[QUOTE=dnooman]
Maybe I’ve read too much crime fiction (Patricia Cornwell), but isn’t time of the essence? Are your techs taking surface and organ temps?n Or are things so routine that such degrees of scrutiny are often unessecary?
[/QUOTE]
Pace to Patsy and her books, but nope, such things are not necessary. Or rarely.
If a homicide occurs when two drinking buddies fall out and scrap and one gets killed, and the killer calls 911 and is on the scene when EMS and cops arrive, taking the deceased’s temperature isn’t important at all.
If God-blessed Dr — would just STOP sticking a thermometer through the skin of the deceased’s abdomen into the liver, and accidentally hitting a large portal venule, I wouldn’t be pulling my hair out wondering what 100 cc of blood is doing in the right upper quadrant.
One of the most frustrating cases I ever worked involved a guy found dead inside an open train boxcar. He had clearly been dead for some hours, during which the train had pulled through several states. Nobody wanted to investigate because nobody knew whose police department had jurisdiction… ought to spend the money. We tried the old thermometer, vitreous potassium, anything we could think of dodge, but as you know, time of death is notoriously inexact and completely temperature-dependent, and so, there’s nothing a last-seen-alive can’t accomplish better.
You know, I’m not a heck of a scene investigator. I’m good with the bodies, inexpert with the scenes around them. Knowing what to do with a scene involves the kind of magic eye for detail and pattern in chaos that is just not my strength. Police training is the best way to develop scene expertise. The few scenes I go to, I take jurisdiction over the body, and answer all questions pertaining to that. But not the rest of the scene. And you know what? A qualified CSI guy or police officer can do that just as well as I can. I’m better off in the stainless steel room with the bright lights and the rubber gloves (dear me, how that sounds). I will find you out a HECK of a lot more about the body in that room than I will at the scene.
Been to maybe twenty scenes in my working life. Don’t have police training, or forensic technician experience. I recently took the ABMDI exam and passed, but a lot of it was common sense, and it doesn’t make me a qualified scene investigator like some of these cops who are almost magic.
No, I don’t think time is of the essence when a person is dead. Most of what I can do at the scene can be done just as well the next day in the lab. A cop’s work, now there, time is of the essence. Which is why homicide investigators don’t get to go home and go to bed for so many hours after the body is discovered.
[QUOTE=dnooman]
I ask out of curiosity, not out of accusation.
[/QUOTE]
Well, of course you do. I’ve read your posts.
[QUOTE=dnooman]
I once wanted to be a forensic pathologist. I even studied for the MCAT (which I found to be quite easy for any college student). I decided against the medical route, and persued the forensic anthropology route. Turns out most universities don’t have a major for that, let alone practical courses in it. I was going to go interdisciplinary between osteology and anthropology, but then my application for county morgue tech went unanswered (that application was like a phone book!). I was crestfallen, and gave up.
Then C.S.I. reared it’s ugly head. Damnit! Every boob from here to Helsinki is going to have an “interest” in this. They don’t know who Clyde Snow is, they wouldn’t know a pubic synthesis if it bit them in the…damn. That killed it for good.
I’m really sorry for the hijack. It’s just that things that seem mundane to you, used to be the things that sent me to the library for research.
Please continue with the thread. Sorry.
[/QUOTE]
I wish you had gone on to forensic anthro; it’s one of my dear loves. You don’t make a lot of money for the PhD, but you do some of the most interesting work in the country, and you make scientific discoveries and help (drumroll) Justice for those least able to help themselves.
So sorry your career path didn’t work out. You want advice on going back?
