The Los Angeles Police Department is no longer investigating the car crash that left actor Anne Heche legally brain dead, according to a statement shared with NBC News.
“As of today there will be no further investigative efforts made in this case,” the statement reads. “Any information or records that have been requested prior to this turn of events will still be collected as they arrive as a matter of formalities and included in the overall case. When a person suspected of a crime expires, we do not present for filing consideration.”
It has been interesting to me how various news outlets have been reporting her death. The more “established” news organizations such as AP, CNN, New York Times, Washington Post and others are only now reporting that Heche has died, citing that she was taken off life support. Whereas other outlets such as People and TMZ were reporting that she died on Friday, citing that she was brain dead and therefore “dead” under California law.
I believe the early reporting on the brain death came from “informed sources” of one type or another while the established news sources were waiting for an official announcement.
I’ve had some experience working with brain dead and pre-donation cases, I’ll lay out my thoughts on this if there’s enough curiosity (I don’t want to come across as morbid, or callous).
I’ve been thinking about this, and I think it involves how “death” is defined.
For example, I know my spouse died around 11:30 am because I was there, and it was confirmed by my sister who was also there and is an MD with experience in declaring people dead. But the time of death on his death certificate is later in the day, because he was officially and legally declared dead by one of the hospital staff doctors. So the legal record shows the later time.
Some media might be going by the family/spokespeople announcement of brain death. Others might be using a more legalistic definition based on official public records.
Having once worked at a hospital that had quite a few Gift of Hope cases, I can attest that hospitals DO NOT kill people to make organ donors. Au contraire; they get the most intensive care of any patients I ever saw.
I have always assumed that the person was not considered actually dead until the point where they stop breathing. Hence why there is the additional term “brain death” to refer to a time before that point in some cases.
Two categories of legal death are death determined by irreversible cessation of heartbeat (cardiopulmonary death), and death determined by irreversible cessation of functions of the brain (brain death). In the United States, each state has laws for determining these two categories of death that are modeled after the Uniform Determination of Death Act. States that do not recognize “irreversible cessation of all function of the entire brain, including the brainstem” to be death include Arizona, Illinois, Iowa, Louisiana, North Carolina, and Texas.
I would expect that she’d stopped breathing days before, that’s what the ventilator was for. In my new thread I talk about the delay to declare brain death when you have a diffuse injury, like drowning.
She stopped breathing on her own, but presumably she was on a respirator, which breathes for her. Oxygen was still circulating in her blood to keep her organs alive.
My issue isn’t the legal concept. I can understand defining death legally at brain death, since there is no longer a person there if there is no functioning brain. But I’ve never seen that criteria used when reporting deaths. It was always whenever the doctors pronounced the whole body dead, and not merely brain dead.
I’d never realized they actually sometimes announce deaths at brain death. That didn’t seem to be what happened with other celebrities who died in California.
When my brother-in-law was waiting for a heart transplant I suggested he spend some money on advertisements in high school yearbooks. My proposed wording for the advertisements was “None of the cool kids wear seat belts”. You get your organs whatever way works.