Coroner's Journal (11 page)

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.

“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.

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.

In a world of such insanity, such bewildering intensity, one actually has the desire to rush in and embrace the baby. Sounds crazy, but once you are in such a situation you are changed forever. You cannot
un
-experience it. Even as I focused on the investigation, the reconstruction of the crime, and the collection and preservation of evidence, I knew I would be taking this child into my life, and she would be with me forever.

Of course, my role here was grounded in practical reality. The simple words from the crime-scene tech knocked my thoughts back into the moment, and back into professional objectivity: “What we gonna do here, Doc?”

Many a physician has wrestled with the mandate of objectivity and the need to keep emotions in check. Ironically, it becomes a form of subjective objectivity. Sounds oxymoronic, but there you have it. You cannot escape being human—and if you can, you don't need to be a doctor.

With some help, I was hoisted into the swill and gently tried to free the child. No luck.
Dammit!

I turned to the crew of officers, detectives, garbagemen, their risk-management executives, and death investigators. They were just sort of staring past me and at Baby Jane. It was like being in a TV and looking back at the viewers—strange indeed.
Is this real?

I muttered to no one in particular, “She's stuck . . . it's a she. We need to take some pressure off of this blade.” I turned to the BFI folks, “Can we do that gently or gradually? And can we do it without killing me?”

Risk management assured me that they could, but I wanted to hear it from the guy who works the back of the truck all day. His assurance was my signal to continue. So the BFI guy had to move the blade. It was not without trepidation that I stood there while he manipulated the controls, which could easily crush me also.
This is surreal.

Then . . .
Got her!
She fell into my hands.
So little, so cold . . .

Autopsy revealed that Baby Jane had been alive when she was placed into the garbage bag. The blade crushed her skull. She had bled into the injury.
She was alive when the blade smashed into her little head.
That announcement quieted the whole morgue—no gallows humor here today. Here was silent outrage.

Some of the placenta was still in the bag. Not all of it, so maybe the mother had some left in her. That would mean she would have to go to a hospital—maybe. But she may well have left town and ended up at the Charity Hospital in New Orleans, known as the “Big Free.” One could easily be treated there, and we would never hear about it. But if we do, we have the DNA to match the mother to this heinous abandonment.

In 2000, the Louisiana legislature passed a law allowing mothers to leave newborns at hospitals and police and fire stations up to thirty days after birth without being prosecuted.
So what happened here?
Maybe the mother never heard about this safe-haven law. I'm not sure how many people in need would know about it. It's really not that well publicized. I posted it on my coroner website but I doubt the mother checked the site out before committing the murder of her child. I think that it is important that we explore the “maybes” here. Maybe we can find some answers and practice some preventive medicine. Baby land is too full already.

For Baby Jane, a group called Threads of Love speaks and remembers. This organization, with 125 chapters across the country, provides clothing, blankets, and other handmade articles for infants that are stillborn, miscarried, or even premature. They are also dedicated to abandoned infants. For Baby Jane they coordinated a proper burial: Welsh Funeral Home prepared Baby Jane's body; a burial plot was donated by Green Oaks Cemetery in their “Baby Land”; and she was dressed in clothing hand-sewn by Threads of Love volunteers. The news media presented the story without sensationalism. They also took this occasion to promote awareness of the Louisiana law that allows you to drop an unwanted baby off at certain locations—no questions asked and no criminal charges filed. You can walk away without legal consequence.

Who listens?
The funeral was well attended. Sissy Davis of Threads of Love gave me a picture of Baby Jane dressed in her outfit. She looked so peaceful—a stark contrast to the photographs taken at her crime scene and autopsy. I put it in her file.
It's about dignity.
They also gave Baby Jane Doe a name: Christine Noel Love. But my death certificate will still read “Unknown,” and so will the birth certificate I must issue—both hollow documents.

As I stood by the casket, I spoke to Baby Jane, now Christine. “Well, ‘Little Bit,' you got lots of love here today. I hope you find some peace now. We'll keep trying to do what we do, Boo . . . and that's a promise.”