Speaker 1: Quality times, but Joseph's gotten more many years ago. When
Speaker 1: I was in high school played football. I was never
Speaker 1: a great football player, but I was like second tier.
Speaker 1: I guess I had an opportunity to attend service academy.
Speaker 1: Two of them, Naval Academy and West Point VMI. They
Speaker 1: had reached out to me in Central. I was a linebacker.
Speaker 1: I was never like, you know, top tier, but I
Speaker 1: didn't mind getting hit. And that's what happens when you
Speaker 1: play football. It's like going through a car accident every
Speaker 1: single day that you go to practice. Practice for me
Speaker 1: was always worse than games. But you know, my football
Speaker 1: career came to an end as a result of a
Speaker 1: car accident that I was in and guy ran a
Speaker 1: red light. And I had this beautiful nineteen sixty eight
Speaker 1: Mustang that had been restored three speed transmission.
Speaker 2: Love that car.
Speaker 1: And I was actually on a way to a key
Speaker 1: club meeting in high school and a guy blew the light.
Speaker 1: He was driving to ford pickup truck, and he had
Speaker 1: five people in the front seat on a bench seat
Speaker 1: in this thing and hits me in the front right
Speaker 1: quarter panel of my car. I had the right away
Speaker 1: at four lane Street. I was going green, he blew
Speaker 1: the light hit me, and I wound up being in
Speaker 1: hospital for about a month, lost the sensation on the
Speaker 1: left side of my body, hurt my C five, C four,
Speaker 1: and eventually through traction, those were things they relieved that problem,
Speaker 1: but I've never completely recovered from that. My neck still cracks,
Speaker 1: it still hurts. It hurts too because I always think
Speaker 1: of about what if you know, well, what I went
Speaker 1: through that day is something that I'm sure that many
Speaker 1: of you guys have gone through throughout your lives, and
Speaker 1: that is being involved in a motor vehicle accident. You
Speaker 1: can bear witness to them, and that's terrifying enough. But
Speaker 1: you know, when you're suddenly rear ended or somebody just
Speaker 1: comes out of nowhere and hammers you, it's one of
Speaker 1: the most terrifying experiences of your life because you're like
Speaker 1: you're at the mercy of a machine at that point
Speaker 1: in time, and all of that energy is transferred into
Speaker 1: your body. Well, today we're going to talk about that
Speaker 1: energy transfer, and we're going to talk about it in
Speaker 1: various modalities, but the theme today on bodybacks is going
Speaker 1: to be blunt force trauma, and I think it's going
Speaker 1: to make for an interesting conversation, and I'm hoping that
Speaker 1: you'll learned something along the way. I'm Joseph Scott Morgan
Speaker 1: and this is Bodybacks brother Dave. I was on the
Speaker 1: same defense in high school as Jesse Tuggle was. Jesse
Speaker 1: Tuggle is the career leading tackler in NFL history. They
Speaker 1: called him the Hammer. Played his entire career as a
Speaker 1: walk on by the way, as a free agent, a
Speaker 1: walk on in college, and as a free agent. He
Speaker 1: was non drafted and wound um being And I've never
Speaker 1: been hit so hard in my life, and by Jesse Tuggle.
Speaker 1: Sweet guy, but he's the only person I ever saw
Speaker 1: talk about blunt forces trauma. He's the only guy ever
Speaker 1: saw in football that. And he played defensive end in
Speaker 1: high school that actually caved another person's face mask in
Speaker 1: with a single blow from his forearm.
Speaker 2: Wow, a right.
Speaker 1: Right all face mask that had the center bar that
Speaker 1: ran right and it actually bent. And a couple of
Speaker 1: guys I'd never seen that before. That's the kind of
Speaker 1: power he had, you know, And he never He's one
Speaker 1: of these guys kind of like herschel Walker that never
Speaker 1: like dedicated himself to the weight room he's just naturally strong, wow,
Speaker 1: and a force of natures like he's kind of like
Speaker 1: getting hit by Ford f one fifty.
Speaker 3: I was looking over the list of blunt forest deaths
Speaker 3: because as we were talking about doing this show, Yeah,
Speaker 3: I realized how ignorant and I mean unknowing of what
Speaker 3: that is. And looking at some of the pictures of
Speaker 3: the different aspects of blunt force trauma. You know, I've
Speaker 3: learned so many things from you doing this show, and
Speaker 3: I thought one of the most common modes of blunt
Speaker 3: forest death if you have to, is there like a
Speaker 3: graph anywhere where you can look at these and go, yeah, here's.
Speaker 1: The Yeah, you could probably dig it up. I'm going
Speaker 1: to go ahead and give it away right now. The
Speaker 1: number one source of fatal lunt force trauma in America,
Speaker 1: and I would probably say in the world, are motor
Speaker 1: vehicle accidents. You know, people always talk about people always
Speaker 1: talk about gun violence and all these things, and yeah,
Speaker 1: it's real, it's out there, but it nothing comes close
Speaker 1: to motor vehicle accidents, particularly in America.
Speaker 2: Have you been any more accidents than the one you
Speaker 2: talked about Let's see.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I've been rearing into it a couple of times,
Speaker 1: but never anything other than that that was so traumatic.
Speaker 1: And listen, I have had I've had, you know, I've
Speaker 1: had As a practitioner, I've had I've had multiple car
Speaker 1: accidents that I've worked, not just car on car, but
Speaker 1: pedestrian on car or car on pedestrian, which is horrible. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I actually and even as a professor, I actually had
Speaker 1: a kid that was hit in a crosswalk on the
Speaker 1: way to my lecture, I mean right in front of
Speaker 1: the campus. And this was when I was over in
Speaker 1: Georgia teaching and one of their colleagues, one of their students,
Speaker 1: fellow students, came up in the class and said, hey,
Speaker 1: Professor Morgan, you know so and so has been hit.
