The teenagers that we tend to examine are
usually non-natural deaths. You know, traffic accidents, gunshot
wounds and suicides. Most teenagers are relatively healthy, so in a
typical week, there aren’t many teenagers. If there are, they are
usually suicides and homicides.
When I started working in the 1980s, most of
our homicide victims were in their late 20s, early 30s. Over the
years, the ages have been creeping down. We even have cases where
12- and 13-year-olds were homicide victims, but 12- and
13-year-olds were also the offenders. The gangs were using the 12-
and 13-year-olds to carry the guns and to deliver the drugs. They
were using the younger members, recruiting them younger, because
they figured the police wouldn’t hassle them as much.
On Saturday, I did two homicide cases. Both
single, simple gunshot wounds. One was a 16-year-old Hispanic male
and the other was a 16-year-old black male. One of the kids was
just sitting with his friends and they heard what sounded like
firecrackers. They turned to look and he got hit in the right side
of the head. Totally innocent bystander. Never been in trouble a
day of his life. The other one was a gang member. He had been
arrested at least twice: one for a stolen vehicle and one for
drugs. But, of course, I’m sure his family is saying that he was an
angel and that he has never been in trouble a day in his life.
You find out that, if you look into some of
these reports, they give gang affiliations. They usually find out
by tattoos or witnesses, things like that. You get to recognize
some of the gang tattoos. I mean, the 16-year-old has tattoos, but
one of them was his name and, like, praying hands. A lot of the
people that we work on have tattoos, and a lot of them have gang
tattoos that can easily be recognized.
If it’s the number 4, it’s the Four Corner
Hustlers. If you see crossed pitchforks, it’s GD, which is the
Gangster Disciples. There are so many different factions now that
even some of the bigger gangs have broken up into smaller factions
and fight each other. The crossed pitchforks I see a lot. But a lot
of those are on people that are in their 40s and even their 50s.
They’re older gang members that have survived and they’re dying
from drugs or natural diseases. They’re not into the gangbanging; I
guess it’s not exciting for them anymore.
This is the working hallway where they’re
doing autopsies. Want to see?
It’s a gunshot victim and there’s the victim
himself right there. We have digital X-rays now, so we’re able to
locate the bullets and recover them. All of the bullets in the body
have to be removed.
When a bullet is fired from a gun, it has
kinetic energy, and kinetic energy is determined by its
velocity—how fast it’s traveling—and mass. The more kinetic energy
that a bullet has, the more damage it’s going to do. So if you have
a low muzzle velocity handgun—a .22 or something like that—it’s not
going to do as much damage as a higher velocity gun, like a .22
rifle.
As the bullet goes into the body, the small
piece of lead isn’t really going to do all that much damage. If I
threw a bullet at you, it wouldn’t do anything. But as the bullet
is entering the body, it’s sending kinetic energy out in a
circumferential manner around it. So a bullet that’s the size of a
pencil eraser may create damage in the body that’s the size of a
softball. What happens is it creates what’s called a temporary
cavity, and that cavity pulsates and becomes smaller, smaller and
smaller, until you finally just have the hole the bullet has left
in the organs. That hole is surrounded by a larger area of damaged
tissue.
So depending on where the bullet goes into
the body and what organs it affects, it’s going to create far more
damage. If it goes through the heart, it can kill you very quickly
because you need your heart to pump your blood. Where you’re hit
determines how quickly you may die or succumb. Now, I’ve done
autopsies on victims that have been shot in the head and have run
75 yards or have driven their car for several blocks before they
succumb. It all depends on what part of the brain and what the
kinetic energy is. You could shoot somebody and, if it goes through
the frontal lobes of the brain, they’re not going to lose
consciousness until the brain swells enough from the damage to
cause them to become unconscious and die. If you shoot them in the
back of the head where the vital centers are, they’re going to die
much faster. It’s not like on television when you get shot and you
go down. In some cases it’s true, and in some cases it’s not
true.
