PSP Citizen's Police Academy: Field Trip

Allegheny County Medical Examiner’s Office

By Annette Dashofy

This was the week I’d been looking forward to since I first signed up for CPA. Maybe I’m a little weird, but touring the morgue has been on my want-to-do list for ages. The hazards of writing crime fiction, I guess.

As a side note, I have to share a little history regarding the morgue in Pittsburgh. Years ago, folks used to go there on dates. And you thought I was wacky for wanting to tour the place? Ha! My mom tells of going there on a date (not with my dad!) when she was a young girl. They went in and viewed the bodies. I suppose the idea for having the bodies available for viewing at any time was so folks could go in and identify a missing loved one. This was in the days before AFIS and CODIS. John Does were much more common place than they are now.

But back to the present.

My Citizen’s Police Academy class gathered in the lobby of the ME’s office on a bitterly cold December night to await our tour. Alas, these are the only photographs I have, since I was asked not to take pictures inside. Darn it.

Allegheny County’s ME’s office recently moved to its new location in the Strip District. Here, the ME’s office is on the lower level. Upstairs is the county’s crime lab.

Under Pennsylvania Coroner’s Law, there is no need for a warrant to search a victim’s residence. Forensic Investigators go in, looking for guns, drugs, suicide notes, etc.

In Allegheny County, the ME’s office deals with all hospice deaths, home deaths, traumatic deaths, and—surprisingly—all deaths at the ICU at one of the local teaching hospitals, because of the potential for issues arising with unsupervised residents. If you want to know which one, contact me privately.

They weed through all these deaths to determine if an autopsy is needed. If a body is brought into the morgue, it’s called, fittingly, a “morgue case.” Of the 8,300 deaths in Allegheny County last year, only about 2,000 were autopsied.

There is a difference between a forensic autopsy and a medical autopsy. A medical autopsy seeks out the cause of death. A forensic autopsy looks for the manner of death, of which there are five: natural, accidental, suicide, homicide, and undetermined.

Only the coroner can sign an accidental death certificate.

Interesting (to me, at least) note: bodies coming in to autopsy are x-rayed to find out if there are any foreign objects inside. All old bullets are removed, as they could potentially connect to another crime.

At this point in the tour, we were ushered from the offices to the behind-the-scenes area, beginning with the garage. The Allegheny County Medical Examiner vans are plain, white vans with a little modification inside and lettering on the outside. The stretchers are stripped-down models compared to the kind used on an ambulance. No need to elevate the head of these patients! Our guide showed us a single-use body bag that looked like a blue tarp with a zipper. This would then go inside a black body bag and be covered with a shroud for transport.

One interesting note about the inside of the vans: There was a cargo net separating the back of the van from the driver compartment. No one, including our Forensic Investigator tour guide, could figure out what purpose it served. It wasn’t strong enough to hold back a body or a stretcher in case of an accident. And as our tour guide pointed out, it wasn’t strong enough to protect the live humans from zombies either.

I kid you not. She said that. Just one example of the sense of humor of a morgue worker.

In Allegheny County, ambulance crews cannot touch…other than to put on EKG leads…or transport a body. (I can vouch this isn’t the case everywhere, since I once transported a dead body when I worked on our local, small town ambulance crew.)

From the garage, we moved on to the coolers. There were three of them. One for incoming bodies, yet to be autopsied. One for bodies already autopsied and awaiting pickup from the funeral director. And one for decomposing bodies.

Unlike NCIS or CSI, bodies aren’t kept in drawers. They’re stored in large (very large) walk-in coolers. And we did get to walk in. Fans keep the “aroma” to a minimum. I was braced for the stench in the decomp cooler, but it wasn’t nearly as bad as the occasional roadkill raccoon in front of my house in the summer. The stretcher holding the pieces and parts of a skeleton was interesting, though.

FYI: they don’t use toe tags. Instead, bodies are labeled with wrist straps, much like you get at a hospital. Their names are also printed on the body bags.

Then we moved into the morgue where the autopsies are performed.

During an autopsy, all the cutting into the body is done by an autopsy tech. Photographs are taken at every step of the process, from photographing the body dirty, then after it’s cleaned up, and at each point in the autopsy.

Several of our class members were stunned to learn that only a high school diploma or GED was required to be an autopsy tech. After all, they aren’t going to hurt the “patient.”