Speaker 1: They're on the way to the hospital, you know. And
Speaker 1: sure enough, I looked out in my classroom winning I
Speaker 1: could see the flashing lights. I felt a little guilty
Speaker 1: because I was back then. I was very stringent about
Speaker 1: showing up on time and for the day. I'm not
Speaker 1: that brutal, but they were probably sprinting and not paying
Speaker 1: attention to.
Speaker 3: The JSM is gonna get me, man, No, No, I'm
Speaker 3: not that cruel of a teacher.
Speaker 1: But yeah, and and most of the time. Most of
Speaker 1: the time, if you have car versus pedestrian, it goes
Speaker 1: out saying car is gonna win every single time. And
Speaker 1: you can sustain blunt force trauma in motor vehicle accidents
Speaker 1: in any number of ways. And let me let me
Speaker 1: just kind of tell you how this breaks down, because
Speaker 1: it's kind of interesting, particularly from just a physics standpoint.
Speaker 1: Let's say an individual is traveling down the road and
Speaker 1: they're riding in their motor vehicle. Well as let's say
Speaker 1: they are struck head on by another approaching vehicle. Well,
Speaker 1: the vehicle or they hit a fixed object, that vehicle
Speaker 1: that they're traveling in is going to come to a
Speaker 1: dead stop theoretically, Okay, well, not everything in the vehicle
Speaker 1: comes to a dead stop, all right, because just because
Speaker 1: you're anchored with a safety belt, or just because an
Speaker 1: air bag deploys, you still have this energy that is
Speaker 1: going to be transferred from that impact. And as the
Speaker 1: car comes to a dead stop, your body for that moment,
Speaker 1: Tom is still traveling. Let's just pick a number. Let's
Speaker 1: say still traveling at forty five miles per hour. The
Speaker 1: head on collision may have taken place at forty five
Speaker 1: miles per hour and your body is still traveling through
Speaker 1: space at that point, and you know, the seat belt
Speaker 1: catches you. You know, I've had people that have been
Speaker 1: killed by their seat belts, Dave. And one of the
Speaker 1: main things that happens, Just to give you a sense
Speaker 1: for this, if people will take there, you can use
Speaker 1: your left or your right hand and find your sternum
Speaker 1: and move it about. Go kind of high up on
Speaker 1: your sternum and just below your about two inches below
Speaker 1: your collar bone, your left collar bone, and go down
Speaker 1: about two inches stop right there, just to the side
Speaker 1: of your sternum. That's where your aortis is. And your
Speaker 1: aorta is like the major gigantic vessel that comes off
Speaker 1: of your off of your heart, and that's where you know,
Speaker 1: like oxygen, aitty blood is pumped through that. It runs
Speaker 1: all the way down your spine, it bifurcates, comes into
Speaker 1: your fenmeral arteries, it goes up and transfers out to
Speaker 1: your arm through your brachial arteries. It's a major source.
Speaker 1: So what happens is, Dave, that arch, it's the aortic
Speaker 1: arch is so fragile. So when your body stops, guess
Speaker 1: what your internal organs are still moving. People don't think
Speaker 1: about that. Your internal organs are still moving like your
Speaker 1: body doesn't. The shell of your body might cease motion,
Speaker 1: but for a millisecond, the organs within your body are
Speaker 1: actually still traveling. I've had cases over the course of
Speaker 1: my career where the heart will slam up against the
Speaker 1: backside of the sternum, and when that happens, the order
Speaker 1: will tear and there's a very fragile area where it
Speaker 1: kind of it's kind of the root of the order,
Speaker 1: where it comes off of the heart and it literally
Speaker 1: and look at it. Just do a Google search on
Speaker 1: aortic arch and you'll see it. It's curved. There's a
Speaker 1: real fragile area right there where it kind of roots
Speaker 1: off of the heart and begin it's downward descent and
Speaker 1: you get these little rips in it. And let me
Speaker 1: tell you something, even if you've got a team of
Speaker 1: cardiothoracic surgeons that are standing right there, there's a high
Speaker 1: probability they're not going to save you, all right, And
Speaker 1: so you're going to bleed out. And that's as a
Speaker 1: result of blunt force trauma. You have cardiac contusions where
Speaker 1: you'll have you know, the heart slam up against the
Speaker 1: chest wall. I've seen that you get what's called a
Speaker 1: cardiac tampa nod where the pair of cardial sack will tear.
Speaker 1: It's that this, for lack of a better termam it
Speaker 1: is a sack that your heart is encasing that autopes.
Speaker 1: We have to cut this thing open, and it's filled
Speaker 1: with cardiac fluid in there. It kind of bathes the
Speaker 1: heart and when you that is compromised, the sack fills
Speaker 1: up with blood and it compromises the heart's ability to beat.
Speaker 1: So you've got all of this stuff. Another fragile organ
Speaker 1: in your body. That's that is I was going to
Speaker 1: say impacted, which is kind of accurate. It's the liver
Speaker 1: and the spleen as well, because they will slam forward
Speaker 1: liver when you get a rip in the liver. Physicians
Speaker 1: particularly I don't I can't speak to any other physicians,
Speaker 1: but forensic pathologists they refer to those as liver fractures.
Speaker 1: And you think about fracture relative to the bone, but
Speaker 1: when you look at the surface of the liver, it'll
Speaker 1: have this kind of irregular, jagged kind of tear in it,
Speaker 1: and they'll call that a hepatic fracture many times and
Speaker 1: it rips open, and buddy, if your liver splits like that,
Speaker 1: your gut's going to fill up with blood. Spleen is
Speaker 1: very fragile. You'll have that. My favorite aunt in the
Speaker 1: world died as a result of a car accident. She
Speaker 1: got t bone. The thing that killed her. She got
Speaker 1: hit on the driver side of her door in her
Speaker 1: Chrysler Imperial. It's like a nineteen seventy four Chrysler Imperial.
Speaker 1: You could put eight bodies in the trunk of the thing.
Speaker 1: And my aunt Roxy, that was her name. She died
Speaker 1: as a result of three of her ribs on the
Speaker 1: left side being fractured and driven into her lung. Lung deflates,
Speaker 1: chest fills that with blood. They put a chest tube in.
