[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
.A little after 4:00 p.m., a boater spotted the dead man floating face-down in the river near Washington’s Crossing Bridge, almost three and a half miles from his houseboat.A family water-skiing nearby saw the boater idling in the middle of the river and wondered if he was having engine trouble.The water-skiers came over to see if he needed help, and the boater pointed out the body.The father of the water-skiers had a cell phone, and he called 911.The emergency operator radioed the city police’s river rescue division, which dispatched a boat and two officers.In the WTAE-TV Channel Four newsroom in Wilkinsburg, a reporterheard the river rescue call over the police scanner.A floater near Washington’s Crossing Bridge.The reporter dialed the Allegheny County Coroner’s Office to find out what was going on.Police reporters on deadline at the local papers and television stations call the coroner’s office at the same time every evening to check on the night’s mayhem.Ed and Mike are friendly with some of the reporters and feel a particular kinship with the ones who work the evening shift.Other reporters they distrust.Ed doesn’t forget when he’s been burned.Sometimes reporters find out about a death and call just as the deputy coroners are heading to a scene.If they’re television, Ed instructs them to get his good side on camera.But when the phone rings in the investigative office this afternoon, Mike is shuttling Dr.Cyril Wecht to a speech and Ed is showing the MSNBC gangTHE FLOATER 143around the autopsy room, so Tracy McAninch picks up.She says she hasn’t heard anything and hangs up the phone.“That was Channel Four,” Tracy tells Carey.“They’re asking if we know anything about someone in the river.”Fifteen minutes later, the phone rings again.By now, Ed is back.This time, it’s a city homicide detective, the same one who caught the bone case in Bloomfield.He tells Ed about the body, which river rescue officers have by now fished out of the water and brought to a small dock.He gives Ed directions to the dock and he and Mike take off, TV people and interns in tow.The caravan of two coroner’s wagons and the beige TV van head up the river, then double back underneath the building-sized concrete abutments of Washington’s Crossing Bridge.The sky-blue arch bridge was built in 1923, and its name commemorates the December day in 1753 when a young George Washington narrowly avoided becoming just another Allegheny River floater himself.On a diplomatic mission, Washington fell into the icy water from his raft but managed to scramble to a tiny island on this section of the river, where he spent a frigid night before continuing his journey.On this summer day almost 250 years later, the riverbank is tree-lined and the air is pleasantly cool.When the caravan pulls up, a row of reporters and cameramen are already waiting.(“Ooh, the locals are here,” Trent Gillies, the MSNBC producer, says to the sound technician.“Everybody in town.”) A towboat and a set of barges containing black mountains of coal are muscling upriver as Mike and Ed and the others file down a wooden gangplank to a floating metal dock that runs parallel to the riverbank.Tied to the dock is the river rescue boat, dwarfed by a big red, white, and blue stern-wheeler.Two police officers in shorts and orange life jackets stand wide-legged in the river rescue boat, which is equipped with side panels that lower so they can easily yank bodies—living or dead—on board.The homicide detective stands on the dock, next to a blue body bag.Everyone greets each other as waves from the coal barge’s wake begin slapping at the dock, rocking the river rescue boat.Both Mike and Ed know the detective and Mike also knows one of the river rescue cops.As usual,144 THE FLOATEREd and Mike do not need to confer about who will do what; they’ve been working together long enough to know.Ed starts quizzing the detective.The body was found a hundred yards upriver.The river rescue cops pulled him out of the river and bagged him.The dead man was carrying identification in his waterlogged brown wallet, and the detective has already checked to see if a missing-person report has been filed under the floater’s name.None has.As the cameraman rolls tape and the interns watch, Mike unzips the body bag, which exhales a rich bouquet of river mud and early-stage stinker.“The wind’s going your way,” one river rescue cop warns the homicide detective, who nods but doesn’t move.He’s smelled plenty worse than this.The floater lies on his stomach.Mike turns him over, revealing a flattened-looking gray face, askew nose, closed eyes and matted hair and mustache.The floater’s cut-off jeans shorts and T-shirt are blackened with sooty river sediment, which means he was rolling around on the bottom a while.He’s been dead long enough to sink to the bottom and rise back up.He lifts the floater’s shirt and studies his torso for signs of trauma—nothing.As a kayaker cuts through the water on his red spearlike craft, Mike and Ed talk it over and decide to get the body onto a gurney down here on the dock, away from the local news cameras.Mike begins wrestling off the floater’s rings—the fingers are purple and thickened from the water—while Ed takes inventory of the dead man’s scant possessions, which will be taken back to the office and temporarily stored in the walk-in safe on the second floor of the coroner’s office.