About 1,800 people die each?year in Washington County. Six hundred have already died in 2012, and Roger Morris, the Washington County Coroner expects about two-hundred more deaths this year than in the past ten years. More people die at night and in the winter than any other time because it?s easier to give up during the early hours of the morning, when everyone else is asleep and no one is thinking about the dying, except Morris.
The Washington County Coroner is a full time position, even before he was officially declared that in 2009. Morris deals with all the deaths that happen in Washington County. That includes unattended deaths, nursing home deaths, hospital deaths, homicides, suicides, car accidents and prison deaths. On a daily basis Morris will get ?one or two calls when it?s slow, and midnight to five it?s nothing to get nine to 15 calls.? He doesn?t sleep, there?s no time, people are always dying. He works more than 80 hours a week, of which half is spent with the dead, and he is always on call. Our first meeting was delayed three hours because he was getting his first sleep of the week, on a Thursday.
But Morris is used to the sleep deprivation, though he?s not used to the medical ailments like high blood pressure, and the early onset of gray hairs that come along with the job. After ten years as the county coroner and a certified embalmer for 27 years, his insomnia comes from dedication to the job rather than nightmares that might come from dealing with the dead, not the open-casket-style presentation of the dead, the newly dead.
Morris is good. He can tell if a death seems suspicious because of his experience. His father was the coroner of Madison County. Morris said he remembers watching his father pull a body out of a bushhog when he was five while he sat on the ground Indian style.
Morris? son Hayden is interested too, but he wants his son to focus more in the FBI crime scene field. Hayden is comfortable around the dead like Morris was at his age. ?I was embalming a body one time in our funeral home and Hayden, who was about seven, was sitting on a chair and he asked ?Daddy, what are you doing to that man??? And Morris has also found a way to use his job for teaching lessons to Hayden. His son kept running across the highway without looking. One day at the grocery store Hayden found pictures of a decapitated man that Morris had photographed from a crime scene. ?What happened to him?? Hayden asked. ?He didn?t look before crossing the road.?
In his office in the Washington County South Campus, right across from the county jail, he reenacted a scene from the night before. He stood behind his office chair. A lady had been found dead in her recliner the night before. He mimed checking for any irregularities. He opened where her hypothetical eyes were, shined a flashlight in them. He looked for broken blood vessels in the lower eyelid?a sign of asphyxiation, ?I didn?t see anything, they were as clear as yours or mine.? The pupils were bilateral, so it wasn?t a stroke.? ?Her body temperature was high, so she had just died, and she showed no signs of struggle on her palms and feet.? When I came back to his office later that day he had 11 bottles of prescription medicine scattered around his desk that were confiscated from the woman?s home. He looked up and smiled. Turns out Metamorphin is medication for Type 2 diabetes and ?that individual had not been taking hers.? With the case closed, Morris gets to declare the death a ?natural cause.?
Whenever Morris goes to a crime scene, he?s got a checklist to determine cause of death. ?We look for signs of lividity because if the police say the body was on its face and stomach, but there is lividity is on their back, it means they?ve been moved.? Lividity occurs whenever the heart stops pumping blood through the body. The stagnant blood will settle with gravity or around pressure points and the skin will take shape of the surface it?s on. After that he checks for knots and bruising, signs of struggle, then heads to the medicine cabinet because that will usually indicate their cause of death.
Morris shut off the lights to show me how to clear a crime scene. Wednesday was a very sunny day and there is a large window on one wall, so he didn?t achieve the dramatic effect we were both hoping for. Morris turned on a flashlight, but decided to go find some better batteries for it. His digressions keep him moving. If he stopped for a moment he would probably fall asleep. He came back and showed me one area at a time on the floor. ?This is why we never turn the lights on at a crime scene. You see a lot more with a flashlight.? The brain takes in everything through the sensory register. It discards things that don?t seem important, but in a crime scene everything is important. He sipped from his 24 oz. Diet Mountain Dew, one of 12 he will drink in a day, and sat down. ?You find a lot more that way.?
The eyes start to dry out four to six hours after death, but until that point, a licensed eye inoculator, like Morris, can take them from the body for organ donation. ?It?s actually pretty neat,? he said. But to donate most other organs, you have to be on life support. Except the skin. Morris explained that hospitals use lots of skin grafts, so having a surplus is important. They don?t take it all though, he drew a line across his wrist with his finger, ?they cut off your hands here.? He pointed at his collarbone area, they leave that skin too. But everything else is used. He described the replacement of PVC pipe to restructure the arm if the radius and ulna are removed for donation, but wished he knew the medical term for PVC pipe.