Speaker 1: She lasted from maybe two or three days, but you
Speaker 1: know she was older. You can't recover from that sort
Speaker 1: of thing. So you get all of these types of
Speaker 1: injuries that arise from the number one source of blunt
Speaker 1: force trauma that we experience in America, and that's motor
Speaker 1: vehicle accidents. That's why they try to make them. They
Speaker 1: try to make motor vehicles safer than they used to
Speaker 1: be many times, and people really take exception when you
Speaker 1: start to talk about this sort of thing many times.
Speaker 1: And I know, seat belts saved lives. You know how
Speaker 1: many times have we heard that over the years, And
Speaker 1: that's all find good, and yeah they do. But in
Speaker 1: my world, we see seat belt injuries. You know, you'll
Speaker 1: have these big diagonal marks that'll run from the apex
Speaker 1: of the right shoulder all the way down to like
Speaker 1: your left iliac crest, which is you know where your
Speaker 1: pelvis is on the left side of your hip there,
Speaker 1: and you'll have this big, nasty, abraided area that runs
Speaker 1: through there and it's you know, that's where that locking
Speaker 1: mechanism kicks in with the seat belt and your body
Speaker 1: stops and you kind of fold like in this weird way.
Speaker 1: If you could see it in slow motion, it's kind
Speaker 1: of ghastly to watch. And if you go back when
Speaker 1: I first started my career, you had shoulder belts, but
Speaker 1: majority of people still had lap belts in their cars. Well,
Speaker 1: that energy transfer with lap belts. If people you remember,
Speaker 1: people never wore lap belts, people didn't wear safety belts,
Speaker 1: and people that did wear lap belts when they would
Speaker 1: hit a fixed object This is so gruesome. It's one
Speaker 1: of the most gruesome injuries you can sustain. They would
Speaker 1: have we had there's like a cluster of these things
Speaker 1: pelvic fractures. So when the pelvis fractures, which is horrific
Speaker 1: in and of itself. I've got a great story about
Speaker 1: when I worked as an er tech setting a fracture
Speaker 1: of pelvis on a twelve year old boy that had
Speaker 1: slid into home plate catcher fell. He impacted the catcher
Speaker 1: and fractured this kid's pelvis. The pelvis would fracture. And
Speaker 1: if you you know I've talked about the federal arteries
Speaker 1: that run they run through the floor of the pelvis.
Speaker 1: There's these holes in bone are referred to as framing,
Speaker 1: and so there's these little framing that these vessels run through,
Speaker 1: and if any of those are fractured in any way,
Speaker 1: they create these sharp edges and you can you know,
Speaker 1: those vessels are severed, and again they're hard to get to,
Speaker 1: to dig into, to try to you know, try to
Speaker 1: tie them off. People bleed out, you know from that
Speaker 1: and having touched on you know what happens to the
Speaker 1: brain because again you're in you in motion, and your
Speaker 1: your brain is encased in this rock hard rock hard
Speaker 1: bony uh uh I don't know, vault. It's called the
Speaker 1: cranial vault. Not a lot of cushion. Your brain is surrounded.
Speaker 1: It's actually contained in a sack as well with within
Speaker 1: within your brain. It's called the dura and it's bathed
Speaker 1: in uh in cerebral spinal fluid, and it's it's supposed
Speaker 1: to act as a kind of a shock absorber. Uh
Speaker 1: And if you ever see the inside of a skull,
Speaker 1: it's got these really nasty kind of you know, uh,
Speaker 1: undulations in it and that sort of thing. So when
Speaker 1: the brain, if you didn't have that cushion in there,
Speaker 1: we'd have a lot more people did. But if you
Speaker 1: get hit from the side, you have an initial energy transfer,
Speaker 1: and these are called coup and contracoup injuries where the
Speaker 1: brain will if you're hit from the left side, well
Speaker 1: the brain. Let me get this straight. So your head
Speaker 1: in reaction to being struck on the left side will
Speaker 1: go to the left, but your brain is traveling to
Speaker 1: the right, Okay, And as you come back, the brain
Speaker 1: is traveling from the right to the left, so it'll
Speaker 1: slam up against both of those walls and you get
Speaker 1: these big indwelling subdural subarachnoid hemorrhages that are in there,
Speaker 1: and you begin to bleed out in your brain and
Speaker 1: those little vessels in there can get clipped. There's so
Speaker 1: many things that can happen to you in a car
Speaker 1: accident that it's quite quite striking on one level. Remember
Speaker 1: when we did the episode, and I recommend to anybody
Speaker 1: that hasn't. We did an episode on Sharpfort's injuries very recently,
Speaker 1: and I talked about people being impaled. In Sharpfort's injuries.
Speaker 1: You have objects that come through cars that sort of thing,
Speaker 1: and again those are puncture wounds. But you know, you've
Speaker 1: also got items that are in cars, okay, and they're
Speaker 1: not buckled down. So let's say you're traveling down the
Speaker 1: road and in your back window, your kid at vacation
Speaker 1: Bible School painted you a stone to use as a doorstop,
Speaker 1: you know, and it's in the back window. Well, there's
Speaker 1: certain ways you can be hit in that car, and
Speaker 1: that stone that's free floating or is not anchored down
Speaker 1: in the car suddenly becomes a projectile in that environment.
Speaker 1: That's why if you see like have you ever seen
Speaker 1: delivery trucks, dave that like vans that have that screen
Speaker 1: that's between the front two seats in the van. It's
Speaker 1: a metal screen. Well, there's a reason they have the
Speaker 1: metal screen. It's it's not to like I mean, I
Speaker 1: guess they have them in prison vans. There's a reason
Speaker 1: that companies have been encouraged by insurance companies to put
Speaker 1: these things in because anything's being carried in the back
Speaker 1: suddenly becomes a projectile and it is flying through the air,
Speaker 1: so you can be impacted that way to day. Well,
Speaker 1: they you know, some of the most brutal cases I've
Speaker 1: ever worked were resulting from blunt force trauma within a household.
