Silent Siren, page 13
A Multitude of Maggots
Investigator Jim Sosik and I are called to an apartment complex in Northshore for a decomposed body. Jim is a seasoned investigator originally from St. Louis, Missouri. His head is shaved. He sports a goatee and multiple brightly colored tattoos down each arm. His personality belies his tough exterior; he is among the most personable individuals I have met in the death-care industry. Outgoing and friendly, he is able to put families at ease under the most difficult of circumstances.
A King County Sheriff’s deputy meets us outside the downstairs apartment door. As an officer holding a notepad briefs us on the situation that awaits us behind the closed door, I notice a lone maggot loping down the common hallway towards parts unknown. If the adventurous maggot had separated from the group en masse, I could only imagine how many writhed in the apartment.
We enter a darkened, starkly furnished apartment that stinks of rotting flesh. Two high-performance bicycles hang from pegs on the living room wall. Snowboards are displayed on an adjoining wall. A poster of a man skiing, dog-eared at the corners, is suspended from thumbtacks above a cluttered desk. Maggots crawl in seemingly random fashion across the linoleum floor like animated grains of rice, separated from the source of their nutrition. A congealed black fluid pools on the floor, emanating from a bare mattress on the floor and spreading to almost the kitchen area. Blood, I suspect. It has been there so long that it has dried and cracked, resembling candle wax.
The dead man lies on his back on a bare mattress, surrounded by the accoutrements of his previous life. He is dressed in jeans only. Both eyes have been replaced by writhing balls of maggots. His mouth gapes open with a softball-sized colony of the squirming larvae. The source of bleeding seems to be his left forearm. As I look more closely, I notice the bulge of what appears to be a fistula used for dialysis. A carpet knife, its blade bloodied, sits nearby. A fistula is a connection between an artery and a vein, constructed to allow dialysis in a kidney failure patient. Puncturing or laceration of a fistula is nearly always deadly. Massive bleeding ensues. This man knew exactly how to end his life. The unanswered question is why. No suicide note is found.
While Jim wraps the man’s remains in plastic and zips it into a body bag, I obtain the necessary information from police: date of birth, next-of-kin, etc. We load the body up and transport it to the morgue in Seattle. The man is placed for several hours in the freezer to slow down “insect activity.” He will be autopsied in the morning.
Homicide
I’m working with Jane Jorgensen, my Field Training Officer. It’s evening, and we are on our way to a low-income housing project in Sea-Tac, south of Seattle, for a reported homicide. Police are on scene and have been for some time. More than anything, I’m just pleased to get out of the office. Only two of us were assigned on night shift, and the phone lines at the office had all been blinking at once: “Investigations, this is Matt. Please hold. Investigations. No, we don’t have a press release on that. Call back later.” We’d turned the phones over to the answering service and requested that police only be able to reach us during our investigation.
Jane is a veteran investigator, very quiet and attractive, with long auburn hair and green eyes. She looks too sweet to deal with death on a day-to-day basis. It is clear that Jane does not share my enthusiasm for the call we are responding to. Homicides are not her favorite. She much prefers motor vehicle collisions. On a homicide, the forensic pathologist on call responds and takes over the role of the investigator, relegating us as investigators to mere photographers and litter bearers. Examination of the body is done by a physician, who will undoubtedly be called to court over it.
We pull up to the curb, past the police cruisers lining both sides of the street, past two dark vans marked “CSI One” and “CSI Two,” past the yellow tape that reads “Crime Scene—Do Not Cross.” Though the occasion is sad, I feel like a VIP being led beyond the velvet rope into a scene few are privileged enough to witness. I round the side of our rig and remove the bright yellow plastic case that contains our $5,000 camera. We trundle our gurney with the body bags and neatly folded sheets up cracked concrete steps to a cramped elevator that smells of stale urine. The cot must be set on end just to squeeze into the tight space.
Jane and I exit onto a narrow hallway and greet what appears to be an entire precinct of police officers clustered around an open apartment door. Police radios squawk. A few large black flies orbit the yellowing overhead lights. The carpet is filthy.
