I'm an autopsy tech, death investigator, and forensic anthropologist. ama

Do people really shit their pants when they die?

Often, Yes.

Remind me to die on the toilet.

Just like Elvis.

Elvis died on the toilet but no poop was present. I googled this a while ago. All that work and no relief.

I read somewhere that a lot of people die on the toilet. It's something about your blood circulation that gets fucked up when pressing out stinky sausages.

Personally witnessed this at a Slipknot concert. Girl was crowd surfing, got dropped on her neck and immediately shit herself. She apparently died instantly but we weren't given any real details.

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If he was paralyzed or something he could have sued the shit out of the venue. Never move people with possible head/neck/spinal injuries. Everyone should know this, and I don't know why it's not included in health classes in high school.

and I don't know why it's not included in health classes in high school.

It was where I went.

Is this an AMA or a morgue?

Best comment on here

Do you watch Bones? What do you consider the most ridiculous forensic autopsy techniques that are portrayed on television?

Bones seems to not be as egregious as most in day to day things. There would be no way in hell a demo with roadkill shoved through a tree shredder would be kosher.

Well duh, roadkill isn't usually killed according to Shechita.

When a rapper dies, physiologically speaking, how are they able to continue releasing music?

Real niggas don't die, they multiply.

When operating on the dead, are all tools still sterilized as if you were cutting open an alive person?

no, just clean.

You are not worried about contamination of evidence?

Its an interesting question, however I think the level of contamination required for an infection is significantly lower than what is detectable as evidence. They likely store the bodies in a freezer which would make it difficult for bacteria to take hold as opposed to living tissue at operating temperature. Also I suspect there is some limitation on how long you can take evidence from a corpse before it is considered unusable even with cold storage.

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Have you ever had to investigate a child homicide? I recently watched a program about how people were being wrongly accused of child homicide because of how difficult it is to keep emotions out of the case, on the part of the autopsy performer.Even if you haven't performed one, what are your thoughts?

edit; to sound less creepy...

Never worked a child homicide... uh, can't imagine it being very fun.

My first case was close enough 15 y/o DUI, he was the only one in the car who wasn't high or drunk and was actually wearing his seat belt. Going to tell his mother her only son was dead was the most heartbreaking things I've ever done.

Why exactly were you the one to be telling the mother this (it sounds like you're still training)? I imagine you don't have the authority to pronounce someone's death, and medical professionals/legal professionals should be the one's doing so.

He was pronounced by the coroner. I was the new guy and got the depressing jobs.

Note to self: morgue hazing is the most emotionally disruptive kind of hazing.

That was nothing.

You can re-hydrate dessicated skin and wear basically a dead person glove to get good fingerprints. Slapping your co-workers asses with said dead glove is highly frowned upon.

I was also once chased around by a disembodied vagina. >_<

ಠ_ಠ

These stories should be the basis for your AMA

It would have only been hilarious if benny hill had been playing and my scrubs were a rainbow flag.

As a longtime worker in Emergency Medicine, I can see where this seems highly upsetting to people that aren't familiar with this kind of work. It's high stress all the time, to the point where your average day generally ruins the life of someone else, and this is a good day, because you did your job well. My point is the stress relief option is often as shocking as the cases that get presented. Don't hate on the disembodied vagina (sigh)...she won't need it anymore.

I still think that last bit crossed the line. Obscene jokes are one thing but even if it wasn't me being accosted by a disembodied bloody vagina I would have not been ok with it.

Is it true you're less likely to die in a car accident if you are inebriated due to the more relaxed state of the body and muscles?

You're less likely to become injured in any type of accident if you're intoxicated. You have almost no reaction time compared to when you're sober, so you can't do anything stupid that you think will help you. SOURCE: I fell ten feet off my brother's roof when I was in college. And I'm a DUI investigator.

Headline: DUI Investigator recommends intoxication as a deterrent to injury when car crashes are a possibility!

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What's the strangest death you've investigated?

Auto-erotic deaths.

