Rookie Police Experiment
The Relative Nature of Luck…
The most memorable field trip was to the medical examiner’s office. They split the class into groups of twenty-five so we could walk through in a manageable way. Unlike the ME’s offices you see on T.V., the ME’s office in Philly was one giant porcelain tiled room-slash-refrigerator with rows and rows of stainless-steel rolling tables on which lay the naked bodies of those unfortunates who passed on in the last few days.
I would estimate during our visit, there were 30. (Actually, there were 32, but that’s too Aspie-like to remember the exact number.) (I’m not counting the two in the autopsy room.)
I imagine the lesson was introducing us to what it was like to be in the presence of a dead body or something along those lines. Instructors showed us the loading dock where various vehicles loaded and unloaded the bodies passing through the facility.
These vehicles were often police wagons, so they wanted to show us where to bring bodies when we came to the office. While we were there, there were several hearses, not a common term or sight today, picking up bodies to take to funeral homes for final burial.
So, police wagons, rescue vehicles, private ambulances, and hearses from funeral homes would pull into this area to load and unload bodies.
Inside the facility, we walked through the aisle between the rows of bodies. We toured the offices and, finally, the examination room.
The examination room was essentially an operating room where technicians performed autopsies. Anyone who died violently or suspiciously got an autopsy. If an old person who was sick died at home, the funeral home would come there and pick them up.
If, however, a younger person, like the Girl in the Chair in my coming detective book, died, they might go to the ME’s office for an autopsy.
The instructors told us we were lucky because there was a double homicide the previous night, and today was their autopsy. Perhaps one of the lessons of the visit was the relative nature of luck because these two were having a real bad day.
The examination room was a continuation of the hall of bodies separated only by a half-wall. Technicians wheeled bodies directly from the hall to the examination room.
The homicide victims, cut from neck to groin, lay face up on parallel tables, and by the time we arrived, all their internal organs were gone. The technicians called them canoes.
The object of this exercise was to shock us. I can’t imagine any other reason to subject a group of young cadets to a procedure they would never be a part of. They didn’t teach physics and ballistics at the pistol range; I can’t imagine why they thought this would be helpful.
The two techs who were readying the bodies for the doctor’s inspection were preparing to remove the brain from one of the victims. As the twenty-five of us gathered around the table, one of the techs took a scalpel and ran it around the base of the first man’s skull.
Several sensitive individuals chose to move to the back of the group.
I and several of my more fun-loving cadre stayed right up front, so we didn’t miss anything. The techs looked at each other and snickered, thinking they were about to shock us.
The one by the body reached under the scalp of the poor individual on the table and pulled it forward over his face, exposing the top of his skull.
Joe was right behind me.
He said, “Wow, you really pulled the wool over his eyes.”…
This is just a glimpse—there’s much more to uncover in the full book.