The man lies dead, face up, arms splayed out to his sides, in a puddle of congealed blood just inside his apartment. The door jamb is splintered where someone had forced entry. The name “Nguyen” is scrawled in black pen and tacked to the outside of the door. The odor of old blood and early decomposition wafts out from the warm apartment.
A squat middle-aged man with thinning gray hair and a gleaming gold badge at his ample beltline holds a yellow notepad in a gloved hand. “Beaten to death with a lamp,” he says. “CSI’s already taken it with them.”
The destructive path the killer took throughout the apartment is evident in every room of the sparsely furnished apartment. Blood is spattered on every wall. Bloody fingerprints streak furniture and cheap gold doorknobs. I can’t fathom the horror the old man must have experienced as he fought to escape his tiny apartment, seeking any means of escape from the killer. I photo-document the scene for the pathologist, who will do the examination tomorrow.
Brian Mazrim, the pathologist, arrives on scene, wearing his silver windbreaker, looking tired from a busy shift already. He squats next to the body to conduct his examination.
“Help me turn him,” Jane says. “Don’t step in the blood.” I look down at my boots, mere centimeters from the clotted puddle of blood on the linoleum. Jane and I turn the body and note the dark discoloration on his back—lividity, an indication of how long the man had been dead and whether or not he had been moved. Lividity, or the settling of blood to gravity-dependent areas of the body, is evident first as a faint pink discoloration and then becomes dark and fixed in the tissue at twelve hours.
Dr. Mazrim examines the hands for evidence of defensive wounds and covers them with paper bags to preserve any foreign skin scrapings under the fingernails.
We wrap the murdered man in a clean white sheet and place him in a green canvas body bag. A plastic tag is looped through both zippers, preventing anyone, even another investigator, from opening the bag again until autopsy. Evidence must be carefully preserved in a case like this. There should be no question as to evidence being planted or removed prior to the morning of autopsy, in which the detectives involved, the pathologist, and the autopsy staff will witness the breaking of the seal and the opening of the bag.
Jane and I convey the loaded stretcher into the elevator and bring it down. As we exit, a surprised looking man looks at our hapless cargo and exclaims, “That’s something you don’t see every day!” I can’t say the same.
The door to the apartment is locked. CSI is done with their scene investigation. Washington State Patrol forensic scientists will arrive on the scene in the morning to perform blood-spatter analysis.
Decomp
The white dry-erase board in the control room lists a man’s name, and then beside it, “found decomposed.”
Lead Investigator Al Noriega catches me before I can put down my keys and take a sip of my coffee.
“You’re going out on a call,” he says.
“What is the situation?” I ask.
“Dead on the couch,” Al says.
David Delgado and I head to the downtown apartment where a man was reportedly found deceased in his living room. He hadn’t been seen in several days; the manager had noticed fruit flies circling around his front door and called for police, who found him dead, facedown in bed.
Prior to departing for the call, David has contacted the man’s physician, who relates a long history of cancer. The cause of death established, all that remains to be determined is a positive identification. Since he is decomposed, we will need to compare dental records or skeletal X-rays for a positive ID.
We arrive on scene and notice immediately that police officers are standing outside—never a good sign. They lead us to the apartment where fruit flies have congregated outside the worn wooden apartment front door. A Seattle Police officer unlocks the door and we walk in.
I see the cause of the fruit fly convention fairly quickly. Rotten groceries, still in their bags, sit on the counter in the tiny kitchen. It appears the man had fallen ill shortly after arriving home from the store and didn’t have the time to put the groceries away.
On an overstuffed couch, off-white from cigarette smoke exposure and years of grime, the man reposes facedown, a beam of April sunlight shining through a window, illuminating his thin gray hair. As I get closer, I realize he is wearing only a threadbare blue T-shirt, the flesh on his arms and legs putty gray. The smell isn’t so bad…yet. His left arm dangles off the side of the couch while his right is tucked under his chest. His skin is moving. Hundreds of maggots writhe underneath a thin layer of detached epidermis. The police officer turns away, nauseated.
