I wonder how many Dopers out there would have tried CPR. How long do you reckon it would take to figure out – would the average guy try? What do you think happened with the clerk – did he try to revive the dead man, who turned out (according to police) to be a long-dead suicide?
Might one presuppose the general knowledge required to perform or even attempt CPR might preclude the mistaken handling of a corpse?
In order to attempt CPR, a person probably would have tried to remove the guy from the car and place him on the ground. As the article states that rigor mortis had set in, I’d guess that being locked in a seated position would be a dead (HA!) giveaway that CPR would be futile.
Yep, I agree, but just recently a fellow died of natural causes near my work. He was long gone, (stiff as a board), but still a couple of people thought they might try to be heroic. Ugh.
Probably the general grayness of the skin caused by the blood settling down in the lowest points of the body would be a clue there’s no hope. That, the fact there was no breathing, and the temperature of the body would all be good clues that there would be no point.
I would have gone out to see what was up, noticed several facts:[ul]
[li]He’s cold[/li][li]He’s gray[/li][li]He’s stiff (I really want a different term there)[/li][li]He’s not breathing[/li][li]He’s got no pulse[/li][li]He’s got a gunshot wound in the chest[/li][/ul]
I would then go back inside and called the police. In fact, the one time I found a body, I did pretty much exactly that. The body temp is an incredibly noticeable detail, and very obvious when you go to check for a pulse.
So short answer, no I would not have tried CPR.
Yes, I understand people like you and I might dig the fact that this cat is croaked, but what about the average Joe who works at the convenience store? One might postulate the act of having driven into the store might fool an observer into thinking the driver is still salvageable…
That’s really the kernel of my question: is it likely most people will have the ability to know when a body is out of the realm of resuscitation?
There was a shooting at my university a while back. I was the first one to come to the aide of a woman who had been shot with a WWII rifle through the chest just below the neck. The largish hole through her chest along with the accompanying organs, the lack of breath, and abscence of pulse told me there was no point. After I moved on someone else decided to try CPR though. This was very messy and they had a hell of a time recuperating from the trauma. Just goes to show, just because you know how to do it doesn’t mean you know when to do it.
By the way, the coroner declared that she had died instantly and there was no chance of reviving her.
When I took CPR training, this topic came up. Our instructor said that generally EMS personnel will do all the CPR stuff (even if it looks bad enough that they are just going through the motions) except if:
a) There are signs of rigor mortis
b) There is clearly no hope, as in “decapitation”
But yeah, flight, if I’d been in your shoes I also would’ve recognised that I was way out of my league.