UNDER THE MICROSCOPE
Dr. Raymund W. Lo
Every year in late October in time for All Saints Day, our TV stations try to outcompete each other in coming out with the goriest horror stories, reliving old tales and generally beating to death the tired horse of “aswangs, kapres, manananggals” and other creatures of the dark in local folklore. All it actually does is to reinforce superstitious beliefs and keep people from becoming more rational in their thinking. Add to this the proliferation of fake news and the idolatry of Instagram and other social media “influencers,” and you have the perfect storm of a mindless, zombie-like population heading toward the precipice.
But there are genuine horror stories in the daily grind of forensic pathologists, which I got to experience when I rotated in the Medical Examiners Offices of Kings County (Brooklyn) and Manhattan, New York City, during my Pathology residency training in the United States. Then, as it is still today, it’s not unusual to have dozens of bodies lined up for forensic autopsies on a daily basis.
There is, of course, the usual parade of corpses from motor vehicle accidents, fire victims burnt to a crisp, drug overdoses, murder victims (homicides in forensic parlance), gunshot fatalities, and drug war mortalities fished out from the Hudson River. These are prima facie exhibits of man’s inhumanity to man, including one’s self with suicides.
Among these, a few stand out in my rapidly fading memory. One is the case of a beautiful baby girl of two with curly blond locks and an angelic face. Her disfigured body came in with multiple angry blue-black bruises all over. Her spleen and liver had ruptured lacerations sustained from a frenzied beating by the boyfriend of her mother. I couldn’t figure out how someone, other than a jealousy-crazed or drug addled man could do such a thing to an innocent child. Then, I remembered that animals in the wild would usually kill the offspring of a rival male after taking over his harem. I don’t know if the guy and the mother were convicted of this horrendous crime or not, but if we’re to go by the record of American justice, I’m sure they were.
Violence isn’t the only weapon that can kill. So will neglect. The next case is that of an 85-year-old brought in from a nursing home facility. His body came in the bed he was lying in, obviously for the last several years of his life, for he was encased in a cake of dried feces several inches deep all around the body. To top it all, there were lice crawling all over the body and bed, which sent us all running from the case until it was doused in kerosene to kill the lice. Just remembering this case sends shivers up and down my spine whenever I recall it. This must be the epitome of elder abuse and neglect if ever I saw one.
The third case was that of a horribly obese man in his forties who died of asphyxiation because his abdominal organs were so huge, they literally compressed his lungs and he suffocated to death. Talk about killing oneself softly through gluttony. When I was assigned to perform the autopsy on him, I had to do it standing on a tall stool, as his belly towered above the autopsy table and I couldn’t see inside his body cavity if I just stood on my own height. There was a terrifying moment during the autopsy, after removing most of the internal organs when I slipped and almost fell into his body cavity, which was big enough to accommodate me. The medical examiners had a hearty laugh at my expense on that day.
The next case was a forensic puzzle. The murder victim had been shot in the chest. The medical examiner found that the bullet had struck a rib and ricocheted into the heart. However, there was no point of exit and the bullet could not be found anywhere in the chest cavity. After an exhaustive search, it was decided to do a whole-body X-ray. Lo and behold, the bullet was lodged in the femoral artery of the thigh. It had travelled there via the blood flowing from the heart through the aorta. Case solved!
We need not look further than our own shores though, for real-life horror stories. There is the continuing parade of extrajudicial killings, including that of Percy Lapid and subsequently that of the alleged middleman of his murder, who died mysteriously in prison. Dr. Fortun did a second autopsy and concluded that he had been suffocated with a bag over his head and face; thus, no mark could be found superficially. But there was evidence of asphyxiation in the lungs, based on news reports. This is a case of murder on top of another murder. Where does it all end? Horror stories must have an ending and not be left hanging.