Large black flies buzz randomly about the apartment, many gathering at the window. Others have already laid their eggs and died, lining the baseboard with their winged carcasses.
We search for valuables in the apartment. Since the man has no family in the area, we will need to transport anything of value with us to the office for safekeeping. In the process, we locate a manila envelope that contains X-rays of the man’s hip replacement—an unexpected clue as to his identification.
David and I line the cot up with the couch and lower it to the floor, spreading the plastic sheet on top. The officer looks on with disgust as we gingerly ease the decomposed remains into the plastic. David warns me to fold the plastic carefully, so as to avoid flicking “decomp juice” on him or myself. This is good advice, I think.
The dead man is wrapped tightly in the plastic, secured with straps, and a clean white sheet is placed over him for the trip outside. Fortunately, he is light, emaciated even, so trundling him down the front stairway of the apartment complex is no problem.
Neighbors stare as we convey the body to our truck. I am sure they can smell him too.
Well, good job,” says David as we head back to the morgue. He’s pleased I didn’t vomit.
We get back to the morgue and transport the body upstairs to the cooler. David wants an estimate of how long the man has been dead, so he calls our amateur forensic entomologist, Monty Nelson, upstairs for consultation.
Monty has been an investigator for a number of years at King County Medical Examiner’s Office and has taken it upon himself to learn as much as he can about human decomposition, specifically the life cycle of the fly. He has visited the Human Anthropological Research Laboratory in Tennessee, also known as “The Body Farm,” to study rates of decomposition. To further his knowledge, Monty grew maggots on rotting meat in his backyard to observe their maturation.
With an almost parental touch, Monty extracts a writhing maggot from the body. Grasping it between his thumb and forefinger, he appraises its size, and from this, its stage of maturation.
“See, she’s got these hooks to burrow with and she can breathe from the other end,” Monty says. For some reason, he seems convinced this is a female maggot. “I’d say this gentleman’s been dead about four days.” Gently, almost lovingly, he places the maggot back on the body.
In Shades of Ordinary
She looks to be sleeping. The faint blue tinge around her lips is all that gives away the fact that she’s not. That and the stillness of her chest are a disturbing reminder that the girl that lies before me on a removal gurney, dressed in matching flowered pajama tops and bottoms, her long brown hair carefully combed and flowing onto the plastic sheet on which she reposes, is unmistakably dead.
Rebecca had been celebrating her twelfth birthday like so many other girls on a hot summer day, with her friends, swimming in a lake, the warm sun shining on the water’s surface. She and a friend had dove under a pier and disappeared from the view of parents watching shore-side. I can imagine the scene—seaplanes landing nearby, small children running along the shore. All is well until someone realizes Rebecca and her friend haven’t surfaced in ten minutes or so.
Snagged under a pier, Rebecca had been found first. A couple of bystanders had given her CPR until a Snohomish County medic unit arrived and transported her to Children’s Hospital in Seattle, where she had been pronounced dead. It took at least a half an hour for her friend to be recovered. No resuscitation was attempted on her, and she became a case for Snohomish County Medical Examiner’s Office.
After Rebecca was pronounced dead in the emergency room, her parents had gone home and returned with her pajamas. They had dressed her and combed the tangles out of her hair, preparing her for her final journey. I couldn’t imagine the pain those parents must have felt. How could they even drive home?
Tomorrow, the pathologist will cut deeply into her body to conclusively determine her cause of death. Her organs will be removed, weighed, and dissected. The illusion of sleep will have been destroyed, but for now, she is an ordinary girl, wearing ordinary pajamas, anybody’s daughter resting on her back with her hands folded over her abdomen.