A guy had been giving himself alaskan pipelines (pooping, freezing poop, and putting poop back in its home). had Polaroids of it all over around the body.

tl;dr guy whacking off in ladies underwear surrounded in pic of him sodomizing himself with frozen poo while strangling himself.

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I don't care how much shit you get for dropping the ball, this comment made all the scrolling worthwhile. What the FUCK is wrong with some people?

that one was really fucking hysterical.

his girlfriend and mother were 1st gen swedish. they weren't fazed by it at all "OH JAH THIS IZ VERY COMMON WHERE I COME FROM."

Just when I thought I have heard and seen it all...... ಠ_ಠ

In other reaches of the world they call that a Jamaican Bobsled, just FYI.

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What was the strangest death you've ever seen at your job?

Meth dude and his girl kidnapp a meth cook and his girl, drive them out to the woods. They torture then about 3 days to get the formula out of them. When this doesn't work they shoot them in the heads with a edit.357 then saw off the heads and throw em in the bushes, bury the rest of the bodies. We found his written recipe for cooking old school pseuo meth, it was bloody illegible.

wtf why didn't they just google the damn instructions? i mean come on, duh, the internet.

seems pretty drastic to like.. you know, gruesomely murder two people over.

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Holy shit, the sawing off heads part seems a bit overkill

They were really high. They didn't bother burying them or anything, just threw them in the bushes.

You ever cop a feel? We won't tell.

Nooooooooo!

Have you ever had to perform an autopsy on somebody you knew? I hear this is quite a common thing.

Hope this AMA picks up.

Missed that by a few months when I moved offices. Fortunately no, I don't think I could work on someone I knew.

Do you think it is still possible to get away with murder in this day and age?

If you're crafty enough, it's getting harder.

What's the grossest story you have?

Thanks for doing this, lolinterbutts!

I had a large decomp case explode on me a la L4D. He had been sitting in a cheap motel room for several days with the heat cranked and had become a bit bloated. As the doc went to do the initial Y incision it sounded like someone had pinched out a wet balloon and the doc, other techs, and the ceilling got a good smattering of the most vile smelling gore.

BOOMER!

Who has to clean that up?

There are companies you can hire.

I actually cleaned out my uncles house after he hadn't been found in a few weeks. It. Was. Not. Fun. I had to burn those clothes after, never could wash out the funk of decomp and mold.

If you could have your time over, would you hire a company instead?

Yes. I also would have been spared finding his home made porn collection. Yuck, thanks uncle.

Has anyone ever tried to pay you for private time with the bodies?

no

what is the weirdest case you have been part of?

ID'd a guy from a hells angels contract killing. Despite what the movies tell you, dumping a body in a barrel and filling it with cement really doesn't help get rid of and evidence. Except make it a pain in the ass for me to get his teeth and hands out.

Hells Angel contract killing

Exploding corpse

Alaskan pipeline

What the actual fuck?

it's a living.

Do do you put the organs in the corpse back where they should be or do you stuff em all in there?

stuff em in, usually in a red biohaz bag. I always stitch it up after

My father was a detective for 30 years. The things I grew up knowing about... smh...

He had a pretty good sense of humor about it, though, and I have always imagined, he left the worst stuff out - so that those thirty years appeared to be more key stone cops and science (a human kidney weighs so and so pounds, this organ is on this side of the body and looks like blah) than blood soaked carpets and ruined lives.

If I could go back in time to tell my dad how to do this better, I wouldn't change a thing. He made me brave about my own body, its strengths and weanesses and how those strengths and weaknesses could be mitigated by my own choices. He hated cop shows that showed "bad" cops because he insisted that it didn't happen, and if it did, the cops who followed the rules hated them more than the public ever could, but he did make me promise him that if I was ever arrested for anything, even if I was innocent, to shut up and call a lawyer. Kind of a trust the cops... but they're not your dad philosophy.

Watching cop shows is always amusing with him because a detective will make a statement about where the assailant was standing and my dad might retort "not with that blood spatter pattern" or they might conduct a search and he would say - that's illegal, wouldn't happen.