“We’ve got a white ring.a yellow watch.another white band,” Ed says, as Mike removes each item and places them in a plastic baggie.“No necklace.No earrings.”Deputy coroners must be painstaking in this inventory process.They’re careful because the stereotypical image of the thieving morgue worker still exists.Relatives keep a sharp eye on deputy coroners when there is cash at the scene, and they will raise hell if they think a body has been looted.In fact, justTHE FLOATER 145this past March, a woman told Philadelphia police that someone was using her dead father’s credit cards to rent cars and buy computer equipment.Police arrested two suspects, who said they bought the cards from Philadelphia medical examiner’s employees who worked the death scene.Using that evidence, police mounted a sting operation against three Philadelphia morgue workers.A police detective planted a bag of money at a death scene and busted the morgue worker who stole it.Two other medical examiner workers were charged with stealing more than $90,000 in cash and property from the dead over the past decade.So an honest deputy coroner must create a paper trail.That’s why Ed got so upset with himself a few days ago, when he got back to the coroner’s office and saw that he’d overlooked a ring on the finger of the obese dead woman—he hadn’t noted it on the inventory at the scene, as protocol dictates.He called the woman’s husband immediately and apologized.About a year before Ed joined the coroner’s office, an anonymous tipster called the coroner and said that two coroner’s office employees stole money from a man killed on a local highway.The coroner’s staffers documented and turned over $3,100, but the tipster said they pocketed more money.State police investigated, but came up with no evidence.One of the accused, a veteran deputy coroner who has since retired, insisted the charges were false [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
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.A little after 4:00 p.m., a boater spotted the dead man floating face-down in the river near Washington’s Crossing Bridge, almost three and a half miles from his houseboat.A family water-skiing nearby saw the boater idling in the middle of the river and wondered if he was having engine trouble.The water-skiers came over to see if he needed help, and the boater pointed out the body.The father of the water-skiers had a cell phone, and he called 911.The emergency operator radioed the city police’s river rescue division, which dispatched a boat and two officers.In the WTAE-TV Channel Four newsroom in Wilkinsburg, a reporterheard the river rescue call over the police scanner.A floater near Washington’s Crossing Bridge.The reporter dialed the Allegheny County Coroner’s Office to find out what was going on.Police reporters on deadline at the local papers and television stations call the coroner’s office at the same time every evening to check on the night’s mayhem.Ed and Mike are friendly with some of the reporters and feel a particular kinship with the ones who work the evening shift.Other reporters they distrust.Ed doesn’t forget when he’s been burned.Sometimes reporters find out about a death and call just as the deputy coroners are heading to a scene.If they’re television, Ed instructs them to get his good side on camera.But when the phone rings in the investigative office this afternoon, Mike is shuttling Dr.Cyril Wecht to a speech and Ed is showing the MSNBC gangTHE FLOATER 143around the autopsy room, so Tracy McAninch picks up.She says she hasn’t heard anything and hangs up the phone.“That was Channel Four,” Tracy tells Carey.“They’re asking if we know anything about someone in the river.”Fifteen minutes later, the phone rings again.By now, Ed is back.This time, it’s a city homicide detective, the same one who caught the bone case in Bloomfield.He tells Ed about the body, which river rescue officers have by now fished out of the water and brought to a small dock.He gives Ed directions to the dock and he and Mike take off, TV people and interns in tow.The caravan of two coroner’s wagons and the beige TV van head up the river, then double back underneath the building-sized concrete abutments of Washington’s Crossing Bridge.The sky-blue arch bridge was built in 1923, and its name commemorates the December day in 1753 when a young George Washington narrowly avoided becoming just another Allegheny River floater himself.On a diplomatic mission, Washington fell into the icy water from his raft but managed to scramble to a tiny island on this section of the river, where he spent a frigid night before continuing his journey.On this summer day almost 250 years later, the riverbank is tree-lined and the air is pleasantly cool.When the caravan pulls up, a row of reporters and cameramen are already waiting.