Episode 06: Welcome to Pushing Up Lilies, I’m your host Julie Mattson. Today I am sharing with you what the life of a death investigator entails. A lot of people have asked me exactly what a death investigator does, and a lot of people will call me the medical examiner, which I am not… I actually am not a doctor, I am a nurse though, and there are very few nurses in this field that do the job that I do. A lot of the people that I work with are actually retired law enforcement, and many of them have degrees in criminal justice as well as mortuary Science, so there are a lot of different backgrounds of people doing the same job that I do. Medical Examiners are actually forensic pathologists who have to be doctors, and they are the ones who perform the actual autopsy, the forensic death investigators that are on scene are actually there to help the doctors, so we do many things when we go out on the scene to assist the doctors in coming to the conclusion as far as what the cause and manner of death are.

SHOW NOTES:

•  The one thing that we don’t do is autopsies. Now, you may find in some offices that the investigators have multiple jobs, and one of them may be to serve as an autopsy tech and also investigate the death, those may be in smaller offices where they have fewer staff members and they utilize the investigators also as autopsy tech. In our office though, we do not… Ultimately, the autopsies are done by the forensic pathologists or the medical examiners or assistant medical examiners that work at the office. We also do not collect DNA, at the scenes at our office, not to say that it’s not done everywhere. But I know on TV, they’re like, Who is this guy? Let’s go ahead and collect some evidence on him and see if we can find out who he is. And all of a sudden on an iPad, DNA comes back in 15 minutes and it definitely does not happen that way. We do not swab the body in any way before we send it to the medical examiner because we don’t want to lose evidence. So, that’s not something that we do on scene, which many people see on TV and maybe get angry when they find out that DNA does take a little bit longer than it does on CSI.(02:51)

•   We want to get as detailed as we can… Photos, and you can never take too many because we want our doctors to feel like they were there. We want them to be able to look at the body and also look at our scene photos and put the picture together to determine the cause and manner of death. And in addition, we are going to interview people to get additional information, but we don’t move anything before we take pictures. We want photos of the scene the way it was when the person was found, we want to always make notes about things that are moved prior to us getting there. Many times, the police or the fire department will have to move something in efforts to try and resuscitated someone if they think that that’s a possibility, and we always make notes of those things that are moved… Many times when we get to the scene, it’s not supposed to happen, but it has… Where law enforcement may have moved the weapon or picked up the casings, and we need to know where the weapons were, what the weapons were, what the ammunition was, where the casings were found, if the projectiles were located, all those things are very important to our doctor and a big part of what we do. (06:14)

•   Sometimes these questions are hard to ask… Well, always they’re hard to ask, right? Because it’s really hard to ask someone who’s just lost a loved one all these questions about history and whatnot. But they’re just things that we really to know and the best thing that we can do is just explain to them that our job is to find an answer for them, as far as how their loved one passed away, and any information we can get from family is going to help us to do that. So, we do try to make them understand that we’re doing this for them, we’re not just being nosy, asking questions, there is a reason why we do what we do. Many times we have to follow up as far as finding family, we’ve gone back to people’s homes before to look through their belongings to see if we can find business cards. Maybe indicating a doctor they may have gone to in the past who might have record of a next-of-kin or a close family contact. We may have to go to the apartment office to find out if they listed an emergency contact on their paperwork when they signed their lease. And so there are many ways that we can look to try and find family members of someone. We also have some computer programs that we use and some agencies that we can reach out to if we have problems trying to find family. Many times an issue of identifying someone comes up, if that’s the case, and when I say identifying, if a person doesn’t have a photo ID and you can’t look at the photo and then look at the person, and now 100% beyond a shadow of a doubt that that’s who that is. Even if they’re locked in a house that is believed to be theirs, they are unidentified. (08:52)

•  We do also carry knives so that we can cut people down when they hang themselves if they have not been previously cut down by EMS for life-saving measures. And then on car accidents, we are responsible for taking photos of the vehicle from all angles. We need to know the deceased position in the car… Were they the driver? Were they the passenger… Was their foot on the gas? Was their foot on the break? Is the car running? Are the keys in the ignition? Was the door open? Was the door closed? Did the airbags deploy? Did they have their seat belt on, is there any alcohol in the floor board, any indication that they may have been on their phone and been driving distracted, anything like that, are all things that we have to look for in the vehicle and take photos of… Even in natural deaths, if we have to go out and it’s a young person who dies at home, we make note of things that we find in the house, any paperwork from a recent ER visit that shows us the complaints and the diagnosis of that person when they were discharged. (13:28)

•  There are many cases where there’s really no indication that we have absolutely no idea, and those are the cases that are going to go to Fort Worth and get full autopsies, and they’re going to look at everything. They’re going to look for blood clots, they’re going to look for strokes, they’re going to look for bowel instructions, they’re going to look at everything to try and find the cause and manner of those deaths. We don’t always have clues, but a big part of our job is to try to find them if they’re there, and also photograph them. It’s a very hard job, and a lot of people think that they would love it, and they get hired and then find out that they don’t… It’s difficult to go into someone’s house and see some of the things that we see, it’s difficult to visit with the families and ask some of the questions that we have to ask, but those of us who do it love it, and we do it because we’re there to help the families, and we do want to help them find closure. (17:27)

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