Hi all.
Last week a family of four in Montreal was killed when their house sank into a 40-metre sinkhole. The coroner was able to determine the cause of death without doing an autopsy. Here is an excerpt from an Ottawa newspaper:
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The family of four killed in Monday’s landslide in Saint-Jude, Que., died by asphyxia due to burial, a coroner has found.
A spokeswoman for the Quebec coroner’s office said Thursday that coroner Dr. Alexandre Crich didn’t need to do any autopsies to determine the cause of the death.
“The circumstances were fairly clear,” said Genevieve Guilbault of the coroner’s office. A funeral is planned for May 22 in Saint-Jude, 75 kilometres northeast of Montreal.
Guilbault said Crich came to his determination of cause of death after conducting a visual examination Wednesday night of the bodies of Richard Préfontaine, his wife Line Charbonneau, and their children, Amélie, 12, and Anaïs, 9.
The family of four were effectively “buried alive” and died of the resulting lack of air – as opposed to drowning or trauma, said Guilbault.
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So, my curiosity leads me to ask: What would have been so obvious to the doctor that an autopsy would’ve been deemed redundant? For example, how would the doctor know that one of the victims didn’t get hit on the head and die from an internal bleed? Or, are the circumstances of the tragedy obvious enough that pinpointing the exact cause of death is not necessary?
Autopsies cost money and take time. What possible extraneous information could be deemed relevant enough after they were found under mud, in the basement of their house? In the case of a fire, or other suspicious circumstances then an autopsy might be warranted to determine if foul play was involved. In this case they literally drowned in mud.
That’s what I meant when I said: *Or, are the circumstances of the tragedy obvious enough that pinpointing the exact cause of death is not necessary? *
What I’m wondering is whether an exact cause of death is always necessary, or whether simply saying “death by accident” is enough for a death certificate.
If people have dirt in their nose and mouth so that the airways are totally blocked, then you know they weren’t breathing. You can also look at how far the dirt got inside to verify that the people were trying to breath and therefore alive at the time they were buried. Since not breathing will kill you in just a few minutes, you’d have to see some other kind of trauma to expect that something else killed them first. The odds of a non-obvious internal bleed killing a person before asphyxiation is not likely.
Also, I think the coroner is mostly checking the bodies for signs of foul play. If the family was chopped up by an axe just before the mud slide, the police would want to know.
Yeah, I don’t see the utility of even trying to make the subtle distinction between “drowned in mud” and “died of a heart attack because drowning in mud”. It’s not like when they find somebody dead on the floor and need to know if it was accident, suicide, or homicide.
That would only be relevant if there was an insurance policy in force that covered (for example) “drowned in mud”, but didn’t cover “heart attack” due to the stress involved in “drowning in mud”. There are no policies I’ve ever heard of that would make the distinction, therefore no need to determine the exact cause. If there were an insurance policy in force that made the distinction, then an autopsy would have been performed at the request (and probably expense) of the insurance company.