The forensic pathologist takes notes of findings. Organs are removed, weighed, and placed on a cutting board on a table where the pathologist goes through them and takes samples.

I wish I’d been able to photograph this room. It looked very much like pictures I’d seen. One thing you don’t usually read about or see on TV, though, is the bug zapper. Apparently almost every morgue has one. Those pesky maggots do hatch out into a lot of flies.

Ick.

And there was an Autopsy Tip Jar. Presumably for those aforementioned zombies.

An autopsy can take anywhere from an hour to complete to two days (example: for a body with many, many stab wounds.)

Afterwards, the death certificate is signed, not by the pathologist, but by the coroner.

It was a fascinating evening. I picked up lots of fodder for my writing. And as for that tip jar? I’ll definitely be using that one in my current work in progress. You just can’t make this stuff up!

Forensics Workshop

By Annette Dashofy

During my final Citizen’s Police Academy class, we were asked to fill out evaluation sheets. On it was a space for what we thought could be improved. Of course, I thoroughly enjoyed the entire experience, but when pressed, I noted that I wished there had been someone from the coroner’s office to discuss forensics.

Last Wednesday, I got my wish. Sort of. It wasn’t with the CPA, but I was able to attend a workshop at an area library with Dr. Edward Strimlan, chief forensic investigator with the Allegheny County Medical Examiners Office. He spoke in a high speed fashion (I’m still not sure if that’s just his style or if he was trying to cram three hours worth of material into an hour and a half, which he did), heavy on the dark humor.

He explained that “forensics” is the application of science to law. And he quickly debunked the CSI shows, noting that DNA cannot be processed in one hour, that no one works in this business wearing high heels and professional makeup, not to mention that upon entering a crime scene, one of the first things he does is turn ON the lights.

He showed a slide from one of the TV crime dramas showing those familiar cubbies, one of which was open and a body was on the pull-out slab. Silhouettes of corpses’ feet could be seen through the translucent glass doors of the other cubbies. He asked what was wrong with this picture. A few suggestions were offered from the crowd. I raised my hand and questioned why there were lights on inside the coolers. This has always bugged me. Dr. Strimlan agreed and pondered if the bodies were reading in there. But the big “what’s wrong with this picture” was actually the individual cubbies themselves. He said the real cooler is one big room holding a bunch of gurneys with bodies. No private rooms at the real morgue.

When the ME investigators first arrive on a scene they photograph everything from every angle from aerial to the most minute detail. They photograph how the body was found. They even take photographs during the autopsy.

Some of the labs at the ME’s office include toxiocology, trace (hair, fibers, etc), serology (blood), DNA, fingerprints, and ballistics. They have a support staff to deal with odentology (teeth and bite marks), neurology, anthropology, entomology, and engineering (to deal with things like circumstance of a structural collapse). For these experts, they draw from local universities. Dr. Strimlan responded to one audience member’s query regarding the authenticity of the show Bones by stating that no one finds that many bones to make keeping an anthropologist on staff realistic. They would just go to the anthropology department at one of the local universities and borrow a professor.

It’s the job of the ME’s office to determine the cause and manner of death. The manner of death can be natural (in which case just about any doctor could sign off on the death certificate), homicide, suicide, accident, pending, or undetermined.

Another bit of news to me is the fact that the OFFICIAL time of death is listed as when the body was found, regardless of how long it might have been there.

At some point during the presentation, I realized I’d heard of this Ed Strimlan before. He figures prominently in the book DEADHOUSE: Life in the Coroner’s Office, which is a fascinating true look at the Allegheny Coroner’s Office. I highly recommend this book for anyone writing about such things or if you want to get an idea of what that life is really like.

The presentation was not for the faint of heart or weak of stomach, as he offered some very real photographs of bodies from crime scenes and asked us to determine if the death shown was natural or suspicious. Let me just say, decomposition can make a natural death look VERY much like the victim had been beaten or worse.

I’m glad I went. I jotted a ton of notes to use in my current work in progress. And this workshop definitely filled the one void in the Citizen’s Police Academy course.

I’m afraid I won’t be available to answer questions today. I’m away on vacation. If I get a chance, I may stop at the library to use their Internet and check in. Otherwise, feel free to discuss murder and mayhem on your own.