Speaker 1: You know, we talk a lot about knives, but knives
Speaker 1: are in a sense are weapons of convenience because you
Speaker 1: walk in the kitchen and maybe if your dishes are
Speaker 1: clean and you put them away, you might run across
Speaker 1: a knife. But with blunt force trauma, those are what
Speaker 1: we refer to many times in homes as weapons of convenience.
Speaker 1: And you know, it reminds me of the game Clue,
Speaker 1: And I got to give you an insight. I think
Speaker 1: I've said this before. I've never won a game of Clue.
Speaker 1: And I'm a forensics guy. I don't do well much.
Speaker 2: Get in the library with a lead pipe.
Speaker 1: With a lead pipe, there's a candle holder. You know,
Speaker 1: there's all these other things that are out there. You
Speaker 1: know that that can be utilized. And what's fascinating to
Speaker 1: me scientifically is that when you begin to examine a
Speaker 1: body that has been subjected to blunt force trauma, all
Speaker 1: of these instruments, particularly weapons of convenience, you can actually
Speaker 1: see a pattern that develops that is unique to that item.
Speaker 1: For instance, if you have a pipe, okay that has
Speaker 1: a threaded end on it, and someone is struck with
Speaker 1: that pipe, you can see the impression of the of
Speaker 1: the threads from the pipe, particularly how much force. And
Speaker 1: you know what those threads are, how they're being displayed, Well,
Speaker 1: they're being displayed actually dave through an abrasion because abrasions
Speaker 1: come up. Man, we can all identify with abrasion. So
Speaker 1: I would submit to you that everybody has sustained a
Speaker 1: blunt force trauma at some point in time in your life,
Speaker 1: even when you were a little kid. If you fall
Speaker 1: down on the ground and go boom, if you have
Speaker 1: had a skin knee, a skinned elbow, skin, shoulder knows
Speaker 1: whatever it is that is evidence of blunt force trauma.
Speaker 1: And what happens is those abraided areas that you see,
Speaker 1: the skin is literally being kind of plowed through at
Speaker 1: a very superficial level, and that top layer of skin
Speaker 1: down to the dirt. You know, you peel back that epidermis,
Speaker 1: you've got the dermis. It's going to hemorrhage, and it's
Speaker 1: going to hemorrhag slightly. It's why it has that red discoloration.
Speaker 1: It begins to dry out after sometimes you'll get a
Speaker 1: scab on it, that sort of thing. Well, that's kind
Speaker 1: of the superficial level. If you're at the top end.
Speaker 1: It depended upon how much force is behind that strike
Speaker 1: that will travel down through the dermas and into what's
Speaker 1: called the sub q fat, that kind of cushioned area
Speaker 1: that protects the outside of our body and overlies the musculature.
Speaker 1: And so with that depth, you're going deeper and deeper
Speaker 1: and deeper. Depended upon how much forces applied, and also Dave,
Speaker 1: how much how many times they've been struck. And I
Speaker 1: got to tell you the story about the worst.
Speaker 3: It never occurred to me. You know that you would
Speaker 3: have to figure out. Yeah, how many times in a
Speaker 3: how many times somebody got hit?
Speaker 2: Oh?
Speaker 1: Yeah, you do, and you try to figure out. And
Speaker 1: again I'm full disclosure here, I have to say that
Speaker 1: you can never you can never ever determine order most
Speaker 1: of the time, except in the case I'm about to tell
Speaker 1: you about, and it's probably one of the most gut
Speaker 1: wrenching things I've worked. I had a case in Atlanta
Speaker 1: of a lady that lived in public housing and she
Speaker 1: lived there. I'm doing air quotes right now with her boyfriend.
Speaker 1: I love it when they're referred to as a fiance
Speaker 1: There've been a fiance for like the last decade. Well,
Speaker 1: he's like a raging, angry alcoholic and his fiancee is
Speaker 1: suffering from all kinds of debilitating physical problems. They had
Speaker 1: a studio apartment in public housing. I'd never seen one
Speaker 1: of these before, and she slept on the pullout sofa
Speaker 1: in the front room of the house, and she was
Speaker 1: always covered in blankets and she couldn't move. She had diabetes,
Speaker 1: she had had a partial amputation of one of her feet,
Speaker 1: heart disease. I mean, the list just goes on and on.
Speaker 1: So you know, he's what's referred to as a mean drunk. Well,
Speaker 1: I got called out in Atlanta. This radio signal for
Speaker 1: death is forty eight, so they call it a signal
Speaker 1: forty eight, and it came out initially as a forty
Speaker 1: eight natural is the way that the radio call. But
Speaker 1: she's found dead, so I'm mandated to have to go
Speaker 1: out to the scene just examine her. And I roll
Speaker 1: out there and I met by a young uniformed officer
Speaker 1: and this male that's hanging outside and he is hammered, hammered,
Speaker 1: and there are these cans of beer that each individually.
Speaker 1: They're big Mont liquor cans that are still wrapped in
Speaker 1: paper bags, empty, but they're laying all over the place
Speaker 1: and sitting up on the stairs. And when he greeted me,
Speaker 1: he's like, hey, Cap, how you doing? And so for me,
Speaker 1: and I had police officers that were telling me that
Speaker 1: if someone calls you cap, and I'm wearing a bage
Speaker 1: they call you Cap, there's a high probability they've done
Speaker 1: time because it's like a formal address, you know, hey captain,
Speaker 1: like captain of the Guard and that sort of thing.
Speaker 1: I said, Hey, how are you? And I didn't want
Speaker 1: to talk to him at that point, I just wanted
Speaker 1: to go in and see this Lely's body. Well, the
Speaker 1: young officer followed me in and said, yeah, he came home.