The length of an autopsy depends on how many
times they’ve been shot. I’ve been doing this for 25 years, so it
usually takes me about an hour, an hour and a half. We always X-ray
our gunshot victims, examine the outside of the body. We do height,
weight, hair color, eye color. Are your teeth natural? Are your
ears pierced? Do you have any tattoos, you know, scars, identifying
marks? Then we locate and measure the wounds. We look for evidence
of close range fire, like soot, gunpowder or stippling.
After you do the external examination, then
you do the internal examination. If you’re shot in the head, it
doesn’t matter; we’re going to do a complete autopsy. We usually
start with the chest and abdomen. We collect toxicology samples:
blood, bile from the gall bladder, urine from the urinary bladder
if there’s some there; we usually take fluid from the eye. If
they’re shot and the bullet is still in the body, then we remove it
and photograph it for the investigating officer.
What happens when they do IDs is they set it
here under the camera. So if you stand right here and come a little
forward—there you are.
The intake attendants and autopsy technicians
get the body on the cart and they usually have a blue sheet over
them and just the head is shown. We do identifications by
close-circuit television. We don’t pull a drawer out, like you see
on TV. The family’s not standing right there.
We have the family fill out an affidavit when
they come in. We take them in the order that they come. We ask them
who are they here to see, what their relationship is to the victim,
you know, as much demographics as we can get. We make a copy of a
photo ID. Then, they sign it. After they’re done with that, we ask
them to sit down and we’ll call them back and take them into the
viewing room.
This is the room where we bring the families
to make the IDs. We ask them to sit down, ask them if they’re
ready. When they tell us they’re ready, we turn the TV on and they
see the face of the body. They can sit here as long as they want.
They can look at it as long as they want.
We used to let anyone come in and as many
times as they wanted to see the body, but we found that people were
using us as their funeral home, and I don’t have enough staff. This
is a very difficult part of the job that we do—helping the
families. I don’t have a grief counselor or a minister or like a
chaplain or anything like that for either the families or my
staff.
Now this painting, this picture is very
non-denominational and is usually hanging on the wall over there.
But if you look at the wall you can see a ripply area. Somebody
punched three holes in the wall while they were doing an
identification. I don’t even think it was a homicide victim. So
we’ve restricted the number of IDs that we do. We’ve cut back,
especially after the damage was done to the wall. Some of my staff
have been threatened. We now restrict IDs to homicide victims, as
well as unidentified and those tentatively IDed. It’s made a big
difference. Everyone’s stress levels have gone down quite a
bit.
In this job, we see the best and the worst of
human beings. We really do. I’ve had mothers truly devastated by
the loss of a child, of course. But others—well, we just recently
had a young homicide victim, and the mother came in and she was
making loud, wailing noises and dramatically falling to the floor
and things like that. But when you looked at her closely, there
wasn’t a single tear in her eye. You know, they give an
over-dramatic performance out of guilt. Some of our victims are
10-year-olds or in their early teens who were out on a school night
at 11 or 12 o’clock at night. What were they doing out on a school
night at midnight? Why aren’t the parents enforcing curfew? Why
aren’t they in bed sleeping? I think that’s part of the guilt. The
parents realize that they weren’t there for them when their child
was young and needed them.
My parents lived through the Depression and
World War II, so it was the nuclear family, the whole thing. When I
was a kid, you were held accountable and learned to become
self-sufficient. I grew up around the time where the drug culture
and free love and personal freedom started coming in. Those parents
raised their children differently, with maybe a little too much
free rein, as opposed to what we had when we were kids. It has
progressed to where society believes you should really allow your
child to express themselves and you really shouldn’t discipline
your child.
I think the problem today is that parents are
trying to be their children’s friend and not the parent. And you
have to be a parent; you have to set limits. Bribery doesn’t work
with kids, because they’re just going to want more and more. You
have to be a parent.