I place an identification tag around her ankle, the cold of her skin palpable through my thin latex gloves. I open the heavy door of the morgue’s cooler, kept at forty-two degrees, and wheel her gurney inside, parking it by the far door, where the autopsy staff can easily find her in the morning. For a moment I hesitate and a very ordinary, but irrational thought briefly enters my mind: Won’t she be cold? I need to find her a blanket.
But then the whirring of the ventilation fans and the faint odor of decomposition brings me back to reality. The ordinary girl in the ordinary pajamas, who died on her birthday, has no need of ordinary comfort. I walk out, shut the heavy door behind me, secure the padlock, and remove my gloves.
Gross
From time to time, I am asked by those outside the EMS inner circle: “What is the grossest thing you’ve ever seen?” While the question seems voyeuristic on the surface, I understand the fascination. The heroic resuscitations that occur behind closed doors, the victims of motor vehicle collisions, shielded by police cruisers and fire engines, the corpses shrouded in linen and sealed in body bags, quietly conveyed out a back door, represent a side of life rarely seen by many. Curiosity is natural.
If I had to answer the question, I would say it would be a toss-up between the trauma done to a human skull by a shotgun blast or a motor vehicle collision and the image of a badly decomposing human being, bloated beyond recognition, oozing dark fluid from every orifice.
Of all the grotesque injuries possible, the worst are those that distort or even obliterate the human face. More so than limbs or torsos, we identify most strongly with a person’s face. It is how we tell someone we love from a sea of total strangers. The face conveys the full range of human emotions and seems to change the least of all the body parts in the aging process. A missing or mutilated face, even in the presence of an otherwise intact body, remains startlingly disturbing.
As most EMS responders or police officers will tell you, what sticks with us the most are not so much the sights, but the smells. Extensive neural connections wire our olfactory receptors with our limbic system, that part of the brain that processes emotion. We remember with nostalgia the smell of grandma’s fresh-baked apple pie, the aroma of the beach on a favorite vacation, the scent of a lover from many years ago.
Dreadful odors conjure powerful memories as well—the musty odor of a house where an old person has lived without ventilation for eons, the pervasive odor of sick in a chronically ill, bed-bound patient, and, perhaps worst of all, the nostril-assaulting, sickeningly sweet, almost marine odor of human decomposition. It’s impossible to forget for its unpleasant ability to permeate nasal hairs, mustaches, clothing, and vehicles. Most of us have come across a dead bird or rat in the middle of summer and noticed how foul it smells. Now imagine that odor multiplied ten-fold, contained in a tiny, eighty-degree apartment in the middle of the summer. And you have no choice but to be there and bear witness.
Rough Riders
Investigator Monty Nelson and I are called to a highway exit ramp in Bellevue for a man who has attempted to drive his car underneath a cement mixer. The only information we are able to obtain from Bellevue Police is that the man had come barreling through a construction zone without braking and is now DOA in his car.
We arrive to find that the man’s sedan has been modified by kinetic energy to resemble a convertible. The vehicle is demolished from the windshield to just in front of the rear window and the cement mixer has been moved slightly forward to permit removal of the body. The dead man lies under a tent Bellevue Police has constructed.
No skid marks are present prior to the collision, so it is a collaborative effort between us, State Patrol, and the King County Sheriff’s Office Accident Reconstruction Team to determine what went amiss and whether the collision was an accident, an act of suicide, or something else. Motor vehicle collisions are one of the longest to document; in addition to snapping multiple photographs of the vehicle and its apparent trajectory, measurements are taken of bumper height (in the case of car versus pedestrian), length of skid marks, and metal intrusion into the patient compartment. It was tedious, but necessary, not only for the families of the deceased to find closure, but for State Patrol and local law enforcement to produce technically accurate reports for prosecution and other uses.
Much like the car, the man’s head has been turned into a convertible. Above the bridge of the nose, his face is flat and mushy. Brain matter oozes from his nostrils. He is dressed in jeans and a button-up shirt, with a name badge that reads “Gary—Circuit City.” I find a cellular phone in his pocket. It’s about 5:30 p.m., so it’s a fair bet he was on his way home from work.