Speaker 1: He's been out all night. He came home and found
Speaker 1: her dead in the bed. And it was hot, I
Speaker 1: mean it was so hot in this apartment. And she's
Speaker 1: covered in like three layers of blankets. Well, I'm looking
Speaker 1: at her. I pulled the blankets back, Dave, and she's
Speaker 1: got this dirty nightgown on. And you can when you
Speaker 1: pull the blanket back, the smell just kind of rushes
Speaker 1: out and hits you. And it's not dcom it's a
Speaker 1: smell of feces. It's a smell of urine. It's kind
Speaker 1: of stale urine smell. And as it turned out, it
Speaker 1: was also a smell of bed sores. And so I
Speaker 1: began to examine her. And day when I pulled back,
Speaker 1: pulled back these blankets and pulled up her just a dirty,
Speaker 1: filthy nightgown that she had on. That she had all
Speaker 1: of these contusions, which remember it goes abrasion in contusion.
Speaker 1: So contusion is deep tissue. It's a bruise. It's a
Speaker 1: fancy term for a bruise. So you have to get
Speaker 1: past the abrasion. One hundred and sixty seven of them,
Speaker 1: one hundred and sixty seven of them. The reason I
Speaker 1: know that is they were in this odd shape. They
Speaker 1: were shaped. See how can I describe it? They were
Speaker 1: about each one of them was about an inch in width.
Speaker 1: They had a it almost looked like a saw tooth
Speaker 1: end at the terminal end of each one of them.
Speaker 1: And I say saw tooth, kind of jagged, and each
Speaker 1: one of them varied in length from about twelve inches
Speaker 1: up to about sixteen inches. She's covered with them, Dave.
Speaker 1: And when I saw that, I looked at that officer.
Speaker 1: I said, put his ass in handcuffs, put him in
Speaker 1: the back of the unit out there, called detectives, get
Speaker 1: CID in route. I've got a call back to my office.
Speaker 1: Call back to my office because I'd never seen anything
Speaker 1: like this. And when I'm describing this, I get the
Speaker 1: pathologist that happened to be a friend of mine that
Speaker 1: was on duty. I said, look, man, I said, I've
Speaker 1: never seen this. I would really prefer that you'd come here.
Speaker 1: He's like, come pick me up. And we were not
Speaker 1: that far away from the office. I ran, you know,
Speaker 1: blasted over the office, grabbed him when we came back,
Speaker 1: and I'll never forget this friend mine. He's from North
Speaker 1: Dakota and he he's got this real thick North Dakota accident.
Speaker 1: He's like, oh my like that, and he said, I've
Speaker 1: got it. We've got to get heard her good lighting
Speaker 1: so I can better examine her and took her back
Speaker 1: and I was with him in the morgue and I
Speaker 1: suited it up for this and we start taking photos
Speaker 1: of these injuries all over her body, Dave, and you
Speaker 1: couldn't They were mostly intire on the front of her
Speaker 1: body because she was bedridden and laid in one spot,
Speaker 1: and she had these big ulternated bedsores. It was one
Speaker 1: hundred and sixty seven of them. And the physician looked
Speaker 1: at me and said, there is something in that house
Speaker 1: that matches this pattern. You got to go find it.
Speaker 1: So myself the homicide detectives went back out there and
Speaker 1: in their laundry room day there's a shelf over and
Speaker 1: people can identify, you know, the shelf that you have
Speaker 1: over your where you keep your detergent and your fabric
Speaker 1: softener and all that. And I started moving things around
Speaker 1: and in the back behind like where the detergent was,
Speaker 1: there was a busted or fractured dryer belt. Now, if
Speaker 1: you've never seen a dryer belt, there actually more robust
Speaker 1: than car belts than car fan belts. They're big in diameter.
Speaker 1: And sure enough, Dave, the thing matched the pattern on
Speaker 1: the end of this thing that every time he came home, blistered, drunk,
Speaker 1: he would grab this thing. And this poor woman who's
Speaker 1: so debilitated, is completely dependent upon her fiance, he would
Speaker 1: beat her every single time. This and again this is
Speaker 1: a first for me. When we were in the morgue,
Speaker 1: you've heard have you ever heard the old term beaten
Speaker 1: to a pulp? When the physician, because we were trying
Speaker 1: to age what they call age the wounds or age
Speaker 1: the bruises contusions, you create these external incisions just to
Speaker 1: go down specifically into that area. She had been beaten
Speaker 1: so faroosle Dave that her subkey fat in many spots
Speaker 1: had liquefied, and when the incision was made, it, along
Speaker 1: with blood, came porn out. Look, there are any number
Speaker 1: of ways that blunt force trauma can be sustained. I'm
Speaker 1: thinking right now many times about our elder population I'm
Speaker 1: sure that many of us can identify. We've had elderly
Speaker 1: the old ones that have fallen and you know, broken
Speaker 1: a hip, that sort of thing. Our bones are not
Speaker 1: as robust as they were when we were younger. That's
Speaker 1: a form of blunt force trauma. And you'll find people
Speaker 1: that are not in necessary haven't necessarily had a heart attack,
Speaker 1: but they they're they're lightheaded, they don't have the same
Speaker 1: gait that they once did their steady and they can
Speaker 1: fall and crack their heads. You'll see that many times
Speaker 1: the manifestos seen and sometimes you see that and you're thinking, oh,
Speaker 1: my lord, you know they've been beaten and that's not
Speaker 1: the case. But for us in the field, Dave, we
Speaker 1: look for any manner of injury that we can tie
Speaker 1: back to a specific object that may have created it.
Speaker 2: Wow, got can I ask you something?
Speaker 1: Yeah?
Speaker 2: Sure.
Speaker 3: When the Karen Reid trial took up a lot of
Speaker 3: prime time crime coverage and there were two of them, Yeah,
Speaker 3: and I think sometimes the victim, John O'Keefe kind of
Speaker 3: got lost in the shuffle between whatever kind of investigation happened,
Speaker 3: and but who Karen Reid was or is? And I
Speaker 3: did look at pictures and things that were made available.
Speaker 3: You're familiar with the case enough that he suffered blain
Speaker 3: force trauma.
Speaker 1: Correct, Yes he did, Yeah, he did, and it and
Speaker 1: the blot force trauma that I was particularly focused on
Speaker 1: in that case was going to be the head trauma,
Speaker 1: because that, along with hypothermia, is probably what brought about
Speaker 1: his death.