So what do you plan to tell children about your job? Or relatives at the holiday dinner about your work?

I never want kids.

My relatives won't shut up about it and I have to draw a line somewhere with the gore factor.

You should do an AMA but have your dad answer the questions!

My grandfather was a cop in a small country town. I would spend summers at his farm and with him at the station. He take me with him on the job for little things. Once we we're the first responders to a wreck between a motorcycle and truck. He made me stay in the car. He walked over to the wreckage, the bike was wedged under the truck. While he was looking a pack of kids rode up on bike and yelled 'was anybody hurt? " To which my grandfather picked a severed head off the road and said "you mean like this." The kids freaked out. I freaked out, Gramps laughed. To this day I don't rubberneck car wrecks.

Not sure if grandfather was insane or coolest dude ever.

How long does it usually take to do an accident recreation and how is it done? My parents passed away about a year ago in an automobile accident and I'd just like for it to be over with, to be honest, but we haven't received anything in regards to an accident recreation or anything.

Accident recreation is way out of my field of expertise.

Sorry for your loss <3

Have you ever visited Bill Bass' body farm, or the equivalent elsewhere? If so, what sort of experiments were they working on?

I currently work on a body farm, yes but I'm not allowed to talk about it. Sorry that's a crappy answer but they have you sign all sorts of NDAs

Worst smell, noise, sight ever?

Any decomp, they are just bad man. The sight doesn't bother me. I grew up on /b/ b0g and ogrish. XP

How much does "Bones" get wrong and is there anything that's dangerously wrong for the fans of the show to believe to be based on reality?

The "dangerously wrong" bit you need to worry about is what we call "the csi effect." Suddenly every potential juror thinks they know all there is to know about forensics. DNA and fingerprints are a bitch to lift, sometimes it doesn't work. Time since death can be really tricky to determine depending on condition of the body, wounds, weather patterns etc.

My uncle recently died after being sent home from the hospital with chest pain. The autopsy report lists cause of death as "acute poly pharmacy" but doesn't have a toxicology report included. My aunt and I are trying to figure out if that means OD or Drug Interaction? Is that commonly listed as a cause of death rather than like "respiratory failure as a result of acute polypharmacy" or whatever? Last questions I swear. Is it normal for there to be a toxicology related cause of death but no toxicology report?

acute poly pharmacy usually means that the person died as a result of a combination of the drugs he was taking at the time. There is never a tox related CoD without a report. Full reports can take a week or so to get back though.

What percentage of people die in some sort of sexy situation?

Double-barreled question: how often do you find sexy things inside people, piercings of genitalia, tattoos on genitalia, etc. etc.

rarely find people in sexy situations, this may be because the reporting parties "clean up" the scene before we get there. Google "Auto-erotic asphyxiation" for a better idea of what I mean. As far as other things, our old coroners office unofficial motto was "We WILL find your porn." I imagine I'll surprise some young intern when my prince albert pops out to say hello!

Related story: I studied Criminal Justice in college, and the local ME's Investigator came and gave lectures in a couple of our classes.

He got a call from two uniformed officers who found a guy dead, naked, face-down on his bed. They were asking him whether they needed to call the homicide detectives.

Investigator looked around, found a HUGE box full of porn in the closet. Convinced the cops to help him lift the guy up, found a porn magazine under the body, and told them..."No need to call the detectives. This guy came and went."

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how much can you tell about a person during or by an autopsy or investigation?

age sex stature ancestry time since death, manner of death... it goes on.

Could you please send me naked photos of Agent Booth? I need them because of reasons. Thanks.

Because science.

Say no more.

What did you major in to get that job? What subjects or internships did you take?

Majored in anth, worked my ass off at various coroner/ME offices.

Did something you see, make you change your lifestyle (As in eating healthier or quit smoking)?

Alcoholism. I saw too many young successful people slumped over in their bathroom with puke all over the floor and a load of shit in their pants.

That ain't me babe.

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