A newsletter for the students, faculty and staff of the Collin County Community College District. Published monthly. For information or submissions, call 972.758.3849. Cougar News welcomes student and faculty submissions. Next deadline: May 10 All submissions are due by 5 p.m. on the due date. Photos cannot be returned. Text should be e-mailed to mrobinson@ccccd.edu or sent on disk. Please submit copy that is proofed, edited and saved in Word format. Cougar News staff: Lisa Vasquez, director; Mark Robinson, editor; Marcy Cadena-Smith, contributor; Sydney Portilla-Diggs, student correspondent; Stephanie Hall, student correspondent; Nick Young, photographer; Heather Darrow, contributor; Shawn Stewart, contributor; Lydia Gober, contributor; Tatiana Shehedah, contributor
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CSI Collin County: the real deal
By Heather Darrow
Special Contributor
Under the direction of Biology Professor Cathy Donald-Whitney, Collin’s pre-med biology club and Student Life hosted guest speaker Terry Sanner, chief field agent of the Collin County Medical Examiner’s office.
More than 150 students, professors and community members can now discern fact from fiction when they watch CSI on television.
Separating Entertainment from Forensics
According to Sanner, only 12 counties in Texas have medical examiner offices.
On the average, he and his team work on one body a day. In January 1987, when the Collin County office opened, they were involved with 592 deaths. In 2005, the figure rose to 1,881.
So how is Collin County CSI like the television show? Well, there are just a few members on the team. The five Collin County ME office employees are certified by the American Board of Legal Death Investigators. Like the television show, Sanner prefers that the body be left undisturbed; however, he brings his own camera even though law enforcement officers also take pictures, so that there are always back up photos if needed.
“Scenes are not always as they appear. It may look like a homicide when it is a suicide. You have to be professional, discreet and respectful,” Sanner said.
It is at this point that reality leaves TV behind. Sanner is forever amazed at how viewers buy into the details of the forensics show, and he was quick to point out that a new employee never becomes an expert overnight.
“It is amazing what they can do on TV. No, we do not drive Hummers. My coworkers are not nearly that cute, and no we do not solve all of our cases in an hour. One of the things you miss on CSI is the odor; decomposed bodies are not pleasant,” Sanner said. “When we transport bodies, we wrap them up in a white sheet, so we do not lose any evidence. We only use body bags if the body is decomposed. If it is a homicide or suicide, we bag the hands with paper sacks, not the plastic sacks I saw on CSI. That is wrong. If you use plastic, the hands sweat and you lose evidence.”
Do Dead Bodies Really Tell Tales?
Sanner says he is always suspicious of Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS) cases. He said any death in a child more than six months old is probably not SIDS. According to Sanner, the ME office will only rule a case SIDS if nothing else is found.
“You think we do not get information from dead bodies, but they tell us things all the time. We had a male black baby, and the story was that the boyfriend put the baby to bed. There were no marks on the baby, but the baby’s liver was lacerated; someone hit, kicked or punched that baby. It turned out the boyfriend was watching TV, the baby was loud, he kicked it, and it died,” Sanner said.
Sanner says he can tell if a body has been moved by examining the body. He looks for rigidity, lividity and the surrounding temperature. He checks the body for rigidity of the arms, legs and jaw. According to Sanner, the body becomes stiff because of a depletion of chemicals in the muscle fibers. He explained that lividity is associated with the discoloration of the dependant body parts due to the settling of blood by gravity. If a body has been moved, the lividity will not match the body’s position.
He also records the surrounding temperature because bodies decay much faster in summer with no air conditioning than they do in the winter. Once he gets the body into the ME office, two examinations are performed: a physical inspection and, if needed, an autopsy. A physical inspection includes taking fingerprints, looking for tattoos, drawing blood, checking urine from the bladder and checking the vitreous fluid in the eyes.
“We can compare the vitreous levels of alcohol with the alcohol blood levels, and we can tell if a person just started drinking or not,” Sanner said.
How has technology affected this profession?
In some cases, technology has provided ME’s with an added challenge because people are now typing suicide notes on their computers and leaving them unsigned. On the other hand, technology has also provided gas chromatographs which detect alcohol and acetone, substances found in the urine of diabetics. In addition, a cerebral oximeter reading can indicate whether a person was alive while a fire was burning. The Collin County ME office sends everything else out to labs for further testing.
A Day in the Life of an ME
Medical examiners do not respond to all deaths. They are alerted in homicides, suicides, natural or unexplained deaths in individuals under 50 years of age, decomposed bodies and in any cases requested by law enforcement. In some cases, life persists because of the ME office. Tissue and organs including the heart, pancreas, lungs, liver, eyes, bone, cartilage and even heart valves, can be harvested on the premises to save people’s lives. This thought and a good sense of humor keep Sanner sane as he continually looks death in the face.
“It can be a depressing job sometimes dealing with death everyday. We are on call 24 hours a day,” Sanner said with sincerity.
He added smirking, “People are very inconsiderate; they just will not die from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m.. They die during the Superbowl.”
Sanner has had many interesting experiences with family members of the deceased, some who chose not to retrieve their kin from the ME office. In these cases after about three months, the ME office buries or cremates the body.
“You have to have a little humor in this job or you would be crazy by Friday. If you do not have the money to bury yourself, you do not have near the number of relatives that you thought you had,” Sanner said, laughing.
[PRINTER FRIENDLY VERSION]
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