Speaker 3: Okay, that's what I was wondering, because I knew that
Speaker 3: he was out there in a blizzard, you know, and
Speaker 3: that had to have some type of an impact. But
Speaker 3: there had to be something that made him where he
Speaker 3: couldn't get up and get himself warm.
Speaker 2: So that's where the head trauma comes Yeah.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's where the head trauma comes in. And what
Speaker 1: was fascinating about that, you know, I remember distinctly looking
Speaker 1: at the sketch that the forendsic pathologist had created with
Speaker 1: the interior of his skull. And we do these we
Speaker 1: do these sketches or we have we have their templates
Speaker 1: that you use in them. Morg. Everybody's seeing these things.
Speaker 1: They're kind of you'll see a man or a woman,
Speaker 1: and you'll have an anterior view, posterior view, you'll have
Speaker 1: a lateral view. Then they do specific close ups of
Speaker 1: the body like they'll be one completely devoted to the head,
Speaker 1: one devoted to the hand, and it can be left
Speaker 1: or right hand if you want to get very specific.
Speaker 1: And they do one where the top of the head,
Speaker 1: the calvarium top of the skull is missing and you're
Speaker 1: looking down into the cranium vault well with a Kief's
Speaker 1: the thing that I noticed about his it was so
Speaker 1: very no pun intended striking, was the fact that he
Speaker 1: had two separate groups of fractures. He's got this kind
Speaker 1: of anterior thing that's going on with the right eye
Speaker 1: where that fracture goes through the floor of the skull. Okay,
Speaker 1: and it ceases before it gets to the frame and magnum,
Speaker 1: which is where your spinal cord dumps dumps down, you know,
Speaker 1: where your brain stem turns into your spinal cord. It
Speaker 1: ended before that, but and it's kind of a spider web.
Speaker 1: It looks like spider web when you see it. He's
Speaker 1: got one of those on the backside too. These are
Speaker 1: two separate events, so you've got an initial impact boom,
Speaker 1: you know, being hit. You know, they've described this trauma
Speaker 1: on the right aspect of his face, and then you've
Speaker 1: got concurrently, you've got this strike and there's this laceration
Speaker 1: on the backside of his head. Well, when he impacts
Speaker 1: whatever surface he impacted, if you're particularly hit by car,
Speaker 1: you can that energy transfer is pretty tremendous, you know.
Speaker 1: And I know a lot of people are saying, well,
Speaker 1: he was beaten up by other people and dumped out there. Well,
Speaker 1: if you say that he was beaten by other people,
Speaker 1: my question would be would be what was he beaten with?
Speaker 1: Because hands are not going to generate those kind of
Speaker 1: fractures inside that maybe I guess if he could if
Speaker 1: he got stomped on. But if somebody gets stomped on,
Speaker 1: you pattern abrasion.
Speaker 3: Us the other I would I would think if it
Speaker 3: was in a beating, you would see other injuries around
Speaker 3: the body because if any fight I've ever seen people
Speaker 3: get hit all over the place, you don't get you know,
Speaker 3: you get several And.
Speaker 1: One of the more interesting kind of hypotheses that was
Speaker 1: pushed out there was a head strike, a poster head
Speaker 1: strike on the leading edge of a step, and it's
Speaker 1: because you've got this kind of linear, linear lacerational backside.
Speaker 1: And by the way, I'm going to go into this.
Speaker 1: Lacerations are different than cuts. We kind of talked about
Speaker 1: this in sharpforce's injury. I hope everybody will go back
Speaker 1: and listen to that. This is this is a lacerational
Speaker 1: in back of his head. That's blunt force trauma. That
Speaker 1: it's you know, maybe a little bit larger than an inch,
Speaker 1: and it runs east and west. It's in the horizontal plane.
Speaker 1: And so that energy from that created this other, this
Speaker 1: other fracture on the floor of the skull. So when
Speaker 1: you look at that, you you know, you begin to
Speaker 1: you know, kind of try to assess and O'Keefe is
Speaker 1: merely an example of this. In a morgue, we try
Speaker 1: to assess what, first off, what instrument could have caused this,
Speaker 1: and also what instrument could have caused this it would
Speaker 1: have sufficient force to do this, okay, because you're not
Speaker 1: just going to like fall down, go boom, and you
Speaker 1: get this kind of complex fracture pattern in the on
Speaker 1: the floor of the skull. That's not the way that happens.
Speaker 1: It's not the way this works. It's not the way
Speaker 1: how any of this works. All right, It just doesn't
Speaker 1: you go and push that out here.
Speaker 3: So weird because you know, Joe, there's things that you
Speaker 3: know that people like me I have no clue. Okay,
Speaker 3: I see things a certain way. But then when I'm
Speaker 3: talking to you and you start explaining how these things look,
Speaker 3: I'm thinking, how does anybody ever get away with anything?
Speaker 3: I mean that because you look at something so different
Speaker 3: than the way those people do.
Speaker 1: And that's a good question. I don't know the the
Speaker 1: way people get away with things, and I know I
Speaker 1: have missed things personally.
Speaker 3: Uh.
Speaker 1: And that's the way you become a better investigator is
Speaker 1: not through success but through failure. You It all depends
Speaker 1: on how much it's generally some kind of human error
Speaker 1: where you miss something. And going back to the Keith seeing, uh,
Speaker 1: so much was lost in that that period of time,
Speaker 1: the way it was handled, you know, the way people
Speaker 1: responded to it. And look, there'll be people that will
Speaker 1: be lecturing about the case for years and years to come.
Speaker 1: I mean, it's it's done and now except.
Speaker 3: You know, yeah, Karen Reid cannot be tried again. She
Speaker 3: was judging not guilty. Yeah, precisely.
Speaker 1: You know. Now it's going to be a liability phase
Speaker 1: where you're gonna got in the civil court and that
Speaker 1: might be a bit of a different uh lower there. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's preponderance of the evidence. You know. I guess if
Speaker 1: Nancy was here, she'd say, are you a lawyer, just Scott, No,
Speaker 1: I'm not, but you upset depositions, There enough depositions to know.
