This past weekend Erica Blasberg, a rank and file pro golfer on the Ladies golf tour, apparently committed suicide at her home.
In this NY Times article, it says
Determination of Cause of death could take Four to Six weeks? Huh?
I’m not sure, but sounds like it could be a case of the tests only taking a few hours to complete, but there might be only one Clark County lab that can do the work and a lot of other tests already ‘waiting in line’ for completion.
It’s usually due to a backlog at the lab, rather than the time it takes to run the actual tests.
I assume they give priority to tests on people who are still alive. No need to hurry if the person is dead.
And what happens if the tests reveal there was foul play? So they wait 4-6 weeks to start a murder investigation?
Better that than have someone else die too because their tests piled up as law enforcement inquiries kept cutting in line.
The dead are patient.
Meanwhile, potential witnesses are not being interviewed.
If backlogs are that long, maybe opening up a lab would be a good start-up business.
If murder is suspected they probably don’t wait 6 weeks. But I think in vast majority of cases they don’t need blood tests to know it’s murder. Most murder cases are very obvious - gunshot wounds, stab wounds, and so on.
Really? The police would go to your private lab? And the defense attorneys wouldn’t have a field day with that in court?
CSI is culpable for making people think that cases can be solved overnight, true, but it equally should make the argument that chain of custody and formal procedures and doing everything in house is a requirement for prosecuting a case.
Tests take time. Tissue samples go to the histotechnology lab for gross examination, then they get prepared for examination under a microscope, then they get examined by a pathologist, and that all takes time. The chemistry tests don’t take as much time to actually do the tests, but sometimes they are batched (reagents can be very expensive, and you don’t blow a whole vial on one test a day - you wait until there are a couple to do at once), and as others have said, the dead are patient. The person bleeding out in ER is not, and there are only so many lab techs to go around.
One of our good doctors can correct me if I’m wrong, but there would have been an examination of the body right away by the pathologist, and if she didn’t note anything unusual, my guess is the tests go into the queue.
Cat Whisperer, former lab tech.
You think that’s bad; nationally, in general, the backlog of untested rape kits are huge, and in that case there’s actually an allegation of a crime being committed rather than just a dead person and a semi-questionable cause of death.
Article and a followup; here’s some points of interest:
- Alaska has a backlog of three years in rape kit testing, Louisiana has an eight-year backlog.
- There were 20,000 untested rape kits between the cities of Dallas, Albuquerque, Houston, and San Antonio.
- Even though cost is often cited as a reason for not testing at all, places like New York City are aggressive about testing kits quickly; NYC has triple the arrest rate on rape cases as anywhere else that doesn’t test.
So really, 4-6 weeks on a blood test for someone who died? Not that long of a wait, especially if you have tests for still-living people in hospitals or clinics in that line as well.
It is definately the backlog. I was a temp and I was assigned to a University Hospital where they did testing. And you could put a rush on it. A rush was an additonal $500 - $2,500 depending on the type of test.
The police department would pay if it was a current case, but they did a lot of cold cases, so sometimes it’d sit for two months or more. Which makes sense, as the case has been cold for ten years what’s a few more months? But on a current case they need to act now.
What makes you think they haven’t/aren’t interviewing witnesses? It’s not like they sit twiddling their thumbs while the lab work is being done. They are interviewing witnesses.
I believe that the general rule is that a homicide case is solved in 24 hours or it’s probably never getting solved. Forensic evidence goes into proving the case in court, but serves minimal importance in the investigation. Most murders are for simple, stupid reasons and figuring who did it requires little more than talking to the ten people that the person knew and checking their alibis.
Now, it’s possible that forensic evidence will come in and disprove that the suspected murderer was innocent, at which point the case will be reopened, but that’s only very rarely going to be the case.
It also depends on how much work is requested. Simple immunoassay screen to rule out cannabinoids and cocaine? Can be done in an afternoon, report out shortly afterwards. GC/MS confirmations on 10 different drugs, may require three different assays? Or you don’t know what drugs you’re looking for, please do every test you have and let us know what you find? And while you’re at it, quantitative analyses on everything? That will take four months.
It’s the backlog, as others have said, the time away to do other things (like court) and the mountain of documentation that must be compiled and reviewed before findings are released. High-profile cases like Michael Jackson and Anna Nichole Smith usually get pushed to the front of the line, and it still takes at least several weeks. Confirming and quantifying a whole series of findings is a labor-intensive process.
I don’t think that “doing everything in house” is any kind of a court requirement. Having a proper chain of custody for evidence is, of course, but that chain can go outside, too.
For example, our local Minneapolis lab can do some tests, for others we go to the Minnesota State crime labs. And the most common tests, fingerprints, are done completely remotely, through the FBI computer system. And some very rare tests are shipped to the University of Minnesota for tests. But all of this evidence can be used in court; they just have to be able to present a proper chain of custody when requested.