Forensic cause of death question

Factual Questions
1

Just curious about delayed cause of death identification, specifically alcohol.

I just saw a news report about a guy found in his car under a bridge a month after he’d gone missing. Apparently, he’d crashed into a ditch by the side of the road and would have been found quickly if he hadn’t slid under a bridge and been out of sight. They didn’t say anything except the water was high.

Now, I would assume that some causes of death would be easy to spot even after a month, and others would be impossible after only a day, but I’m curious about alcohol. I would imagine that alcohol in a bottle would be fine, but in the blood, the liver cells, the brain, the eyes*. Would it be intact, or would the decomposition of tissue and bacterial action destroy it, would it matter if it was summer or winter?

*Some years ago, I was present in the ER when a L.E.O drew fluid out of the eye of a dead patient to match against the blood for alcohol content. Apparently, it goes up and down quicker in the blood than the eye, and you can use that to calculate how long since someone stopped drinking.

2

Are you assuming he died instantly in the crash. Do you know that for a fact?

What if he was unconscious for 10 hours before finally dying? As long as his heart is beating, and his liver is functioning his blood alcohol level would slowly drop over time, just as if he hadn’t had the accident, and there would be no trace of it by the time they found him.

Are you assuming he was intoxicated because he crashed into a ditch? Maybe he fell asleep, or suffered a stroke that temporarily incapacitated him.

3

Decomposing bodies create alcohol, making it hard to know if someone was intoxicated at death.

4

Well, I wasn’t assuming anything, but since being trapped and alive for 10 hours would be no different than being home in bed let’s eliminate that.

5

And alcohol isn’t a terminal product, either: ethanol gets oxidized to acetic acid, methanol to formic acid, etc.

6

OK, thanks for the response, I was just curious.