Speaker 1: But yeah, I mean he you can look at that.
Speaker 1: You can look at that and try to understand, you know,
Speaker 1: how how this would have happened. You try to explain it.
Speaker 1: And all you can do is give that information back
Speaker 1: to the police that are trying to understand circumstances. And
Speaker 1: that's what circumstantial evidence. You present them with the physical
Speaker 1: findings you know that you have there, provided that the
Speaker 1: information that was gleaned at the scene is sufficient to
Speaker 1: the task, because sometimes in our world you don't necessarily
Speaker 1: have all the data that's coming in.
Speaker 3: Well, and you and I've noticed that in covering stories
Speaker 3: where there will I'll give you like Harmony Montgomery comes
Speaker 3: to mind. Oh, where we had a lot of information
Speaker 3: on that story as it was, because it came in
Speaker 3: late and we were figuring out and I remember you
Speaker 3: and I were talking about it and more information came
Speaker 3: out and it was like, wait a minute, that explains
Speaker 3: so much something small, and it basically for you could
Speaker 3: break the case wide open because you knew based on
Speaker 3: all of the information you had, on the physical evidence
Speaker 3: of what we had for that point that even without
Speaker 3: a body, based on what you were told, you were
Speaker 3: able to figure out what happened.
Speaker 1: Well, yeah, and with that he and father, with that person,
Speaker 1: you know, even he infamously said, I think I really
Speaker 1: hit her hard this time. And that precious baby, you know,
Speaker 1: died in the backseat of a convertible seabreing in the
Speaker 1: dead of winter in our northeast. Great job of providing
Speaker 1: such a wonderful life for that little angel. And you know,
Speaker 1: still to this day, but you know, hearing we know
Speaker 1: that he had struck her on various occasions, and I
Speaker 1: felt like and poor, poor poor angel. You know she's
Speaker 1: blond anyway, Dave, I remember that, you know, she's blond
Speaker 1: and she has to wear glasses. I know what a struggle.
Speaker 3: I mean, what I could think of it as anybody
Speaker 3: that saw that case. Yeah, I just remember thinking, why
Speaker 3: come on, I would have taken her, you.
Speaker 1: Know, no questions asked, Just bring her, bring her to
Speaker 1: my doorstep. You know what I'm saying. We'll find somebody
Speaker 1: and you know this had been a progression, and that's
Speaker 1: that goes into also assessment of blunt force trauma. Because Dave,
Speaker 1: in our world, in the world of death investigation and
Speaker 1: also with child abuse cases, Dave, what what kind of
Speaker 1: happens is we we actually grade grade bruises. And it's
Speaker 1: when when you're working as a child and child abuse investigator,
Speaker 1: which God bless those people that do that job. I
Speaker 1: don't know how in the world that could do it,
Speaker 1: but I think that everybody that's hearing me right now
Speaker 1: can understand this. Let me kind of run down the
Speaker 1: timeframe so that everybody understands about blunt force trauma. And
Speaker 1: one of things we look at not only in the morgue,
Speaker 1: but when you have a social worker or a physician
Speaker 1: that's working for law enforcement that's assessing child abuse cases,
Speaker 1: one of the things they do is they will age
Speaker 1: bruises and just give me a little latitude here and
Speaker 1: let me break it down. So when you initially get
Speaker 1: a contusion on an impact injury, you're going to be
Speaker 1: looking at the surface of the skin will be kind
Speaker 1: of red. It's like that irritation. Remember how I talked
Speaker 1: about with an abrasion anything that makes contact with the skin,
Speaker 1: even a fist, a closed fist, it'll have that kind
Speaker 1: of red discolouration and you'll see that in the immediate
Speaker 1: Then it'll take about one to four hours and you'll
Speaker 1: begin to see blue and purple, okay in the color.
Speaker 1: Just think about this on your own body. You know,
Speaker 1: generally about four days down range, that purplish area will
Speaker 1: begin to turn that creepy green color, okay, and that's
Speaker 1: gonna last about four to seven days. Then you're gonna
Speaker 1: get the really disgusting color, which is yellow. If and
Speaker 1: that's just part of the healing process, and that's the
Speaker 1: blood that's contained in that contused area that is resolving.
Speaker 1: All right. It's kind of dissipating because it's often interstitial tissue.
Speaker 1: You've got broken vessels. The vessels are healing, and that
Speaker 1: blood just kind of it disappears over period time. Will
Speaker 1: the yellow will stay around seven to ten days, and
Speaker 1: then after about fourteen to twenty one days, you're back
Speaker 1: to normal. We say, Morgan, what difference does that make.
Speaker 1: I'll tell you what difference it makes. If you've got
Speaker 1: an old going case of abuse, all right, if you
Speaker 1: if you're interviewing a child, and I'm talking now to
Speaker 1: people that deal with the living. They will have that
Speaker 1: child assessed by maybe a nurse practitioner or maybe even
Speaker 1: a physician, and if they notice that you have bruises
Speaker 1: on a body that are in these different states of healing,
Speaker 1: they're going to know that this is Dave, not a
Speaker 1: one off event. Okay, I can't tell you how many
Speaker 1: these cases I've worked over the years where you'll have
Speaker 1: an individual that is their body is little bodies are
Speaker 1: just littered with contusions, and you'll have the suspect that
Speaker 1: will say, well, oh yeah, well they fell down the stairs.
Speaker 1: You know, my next question is how many times and
Speaker 1: what days did they fall down the stairs? Because you
Speaker 1: because of those color changes, you know that these are
Speaker 1: not one off events. You'll have these layer things. It's
Speaker 1: kind of like the woman that I was mentioning that
Speaker 1: was beaten to death with the dryer belt over and
Speaker 1: over and over again, and these things are layered on
Speaker 1: top of one another. So it's very important for us
Speaker 1: to be able to assess, you know, assess these injuries,
Speaker 1: to contextualize it relative to relative to know what's going
Speaker 1: on and again with her, one of the things that
Speaker 1: we're looking at is what's referred to as pattern impact trauma.