Morris became animated when he talked about the postmortem stages of the body, talking fast, as one does when passionate for his job. He explained that after 12 hours, rigor mortis sets in. He clenched his fist and tried to open it to no avail. The joints become stiff in the phalanges, Morris said, and after two days it will recede. But then there is skin-slippage. Morris pointed at his knuckles. ?Any skin that holds moisture will begin skin slipping first, think of it as a blister.? He drew a line back to his forearm. That?s how far the skin stretches after day three. From then on it is decomposition.
Some of the bodies in Washington County aren?t found for a couple of weeks if the deceased has no relatives. ?We put a chemical agent in them called STOP about an ounce in and it will kill every maggot in there. It?s cleared by the Arkansas state law for toxicology reports.? But the only thing that stops actual ?decomp,? as Morris calls it, is refrigeration.
?We keep our cooler right above freezing at 40 degrees,? said Randall Gallaway, one of the deputy coroners. ?It?s the optimum temperature to preserve a body.?
The refrigerator is in the back, behind the three offices in the modern architecture style building. It?s spotless, something that remains a priority for Morris because of airborne diseases that bodies can emit during decomposition. The lab is a vast square room. A large metal gurney is the only thing on the floor. Biohazard signs adorn the walls and tabletops like artwork. There are two industrial sinks and no windows. Morris turns off the lights leaving only the ultraviolet light above the gurney to arrange the space. Morris uses this to find particles on clothing and also to see if there are any strangulation marks. The blood disappears from the skin when it has been stressed, so he can see marks that might not appear for hours.
The cooler holds the blood for toxicology and the bodies that are waiting for Morris? transport to Little Rock, or waiting to be claimed by family members. ?One body we?ve had for over a year,? he said, but time is running out. The coroners office cremates unclaimed bodies when they can?t locate family members. Morris pulled out a drawer I had thought was another file cabinet. Four boxes bearing four names were cluttered on the left side. ?Four bodies in 10 years isn?t so bad if you ask me,? he said. Sometimes families come out of the woodwork after a while to claim the body. The deceased has already been cremated with the Coroner?s budget. Cremations cost between $900 and $1,500, Morris said. ?All we can do is hope they reimburse us for the costs.?
To objectively balance dealing with the dead, Morris uses jargon through his thick southern drawl. He calls the bodies ?individuals,? not by their names, he says the acronyms for organizations, calls death certificates ?DC?s?, tells me that they always use a Form 7 to close a case. A Form 7 is the coroner?s consent to destroy tissues gathered for investigation. But through all this formality, he remembers the names of most of the deaths he?s investigated and recalls in detail the crime scenes.
He has had to embalm his grandmother and visit crime scenes of his close friends. ?Every body is the same.? After death they become his job. They no longer have personalities and to Morris, a body is a body. But he?s not allowed to investigate the scenes of people he knows because it would be a conflict of interest. ?I wish I could though, because I do the job right.?
A death certificate categorizes five ways to die: accident, homicide, suicide, natural, and unknown. Morris signs off every death certificate in the county. The only way Morris classifies a death as a suicide is when there is a note. An accident has to be a car accident, slipping and falling, or death because of a past injury. Natural is strokes, heart attacks, and usually infant deaths. Unknown deaths are always sent to Little Rock for an autopsy. And ?you know pretty quickly when it?s a homicide.?
Morris can amend the death certificates if new evidence arises. Last Thursday Gary Conner came to the office looking for the file of McDowell. Conner also recalls every death in the same vivid description that Morris does. ?His autopsy came back undetermined because he was so badly decomposed, we had to ID him from his dental records? he said. ?It was September 2010 I believe.? McDowell?s friend had a journal that Conner said ?reflects distinct suicidal ideologies.? One Wednesday, Morris said he would get to change the death certificate to ?suicide.?
There aren?t many homicides in Fayetteville, but Morris said there have been more this year, than last year within the same months. If doors are locked or the body is up against a door then it ?s probably not homicide.
?Death has its own smell.? Morris claims that people emit the smell right before they die, if they are already dying. And he?s found a comfort in death. ?Every time someone dies, usually within a month a baby in that family is born. I call them guardian angels.?
Most people couldn?t handle Morris? job because of the smells, the horrific homicide scenes, the overtime and the taboo of the last moments of death.
But to Morris the taboo can?t exist. It?s 80 hours of his week, but the afterlife is still unexplainable to him. There is an explanation for the reasons people die. Morris is Baptist. ?I believe in God, but I also believe in facts,? said Morris, and I believe I?m going to heaven. ?I see a lot of peaceful deaths. Dying in your sleep isn?t such a bad way to go.?
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Source: http://www.uatrav.com/2012/10/21/dealing-with-death/
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