Coroner's Journal (6 page)

According to the rat, Jimmy and Shelia argued over who was hogging the crack. Surprisingly, pound per pound of body weight, women can often consume more cocaine that their male counterparts. This is because women tend to have more of an enzyme that inactivates the cocaine. You don't have to be a physiologist to know this—just ask any crack head on the street.

Cocaine tends to do lots of things in addition to making the user feel good. As the run continues, agitation and paranoia set in. For whatever reason, Jimmy reportedly took off his bandana, wet it in the sink and sneaked up behind Shelia and twisted the bandana around her neck. Having done that, he tied the bandana back on his head and did the rest of the coke. I have never known an addict to willingly leave any cocaine on the table.

Jimmy then left her for dead, but somebody found her and realized she was still alive and anonymously called 911. The emergency medical techs responded to the motel room. She was resuscitated and rushed to EKL, where she was admitted to the Intensive Care Unit, and died.

EKL is a charity hospital that dates back to the Huey Long legacy. It is a faded gray structure that has seen better days. Since it is a teaching hospital, the residents handle the brunt of the medical work and patient loads. I am not sure how Shelia's death slipped through the cracks and was not reported to us. I suspect she had several overworked physicians attending to her and the “on call” doctor pronounced her dead without knowing the strangulation history.

I first heard of her death from the police. Based on the informant's report, the Baton Rouge homicide detectives got an order of exhumation. Their next call was to the coroner's office—I was deputy at the time. Burying a loved one is hard enough; having that loved one dug up and autopsied causes even more pain. So several months after her death, Shelia's casket was exhumed under the guidance of the office and was brought to the State Crime Lab for opening and for autopsy.

As I said earlier, Baton Rouge did not have a parish morgue. Amazing—because no morgue means no chain of custody. I cannot imagine getting a death sentence with contaminated evidence, but evidently it had never been challenged. It's the way we had always done it! The office was a travesty in my humble opinion. I was there to witness it and to learn.

You never really know what to expect when a coffin lid is opened. We all brace ourselves for the worst. Fortunately, the funeral home had done a good job on her corpse. As one detective opined, “She looked fresh.” I had expected the stench of decomposition, but we were spared.

She was removed from the coffin and placed on a stainless-steel gurney, which was to serve as the autopsy table. But the cause of death seemed apparent right away. As soon as I saw the embalmed corpse, I knew she had been strangled. The strangulation marks around her neck were blatant. It should be noted that bruises often appear more prominent after a body is embalmed. I was surprised the embalmer missed it. I was surprised the corpse's makeup artist missed it. I was surprised the physician missed it. There was ample opportunity to catch it.

Shelia was reinterred after the autopsy.

Much to Jimmy Jones's surprise and chagrin, he was charged with her murder. He thought he had gotten away with it. EKL got a letter from the coroner's office on reporting requirements. Although justice was belated, the victim did get a new death certificate that listed the cause of death as strangulation and the manner of death as homicide.

I learned a lot about informants from that death investigation, and that talk is (not always) cheap. The sight of the marks on the embalmed neck of the victim preoccupied my mind for a while. I get that 3-D image of her even now as I write this.
How many have we missed like this one?

I happened to drive by it today, the house on Tenth Street, in the northern part of Baton Rouge, just under the interstate. It had been gutted by fire. It won't be long until it gets torn down, and it won't be missed. At least not from what I could tell when it first came to my attention—just a typical run-down shotgun shack.

But it once housed the nightmare of elderly neglect. I entered that nightmare one night in 1998 in response to a call from uniformed police that they had a death of an elderly black female at that residence.

The house was unassuming enough as I drove up in the vehicle I had come to know as the “Green Hornet,” a faded green Ford Crown Victoria—very used—with a “police interceptor” package, which basically means beefed-up suspension and brakes and a bigger engine.

When I got up to the porch, a uniformed officer briefed me. He told me there was an old lady who had died in her bed. One of her sons had found her and called EMS, who arrived on the scene and determined that she had been dead for several hours. So I was called. The son said she had been sick a long time. EMS said they knew her from previous calls and that she had significant medical problems, including Alzheimer's disease. Seemed simple, but the officer had some concerns about something he had observed on her left forehead. He also told me there was no light in the bedroom and just one bulb working in the living room. This was a bad omen. I went back to my unit and got a powerful flashlight and an AC “trouble light.”

The house had only four rooms. All the rooms were built in a row, hence the term “shotgun shack.” As my north Louisiana grandpa used to say: “You could shoot a shotgun right through the front door and the pellets would fly out the back door without hitting anything in between.”

The living room was unkempt and cluttered, and that was where the sole light available to us was, an exposed bulb hanging from a single ceiling fixture. The couch and stuffed chair were both torn and tattered, having seen better days. What looked like an abandoned dresser supported the TV set, which was tuned to a sports channel, blaring away. It was very annoying. The whole place had the acrid reek of stale nicotine and urine.

I walked across the ill-fitted linoleum rug and peered into the next room, which was the bedroom of the deceased. For those folks not familiar with it, a linoleum rug is sort of a poor man's floor tile. It comes in a big heavy roll that looks like thick oversized plastic and has some sort of pattern on it. It is frequently rolled out over a wooden floor. In a short time, the ridges in the floor indent the linoleum and then cracks start to show up. The bedroom was dark indeed. I stood at the entrance of the room and shined a beam of light into it. There were only two pieces of furniture in the room—a bed and a nightstand. The mattress was devoid of any sheets or blankets.