Speaker 1: What could have generated We were talking about baseball bats
Speaker 1: just a minute ago, and let me tell you how
Speaker 1: this kind of breaks down. You'll find this fascinating if
Speaker 1: you ever seen a slow motion the slow motion, super
Speaker 1: slow most shots of a baseball being struck by a bat,
Speaker 1: where it's going through the strike zone and the ball
Speaker 1: you can see just for a millisecond, the ball bends,
Speaker 1: It literally bends and wraps, particularly with an aluminum bat
Speaker 1: or metal bat, it'll rap. Just for saying, you'll see
Speaker 1: an indentation. Do you know. Our skin works the same way,
Speaker 1: So if you get struck, if somebody gets struck in
Speaker 1: the arm with like a baseball bat or any solid object,
Speaker 1: for an instant, the skin will wrap around the circumference
Speaker 1: let's say it's a cylindrical object, around the circumference of it,
Speaker 1: and then pop back into place after being struck. So
Speaker 1: that's why many times these contusions actually appear a bit
Speaker 1: larger than the actual instrument that generated it. So if
Speaker 1: somebody struck with a barrel of a right in a
Speaker 1: sweet spot as you guys call it, right in sweet
Speaker 1: spot of the bat, that contusion is going to have
Speaker 1: the appearance of a much larger object. But what's happening
Speaker 1: as that central point of impact is hang on, I'm
Speaker 1: showing Dave. I got to demonstrate to him that I
Speaker 1: know how to roll my wrist. So as you roll
Speaker 1: your wrists through the swing, the tissue will wrap around
Speaker 1: the barrel of the bat. So even something that's not
Speaker 1: directly struck will slap that outer portion of the bat
Speaker 1: and you'll get this real broad ranging contusion. And that's
Speaker 1: one of the things you kind of assess now if
Speaker 1: you're using something like a hammer, because we have people
Speaker 1: that have hammer attacks where they're struck it it's not
Speaker 1: necessarily the same shape. What's fascinating like hammer attacks and
Speaker 1: blunt force trauma is that if someone is struck in
Speaker 1: the skull, you'll have a coin shape, if you're thinking
Speaker 1: about standard finishing hammer, a coin shape, a braided area
Speaker 1: in the skin, and then when you reflect the scalp,
Speaker 1: you'll have these perfect plugged areas of fracture, and it's
Speaker 1: a circular fracture, which you don't see a lot in
Speaker 1: the skull and these things. Many times, what happens is
Speaker 1: is that as the skull. The external table of skull
Speaker 1: is fractured away from those anchor points around it structurally
Speaker 1: that it's not the hammer being driven into the brain,
Speaker 1: it's actually that plug of bone that's being driven into
Speaker 1: the brain. So you've got this layered event and you
Speaker 1: get multiple of these, the skin is not necessarily going
Speaker 1: to appear the same either. We've got all over the body,
Speaker 1: and surgeons know this. We have what are referred to
Speaker 1: as lines of Langer. And if people are out there
Speaker 1: that have been in the military, one of the first
Speaker 1: things they teach you to do in the military is
Speaker 1: to study contour maps and it gives you height, elevation,
Speaker 1: that sort of thing. So the tighter those lines with elevation,
Speaker 1: they follow the pattern of the ground. Well, we have
Speaker 1: those patterns all over our body and they're very predictable.
Speaker 1: As a matter of fact, when people are when med
Speaker 1: school students are studying human anatomy, they learn the lines
Speaker 1: of Langer. So if you make an incision like classic
Speaker 1: concision everybody's familiar with is what's referred to as the
Speaker 1: McBurnie incision, and that's for an appendectomy. For years people
Speaker 1: you know, it wasn't always done laparoscopically where they're gonna
Speaker 1: go through your belly button. They make this diagonal scar.
Speaker 1: It's on the right lower quadront of your abdomen, and
Speaker 1: it runs it runs diagonally opposing to where the actual
Speaker 1: appendix is. The reason they make that incision that way
Speaker 1: is because it follows the line of langer, essentially, like
Speaker 1: if you're talking about furniture, it follows the grain. So
Speaker 1: if you cut across the lines of Langer, it opens
Speaker 1: up into this really ghastly injury. Okay, Well, when you
Speaker 1: have someone struck by an instrument, okay, like a bat
Speaker 1: or a hammer or whatever it is, a car, they
Speaker 1: get these big nasty lacerations that are abnormal in appearance,
Speaker 1: that the sides don't appear to marry up, you really
Speaker 1: have to, like like in the morgue, we'll use tape.
Speaker 1: Many times, we'll use really strong medical tape to try
Speaker 1: to pull the side together, just so that we can
Speaker 1: appreciate how the two things connect, because when you take
Speaker 1: the tape off, it's just going to spring back out
Speaker 1: to this real irregular I don't know the best way
Speaker 1: I can say it is like a Frankenstein, you know,
Speaker 1: cut because it's so odd when you see it and
Speaker 1: you know that you're dealing because that's a true laceration,
Speaker 1: you'll have these little bits of skin that attach to
Speaker 1: either side. That's called tissue bridging, so it's not completely
Speaker 1: cut through. So you're going to see that with blunt
Speaker 1: force trauma in particular. So it's I would say, dave
Speaker 1: that compared to gunshot wounds and anything I ever had
Speaker 1: to assess in the medical legal context, blunt force trauma
Speaker 1: by far is the most difficult thing to assess, make
Speaker 1: a record of, to try to connect with some specific
Speaker 1: object that's out there. It takes time, Unlike I mean,
Speaker 1: everything that we assess takes time. There's a learning curve
Speaker 1: with it. But I still to this day, to this day,
Speaker 1: at this age and stage in my life, there are
Speaker 1: still things daily that I can learn about blunt force
Speaker 1: trauma and the scars that are left behind. I'm Joseph
Speaker 1: Scott Morgan and this is body bags