The Case of the Drowning Men Read Free Page B

gloves, a process of decay aptly named “degloving”. If signs of degloving are already evident on such a corpse, special care must be taken in recovering the body from the water, as additional harm can easily be inflicted when physically grappling with it or maneuvering it about with hooks and mechanical devices.
    Once it has been successfully recovered, a waterlogged body will rapidly deteriorate when fully exposed to air, therefore an autopsy must be performed immediately in order to help determine the exact cause of death and the manner. This may seem superfluous, but the fact is death by drowning is not wholly assumed by medical experts and law enforcement, especially where there ha ve been no witnesses to unequivocally substantiate it.
    In forensic terms, there is nothing whatsoever deemed “classic” about a ny drowning, no one particular physical characteristic manifesting in a corpse that would aid in expediting such a ruling. Because of this, the methodology for reaching a determination that it was a water death and accidental is one that is chiefly focused on excluding foul play. This places a great deal of importance on the initial investigative role of police personnel who could inform or misinform a medical examiner with their onsite reports and early conclusions.
    Even the autopsy is insufficient on its own for definitively pinpointing the victim’s cause of death as an accidental drowning, but the line of inquiry a medical examiner follows during this phase of the inquest is to review the circumstances of how the deceased person reportedly first entered the water and to try to judge if the body they’re viewing matches up to that version of events. If so, and the death indeed appears benign, the medical examiner will then proceed to determine whether the drowning was a result of the individual’s own failure to stay afloat or the byproduct of some underlying ailment. For this reason, there are educated assumptions which may safely be arrived at when the victim in question is young and healthy, whereas it’s not  impossible in older people that they may have died in the water as a result of a heart attack or emphysema, or some other serious medical problem.
    That makes prompt identification of the body vital to a postmortem medical exam, but, of course, a corpse will always be more deeply probed in those cases where the victim’s identity is still not known or the fatality somehow looks and sounds suspicious.
    Lying on the examiner’s slab and before taking a scalpel to flesh, there are visual clues that can provide a few preliminary answers about the death. For instance, drowning produces a thi n foam in and around the victim’s mouth which usually lingers there for several days before washing away. The presence or absence of this transient substance, on the other hand, is not conclusive because drug overdoses, electrocutions and strangulations also have the same foaming effect, and because up to 20% of drownings are actually “dry drownings” where the victim took no water into their airways but died instantly, or else suffocated very quickly from a sudden throat - closing reflex.
    To see if this telltale foam did once exist, though, placing a hand firmly on the victim’s chest and gently compressing it should bring the substance back up once more, perhaps even with pebbles and sand in it . A lternately, when a corpse has begun to decay a darkish , foul-smelling fluid might fill the mouth instead , but this is standard to all types of deaths where putrefaction has set in and is therefore of little diagnostic value . It is the existence of a pair of o versaturated lungs , ideally with debris in them , that will most strongly point to death by drowning . B ut, again, this by itself is not proof positive either, since a dead body can slowly draw water into its air passages even if only placed in the water after having died elsewhere.
    Also, the victim’s hands can, and often do, reveal important