Saved the insurance company from having to pay out on an accidental death or double indemnity clause. That’s the main reason, money. Nine times in ten, if the question is “Why do they…?” or “Why don’t they…?” the answer comes down to money.
[Quote of and comment on disappeared troll post removed.]
Colibri
General Questions Moderator
I see I was right. Revived a different thread.
This kind of criticism of police/government really frustrates me.
After all, if they adopted a “Let’s rush through the evidence gathering to get traffic moving” someone would be here posting “The police should do their job thoroughly and not botch their investigation just to get traffic moving an hour sooner.”
I suspect this kind of thinking also applies to the autopsies. If you do one on everyone, then you get criticized for being redundant and wasteful. If you do one only when needed, then you’re criticized for not being thorough.
An episode of ‘This American Life’ started with an interesting interview with a pathologist talking about an apparent suicide he once autopsied. The woman had seemingly stuck a gun in her mouth and shot herself. He noticed that the barrel of the gun had apparently been pressed against the tongue, and that seemed odd to him; he thought a suicide would move their tongue out of the way–just human nature, he thought, to avoid that additional injury. He tells the police his suspicions; they call the boyfriend, who blurts out, “When I called the medical examiner’s office a couple of weeks ago, they told me they didn’t autopsy suicides!” Police sweat the boyfriend, and he confesses to killing her and making it look like suicide.
The moral of this story is, of course, things ain’t always what they seem.
To rule out foul play. May she had been poisoned. Maybe the accident was not an accident and the police should be investigating who cause her to die.
Yeah , I go along with this , the guy could had been bumped off .
When my mother died at home there was no autopsy. But she was “under doctors care”. He knew that she died of cancer.
When my Dad died in his sleep 10 years later same bed. There was an autopsy. He had a massive heart attack. But he was not under Dr. care. That can be the difference.
It can also be for the family’s peace of mind and the reputation of the decedent.
There was a case a few years back regarding a man named Charles Whitman. He murdered his wife and mother then climbed a tower and fired on several people. I think the final body count was sixteen. He left several notes explaining he didn’t understand his own actions and was greatly troubled by them but unable to help himself.
Cause of death was blatantly plain- gunshot wounds by the officers who stormed the tower and took him out. However autopsy revealed that he had a brain tumor that most likely influenced his actions.
Imagine this is your family member. It doesn’t change the horrible thing that happened but it might give you peace of mind to know that your beloved friend, brother, or son hadn’t acted out of hatred or evil but was a victim themselves of a medical condition and weren’t responsible for what had happened.
Same in a car accident victim. If a person dies of a sudden aneurysm while driving but ends up plowing into a group of pedestrians before hitting a wall…in an act that looks to onlookers like it was deliberate…it can bring peace to the family to know that it wasn’t a deliberate act of malice but merely a horrible accident.
It also helps medical science learn from each condition it uncovers- how it acts, unusual symptoms that can be produced, etc…even if those conditions are not the ultimate or direct cause of death.
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Colibri
General Questions Moderator
Or sometimes even when they are in the hospital. My 87- year-old grandfather died shortly after being admitted tonhospice upon the failure of multiple organs. At the moment he died, only my grandmother ( his loving wife of nearly 67 years) was the only person in the room with him. The hospital was about to order an autopsy to make sure she hadn’t pulled the plug, but my aunts threw a hissy-fit.
If someone is already under a doctor’s care for a potentially fatal condition, an autopsy is frequently not regarded as necessary. My father (lung cancer), aunt (multiple sclerosis), and grandmother (96 years old and with a history of heart attacks and strokes) died at home, and I don’t believe any of them were subjected to an autopsy.
Aren’t there laws about circumstances where an autopsy is required?
Around here is basically when the medical examiner wants to.
There are. And they’re local.
I can tell you our procedures. When we get called to an unattended death where no foul play is indicated the ME is contacted. Most often they will not respond to the scene in these kinds of cases. If there is no family member around we go searching for pill bottles to get a doctor’s name. Once we get a name the ME will call the doctor directly. If the doctor is willing to sign off on the death certificate then the body is released to the family. If the doctor is not willing to sign off then the body is taken in for an autopsy. With ongoing serious medical conditions the doctor will always sign off.
In the case of the MTV personality who just committed suicide by gravity, jumping off a bridge in Pasadena, it’s obviously of some interest as to what drove him to that, especially if he didn’t have a history of issues and was otherwise pretty successful. It’s likely alcohol or drugs were involved so you’d want toxicology reports if nothing else, and that might lead to more questions, hence an autopsy.
While I agree with a previous poster who suggested it was about “money”, I will go even further and suggest it is about “money due to lawyers”. As this guy was an MTV personality and former Tommy Hilfiger model, a lawyer is likely going to get involved and may try to blame someone with deep pockets for his demise. I suspect the autopsy provides some level of protection against future lawsuits.
I think this gets to the heart of my question or maybe more accurately my discomfort with autopsies like that. If this were my relative, I might like to know if he were drunk or on drugs, but you don’t need to tear his body apart to learn that. Autopsies are gruesome and I’d hate know that the body was defiled like that without a very good reason to suspect foul play. If my child died from a seemingly obvious cause, I’d happily go without knowing every conceivable explanation had been ruled out, rather than look at him in the coffin and know that he’d been eviscerated, weighed and measured, and parts stuffed back in the torso. Maybe that’s just me.
Why do autopsies in the case of a commercial jet crash, when the cause of death is obvious?
Turns out there can be good reasons.
There was even an autopsy on The Big Bopper nearly a half-century after his death in a plane crash, because of rumors of foul play. In that case, it was more a matter of putting a relative’s mind to rest.
That reasoning is behind a goodly percentage of the autopsies I do in cases of illness where the cause of death is really flamingly obvious. If you have a 78-year-old man with a long history of cardiovascular disease, previous heart attacks/stroke, kidney failure, drastically diminished pulmonary capacity and other chronic conditions who dies of a bout of pneumonia in the hospital, relatives still can’t bring themselves to accept the fact of Grandpa’s death.*
*the other major motivating factor behind hospital autopsies is the belief (or at least, hope) that something will be found to permit a malpractice suit. In only a relatively small percentage of cases is there a genuine medical question/mystery to be resolved.
Much as I am not fond of doing autopsies, I have to disagree that they’re “gruesome” or that the body is “defiled”. Organs are removed/dissected, but mostly returned, and in the end the outer body is basically intact and OK for whatever funeral home rituals are deemed necessary (this does not address spiritual concerns, of course).
There are 7 states where you can object to an autopsy on religious grounds. http://www.pewtrusts.org/en/research-and-analysis/blogs/stateline/2015/6/29/religious-freedom-states-interests-clash-over-autopsies