(“Ooh, the locals are here,” Trent Gillies, the MSNBC producer, says to the sound technician.“Everybody in town.”) A towboat and a set of barges containing black mountains of coal are muscling upriver as Mike and Ed and the others file down a wooden gangplank to a floating metal dock that runs parallel to the riverbank.Tied to the dock is the river rescue boat, dwarfed by a big red, white, and blue stern-wheeler.Two police officers in shorts and orange life jackets stand wide-legged in the river rescue boat, which is equipped with side panels that lower so they can easily yank bodies—living or dead—on board.The homicide detective stands on the dock, next to a blue body bag.Everyone greets each other as waves from the coal barge’s wake begin slapping at the dock, rocking the river rescue boat.Both Mike and Ed know the detective and Mike also knows one of the river rescue cops.As usual,144 THE FLOATEREd and Mike do not need to confer about who will do what; they’ve been working together long enough to know.Ed starts quizzing the detective.The body was found a hundred yards upriver.The river rescue cops pulled him out of the river and bagged him.The dead man was carrying identification in his waterlogged brown wallet, and the detective has already checked to see if a missing-person report has been filed under the floater’s name.None has.As the cameraman rolls tape and the interns watch, Mike unzips the body bag, which exhales a rich bouquet of river mud and early-stage stinker.“The wind’s going your way,” one river rescue cop warns the homicide detective, who nods but doesn’t move.He’s smelled plenty worse than this.The floater lies on his stomach.Mike turns him over, revealing a flattened-looking gray face, askew nose, closed eyes and matted hair and mustache.The floater’s cut-off jeans shorts and T-shirt are blackened with sooty river sediment, which means he was rolling around on the bottom a while.He’s been dead long enough to sink to the bottom and rise back up.He lifts the floater’s shirt and studies his torso for signs of trauma—nothing.As a kayaker cuts through the water on his red spearlike craft, Mike and Ed talk it over and decide to get the body onto a gurney down here on the dock, away from the local news cameras.Mike begins wrestling off the floater’s rings—the fingers are purple and thickened from the water—while Ed takes inventory of the dead man’s scant possessions, which will be taken back to the office and temporarily stored in the walk-in safe on the second floor of the coroner’s office.“We’ve got a white ring.a yellow watch.another white band,” Ed says, as Mike removes each item and places them in a plastic baggie.“No necklace.No earrings.”Deputy coroners must be painstaking in this inventory process.They’re careful because the stereotypical image of the thieving morgue worker still exists.Relatives keep a sharp eye on deputy coroners when there is cash at the scene, and they will raise hell if they think a body has been looted.In fact, justTHE FLOATER 145this past March, a woman told Philadelphia police that someone was using her dead father’s credit cards to rent cars and buy computer equipment.Police arrested two suspects, who said they bought the cards from Philadelphia medical examiner’s employees who worked the death scene.Using that evidence, police mounted a sting operation against three Philadelphia morgue workers.A police detective planted a bag of money at a death scene and busted the morgue worker who stole it.Two other medical examiner workers were charged with stealing more than $90,000 in cash and property from the dead over the past decade.So an honest deputy coroner must create a paper trail.That’s why Ed got so upset with himself a few days ago, when he got back to the coroner’s office and saw that he’d overlooked a ring on the finger of the obese dead woman—he hadn’t noted it on the inventory at the scene, as protocol dictates.He called the woman’s husband immediately and apologized.About a year before Ed joined the coroner’s office, an anonymous tipster called the coroner and said that two coroner’s office employees stole money from a man killed on a local highway.The coroner’s staffers documented and turned over $3,100, but the tipster said they pocketed more money.State police investigated, but came up with no evidence.One of the accused, a veteran deputy coroner who has since retired, insisted the charges were false [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]