I discerned some movement in the area of the head. “What the hell?” I focused my beam on the old lady's head. “Rats!”
Her head was covered with rats!
It was a horror movie come to life.

The rats were taking advantage of an easy meal.
They were eating her head!
I stomped the floor and they scurried away—reluctantly. The uniformed officer's response was limited to the same repeated phrase: “Holy shit! Holy shit! Holy shit!” We approached the bed and he pointed to the area on her forehead that was missing. There was still a telltale quiver to his voice as he continued. “It's bigger now,” he said. “And her eye is gone.”

I started jotting down notes in my handy three-by-five notebook, to be later transcribed on a computer. I've filled scores of them. I looked closer and fished a magnifying glass out of my “possibles” bag, which, apart from my car trunk, holds everything I might possibly need at a crime scene:

 

 

I pointed out in my notes the gnaw marks left by the rats' teeth and noted the fact that there was no bleeding. All of these injuries occurred after death. They were postmortem injuries. Oddly, standing over a woman whose face had just been eaten by rats, I felt a vague relief—that she had not sustained
this
trauma prior to her death.

The officer's attention was suddenly diverted to the front room. One of the woman's sons had stumbled into the house and was yelling that he wanted to see his mother. He was very drunk and was ranting that he was a Vietnam veteran and nobody had the right to keep him away from his mother; the tension at the scene started to escalate. I was in the doorway of the bedroom. The officer stood in the living room between the drunken son and me. I gripped my flashlight tightly. It was the only weapon I had. The headline of the morning paper flashed before my eyes: DEPUTY CORONER & POLICE OFFICER KILL SON OF DECEASED. It looked like it was about to be party time when another son appeared.

Son number two was more rational and seemed willing to help with the situation. He calmed his brother down in a composed, assertive manner and introduced himself.

I expressed my sympathy to the family and told him I needed to examine his mother and take her to the morgue. He understood and accepted this. I also asked about electrical outlets and he assured me there was one in the bedroom that worked. It was on the side wall and under the bed—the bed under which the rats had retreated. I told him about the rats. I had no intention of putting my hand under there to find an electrical outlet.

This is when he made the revelation that we needed to let the “rat dog” out. Rat Dog was kept in the bathroom. He had been barking sporadically since we had entered the house. Needless to say we felt the dog was best secured right where it was. However, bowing to the wisdom and experience of the helpful son, we agreed to let him release the dog.

He opened the bathroom door, whistled, and hollered, “Get 'em, Rat Dog!” Apparently that was the animal's name. To my amazement, Rat Dog, a medium-size black-and-white mixed terrier, bolted out of the bathroom and raced right under the bed. The rats scattered as he herded them into the back room, which inexplicably contained stacks of lawn mowers.

With that, the helpful son deftly reached under the bed and plugged in my light. The whole room was immediately illuminated, as was the destitution of the situation. The woman was malnourished and had essentially died of end-stage dementia. I doubt she weighed eighty pounds. She had not been properly cared for and should have been in a nursing home.

I had seen many situations like this before. At times the person stays or is kept in the home because moving the elderly person to a nursing home would mean that the Social Security check would no longer come to the house. That check may be the major source of income for the household. Poverty has many victims—that's the harsh reality. And then again she may simply have refused to go to a nursing home, and the family accepted that as her wish.

We have all sorts of agencies to deal with such issues, but for whatever reason, the safeguards didn't work for this poor woman.

As I drove past her house again, I thought to myself:
I'll be glad when they finally demolish it.

Crime scenes can turn volatile in an instant. A killer may even come back to the scene while it is being processed. It happens. Or a distraught relative may crash through the yellow boundary tape, bent on seeing the deceased and/or extracting revenge for the death. Sometimes, they just walk right in.

As I recall, it was late into the night. The time when most people are sound asleep and certainly not aware of the violence unfolding in their city. I got out of my vehicle at the death scene, and I was greeted by a veteran police officer who had been a homicide detective for many years. He had gone back into uniform due to some twist of politics within the department. I don't know the details, and really don't care to know. Bottom line: he's a damn good cop and he knows how to secure a scene.

The humidity and heat were about five clicks past sweltering. It was one of those nights when you could actually see the humidity, that smoggy haze that clings to everyone and everything. Everyone had that sweaty look. I don't mean “glistening,” either—I mean plain old uncomfortable sweat. The kind that makes you as irritable as a rattlesnake. This kind of heat and humidity also tends to fog the brain. I made the mistake of asking Officer Ben Odom how he felt.

After giving me a gruff rundown of current events, he sputtered out some derogatory comments about the heat, humidity, and the mosquitoes.

I was standing at the street boundary of the parking lot of a local convenience store. The yellow crime-scene tape had been strung up accordingly. Even at this ungodly hour, the inevitable crowd had gathered. I took my usual survey of the area and noted that there were about a half dozen uniformed officers spaced at intervals about the perimeter. “It couldn't get more secure than this,” I said.