This weekend, an acquaintance jumped off of the top of a six-storey parking garage.
Before he did so, he posted hundreds of pictures to Facebook, including many of himself that were tagged as being of himself. If anyone wants to know what <thisname> looks like, it’s easy to find out.
Given that (a) it’s not hard to find out what he looked like, and (b) he probably doesn’t look much like it after falling six storeys onto cement, how did the police go about positively identifying the body? Did someone who knew him have to see it?
Also, in such cases, given that he left many suicide notes to different people and a list of account IDs and passwords, do the police have to initially treat it as a possible homicide or can they skip straight to suicide?
I am not involved in law enforcement in any way, shape or form. But the impression I get is they look for identification on or around the body. They may also go by location, for example if the body was found in a car or residential dwelling, they can check who the owner is, and ask people who knew the person to provide a description and see if it matches up. Then they try to get a family member or friends to view the body and identify it. In cases where they don’t have the slightest idea who it is, or where the body is not recognizable (severe head wounds, burned beyond recognition, etc), they will try to use fingerprints or dental records to identify the body. If there is no way to identify the body, it’s entered into the system as a John/Jane Doe, and in some cases can be identified later - for instance, a missing persons report description matches the corpse, or someone confesses to murdering them, and they can get someone who knew them to positively Id them, as above.
Thanks. What I’m really getting at is: assuming the body had ID on it, if it is very messed up will the police still want a relative or close friend to identify the body? Will they make someone look at the messed-up remains of a loved one?
I know who the person most likely to have to do this is, and I’m worried about him but don’t want to say “so did you have to ID the body???” I’m hoping that he wouldn’t have had to.
The family had a high school age son. He was out visiting some friends.
The police come to the family’s house and tell them there’s been a car accident. The son’s car went off the road and hit a tree. The son is dead and they need somebody to come and positively identify the body.
The mother is too distraught to go and see her son’s body in the morgue. So they ask the boy’s uncle to go and identify the body. He does and says “Yes, that’s my nephew.”
So the family is calling family members and telling them what happened and making funeral arrangements.
And in the midst of this, the son walks in and asks what’s going on.
Nothing involving ghosts or zombies. The son had been hanging out with some friends. For some reason he and a friend exchanged shirts. Later the friend wanted to go somewhere and borrowed the son’s car. It was the friend not the son who was killed in the accident. The friend and the son looked similar and when the uncle saw the body he just went with the fact that he was wearing the son’s clothes and driving the son’s car and assumed any differences were due to the accident.
Sometimes people can tell by clothes, or jewelry or moles or tatoos or the like on the body.
If the body has an ID on it, the cops will assume that ID belongs to the body. But they won’t blindly go with that. After all it’s too easy to kill someone and put an ID on it.
If the cops find the body they’ll contact the next of kin or someone who knew him and say “Is this guy missing?” “Do you know where he is?” If the answer is, “No,” that’s a good sign. If they answer is “He’s at work,” and the cops find him at work, then they know the ID was a plant.
A HS friend of mine committed suicide by lying across the train tracks. Yes, his wife did have to go identify the body. I don’t know many details beyond that.
I know of a situation in which a body was pulled out of a river after six weeks. They had to ask her ex boyfriend to identify her by her inner thigh tattoo as she was otherwise unrecognisable and her family didn’t know about the tat.
(There was a current boyfriend but he was a major suspect and, I guess, had motivation to lie).
A case similar to the one described by Little Nemo is that of Whitney Cerak and Laura Van Ryn. Both were in a van that collided with a semi-trailer. One died and the other was severely injured, but they were incorrectly identified. Some states were talking about changing the rules for identifying a corpse as a result. (And remember that the coroners in some places are really unqualified.)
When he was a cop, dad had to identify the kids of two different colleagues of his. In the first case, a car accident. The victims were so messed up as to be unrecognizable. In the case of his (former) partner’s daughter, they were unable to even identify gender. There were 5 teenagers in the car, and some wallets/IDs, but without being able to identify something as simple as gender… every thing becomes a question. In the other case, the teenage son died of a previously undiscovered heart defect.
Those make for shitty nights - having to ID a friend’s kids body, and then go tell the family. . . I know I’m not built for that kind of task.
As many anecdotes in this thread indicate, the identification of bodies isn’t all that rigorous. Ultimately, it is up to the person who signs the death certificate (usually the local coroner). In the case of your acquaintance, assuming his face is unrecognizable, they will look for identifying marks on the body such as tattoos, scars, or birthmarks. If that doesn’t work, they will go for fingerprints or dental records. If that doesn’t work, they probably would just look at his IDs, check to see if the body roughly matches those IDs, and say it’s him.
Generally speaking, the police will investigate it as a homicide until proven otherwise. Ultimately, it is up to the coroner to determine the cause of death. Once he rules it a suicide, that pretty much ends the investigation.
In this vein, one sometimes hears of a corpse being so hideously disfigured that it was necessary to identify the person by dental records. How do they find that person’s dentist?
I would think that they could use dental records only for confirming a suspected identification rather than identifying a completely unknown body and in that case, they might ask the local dental society if any of their members had the person as a patient.
I once was asked to identify a body in a situation similar to the OP – someone jumped from a balcony several floors up in my apartment building, and landed on the sidewalk in front. But the body wasn’t really all that much messed up. The face was clear enough that I recognized him (didn’t know the name, but recognized him as a fellow occupant of the building). The main difference I noticed (a bit after the fact) was that the whole body seemed to be compressed – it looked to be about 4 inches thick, instead of normal. Possibly because the chest/lungs were not filled with air (and I believe several ribs had been broken).
I am surprised. I think that no one mentioned the case in the news recently where two girls were in a car accident. One was dead and the other in a coma and quite badly injured. Everyone, repeat everyone, misidentified the two. Got them mixed up. The one that was buried was identified as the living one.
Update on my particular case–my friend was NOT asked to identify the body. The police are saving that treat for the guy’s elderly mother.
Though my friend was his roommate, said friend was excluded from the pleasure because, should the police decide this was a homicide and not a suicide, my friend would be a suspect. Nice.
but I always figgered the cops go poking around to see if the body has any ID, a wallet, etc.