adds to the confusion. They may seizure or spasm as they enter the final death throes. Mercifully, the lack of oxygen kills them before the flesh starts to bubble off of their bones.

  He was dead before the flames got to him. I glance up around the room. It’s a tough autopsy. It tells on all of us. We gently stitch the incisions up and put him into a new body bag for his ride to the funeral home.

  I am zoned out as I stand there looking at the little body bag and “dealing with it.”

  The harsh, grating sound of a shelf being pulled from the body cooler elicits a startle response. It ain’t over yet. . . . The body is that of a two-year-old female who died in a house fire . . .

  In the end, we confirm that the little boy had evidently been “playing with fire.” Mom had been away more than a few minutes.

  The cause of death for both children: smoke inhalation.

  Manner of death: accidental.

  That Saturday, Mom attended the funerals of her two children with instructions that on Monday, she would go to the police station to turn herself in and be arrested for negligent homicide. She complied. I don’t know the final outcome of the case.

  CHRISTINE NOEL LOVE

  “I thought
it was a doll at first but then I realized it was real, and that’s when we called the cops,” said the BFI garbage employee who initially discovered the body of Baby Jane Doe, a few hours old in the back of his truck.

  Who speaks for the dead? Who speaks for abandoned, murdered babies?

  On a cool morning in December 2002, close to an Exxon refinery off Scenic Highway in north Baton Rouge, I gazed at the horror before me. Trying to look for clues and strategizing how to get the body out of the back of the truck, I felt those demons creeping up on me. Demons that cause errors that lose cases in the courtroom. These demons lurk within us with such names as judgmentalism and speculation. Most assuredly evil is visiting upon us this day.

  In the midst of cascading negative emotions, it is the duty and obligation of the coroner to remain objective. I reminded myself of that very obligation as I stood, staring. Stay focused, Lou—it’s the only way to try to solve this. Don’t go rushing in.

  The tiny infant (we would later weigh her out at 3.5 pounds on the organ scale in the morgue) was hanging by her head, from the blade of the garbage truck compactor. Her frail, helpless body was silhouetted by mounds of stinking garbage that had been collected before the discovery of her corpse. She evidently had been placed into a white garbage bag and then into a garbage can and subsequently picked up and dumped into the truck. The action of the compactor blade had ruptured the bag, which exposed this horror. We could not see the top of her head. She appeared to be Caucasian. The inside base of the truck was a slush of foul-smelling swill. Blood was now running down the child’s suspended body and dripping off her toes and into the swill. I noted several syringes and needles in the garbage. Not a good sign, considering the task ahead.