Everybody is like, “The police need to do
more. The schools need to do more. Society needs to do more to
prevent youth violence.” But very rarely do you hear that the
parents should be doing more. Ultimately, the parents are
responsible for what their children are doing.
I know that there’s a lot out there about
joining gangs. Why does somebody join a gang? Well, because it’s
their family. The gang means much more to them and provides them
with more than their parents did, than their family did. If you
have a tight, cohesive family who are cared for and everything,
then there’s no reason to join a gang.
But I’ve had mothers where their sons have
been nothing but trouble from the day they were old enough to leave
home on their own. I’ve actually had a mother say, “I’m glad he’s
gone. He’s been nothing but trouble his whole life.” I understand
that you can do everything in your power to try to raise a child
correctly and make them socially responsible and everything, and it
doesn’t make any difference. There are evil people and,
unfortunately, for this lady, her son just was evil.
Don’t misunderstand me. I am a human being
with feelings and emotions, just like everyone else. There are
times where, for whatever reason, particularly if the victim is an
innocent bystander and the family did everything to protect the
child and raise them properly and they still end up dead, it just
breaks my heart. Even if we don’t talk to the parents or meet them
at all, it still touches you.
Every day is a struggle for us to focus on
our job and not focus on the social and human aspects of the job,
because, if you focus too much on that, you lose sight of what it
is that you’re doing and you’re not going to do your job
properly.
Don’t think I’m a coldhearted person, but I
know how to separate the person I am from the work I do. When
you’re doing an autopsy, it’s not a person. You’re working on a
case number. You’re working on a case.
Even with gang members, I try not to think
about them because that’s personalizing them, making them more than
a case number. In order to survive, in order to be able to sleep at
night, in order to come to work day after day after day and do what
I do, I choose to not humanize victims by not knowing their
stories. Yes, even the gang member has family out there that cared
about him, but I can’t perform to the degree that is required to do
a good job if I allow myself to get involved emotionally with what
I do. As the examining pathologist, I don’t want to know about his
life, because my job is to focus on his death. I’m very comfortable
with death; I’m very uncomfortable with dying.
I really love what I do. It’s fascinating
seeing how the human body was put together and to see how little it
takes to cause it to cease to function. I can’t cure what happened
to this person; I can’t bring them back to life. But what I can do
is help the family.
When I was an assistant medical examiner, I
thought of the morgue as a place where the work I was doing was
bringing peace to family members and bringing justice for the
victims of crime—to be the voice of victims and to tell their
families and their friends what happened to them and what brought
about their death.
I still think of it as that.
—
Interviewed by Jacob
Sabolo
BOTH FEET OUT
BENNY ESTRADA
Benjamin “Benny” Estrada believes he is
doing God’s work. A former gang member in the Mexican-American
neighborhood of Little Village on the Southwest Side, Estrada uses
his own experience to help at-risk youth. He spoke with us in 2011
at the YMCA’s Street Intervention Program in Pilsen, where he
worked69 as a program coordinator with Jorge Roque, whose narrative
also appears in this book. The program, which operates in
neighborhoods throughout Chicago, attempts to keep young people
away from street violence through services such as recreational
activities and in-school visits.
Estrada—who, prior to joining the YMCA,
worked for the anti-violence group CeaseFire—is a small man with
swift gestures. He has a casual air, but when he becomes passionate
about a topic he is prone to smacking tables and using his hands to
emphasize his points.
Little Village is divided by two major gangs,
right: the Latin Kings and the Two-Sixes. And where I grew up,
which is like the east side of Little Village, there was a real
lack of resources, a real lack of after-school programming, a lack
of green spaces, parks in general. If we wanted to go to the park
and stay in the Latino community, you can either go to Pilsen,
which is out of your way, or you can go to Piotrowski Park, which
is based in Little Village. But there being two major gangs, if
you’re not from the community where Piotrowski Park is at, there’s
guys that know that.