Resource challenges impact post-mortems as bodies pile up from murders, accidents
Published:Sunday | January 8, 2023 | 1:29 AMCorey Robinson - Senior Staff Reporter
For 400 metres, the sight was pure horror. Chunks of human flesh, mangled, torn and pasted on the asphalt with blood that had gone muddy, littered the St Catherine leg of the North/South Highway.
Initial reports were that the victim, believed to be a man, was shot and pushed from a vehicle. On arrival at the scene, it was clear to the senior homicide investigator in charge that at least half a dozen cars had driven over the body, smashing it to pieces.
It must have been there for about two hours, she surmised.
“He was completely folded up, you couldn’t tell front from back,” the investigator noted, recalling the gory scene of the incident that happened last April.
“We put on our gloves and walked along the roadway and we were just picking up intestines, teeth, pieces of foot and toes all over the place. We had to collect as much of it as possible to ID him and determine the cause of death.”
As it turned out, an autopsy on the body parts determined that the man was not shot but died from being mowed down. The probe was turned over to the traffic police, but it has proven to be a difficult case to solve. To date, the body remains unidentified. So, too, is any suspect for the crime.
SHORTAGE OF PATHOLOGISTS
According to experts in criminal investigations, such cases of bodies being damaged beyond recognition or in an advanced state of decomposition may slow down police investigations, making them more difficult to solve, but they are uncommon in Jamaica.
The biggest challenge they face is the continued lack of resources to conduct the autopsies in a timely manner, especially as murders and carnage on the roadways continue to plague the nation.
Last year, police reported some 1,498 murders, while there was a record 488 accidents on the nation’s roads. It was unclear how many decomposed bodies the police recovered.
Judith Mowatt, executive director of the Institute of Forensic Science and Legal Medicine, said that, as recently as last year, one pathologist migrated, leaving the already short-staffed team even more burdened with only five pathologists to serve the entire island.
“We are back to that again because, in the last two years, we have lost two pathologists who have migrated and are now working elsewhere. We are down to five, and five will have to handle the workload,” Mowatt told The Sunday Gleaner.
“Last year, we had just two less than 1,500 murders, and we had about 500 motor vehicle accidents. We also do all the suicides, sudden deaths, and so on. So that should give you an idea of the workload,” relayed Mowatt, outlining the crisis, especially in a country such as Jamaica where the murder figures continue to climb unabated.
Dr S.N. Prasad Kadiyala, consultant forensic pathologist, who has had some 25 years’ experience in Jamaica and 42 years cumulatively, explained that there will always be some compromise with performing an autopsy on badly decomposed bodies, but noted that in most cases it does not shroud the cause of death.
Last year, he conducted more than 500 post-mortems personally, while he and his colleagues on average perform up to 10 post-mortems per week.
Among the autopsies he conducted last week, Prasad said, was that of a badly decomposed man.
The victim died from a gunshot wound to the head, the doctor said, noting that he found the bullet fragments. That body was still unidentified up to late yesterday afternoon.
DEPENDS ON THE CASE
Paula Llewellyn, Director of Public Prosecutions, explained that instances of corpses found too mangled or too badly decomposed to determine victim identity or cause of death are also rare, and do not greatly hinder the outcome of a case.
“The fact that the body may be highly decomposed may or may not affect the investigation, but if there is evidence from which you can still get DNA, or by circumstantial evidence that establishes the identity of that body, we would still have gone clear,” she explained to The Sunday Gleaner.
“There are circumstances where you don’t have any corpse at all. So, it all depends on the case.”
Recalling a case where a Westmoreland woman was killed and buried in her bedroom by her boyfriend who then went overseas for months, Llewellyn said the body was highly decomposed when it was found three months later. However, there was sufficient circumstantial evidence to secure a conviction against the spouse.
“So, once you have evidence that you can infer to the requisite standards to identify the body, or that the person had been killed, even if we don’t have a body, you can still secure convictions,” she relayed, citing the infamous Mary Doyley Lynch case which gripped the nation decades ago.
Doyley Lynch, a former upper St Andrew housewife, spent 14 years in prison for the murder of her husband Leary, a former bank executive in 1992. In that case, Llewellyn said only a part of the man’s skull and skeleton were found and used in pursuit of a conviction.
‘JUST PART OF FORENSIC AUTOPSY’
Players within the funeral home sector have been accused by members of the public of improper storage of their loved ones. Prasad, however, was slow to cast blame.
Bodies ought to be stored at -20 degrees Celsius upon entry into the morgue, to quickly slow down decomposition, and then later placed in a regular refrigerator that runs at a regulated temperature.
The police investigator explained that corpses taken from crime scenes are secured in their original state in body bags on site.
That bag is sealed, signed for, and there is restricted access at funeral homes where the bodies are stored until a post-mortem is done, which is usually conducted within a month. Those for foreign nationals are usually expedited.
There will be some decomposition at autopsy, Prasad said, but noted that factors such as lengthy exposure to the elements can promote faster decomposition.
“It (decomposition) will affect the autopsy, but I don’t find any fault of the family or the police. It is just part of forensic autopsy,” he explained. “We also have to think about our resources. We are unable to do post-mortems immediately. Here, we are doing the post-mortem between three to six weeks.”
“The high amount of crime and the high amount of road traffic accidents is contributing to the backlog also. We don’t have the human resources,” he said, adding that, in some cases, post-mortems are delayed as relatives do not turn up on appointed days to identify their loved ones. They simply say they cannot make it, he said.