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Position: Coroner's Report
Email: chuser@durangoherald.com
In a perfect world, girls and women subjected to sexual abuse would speak out immediately. Appropriate charges would be brought, and families would support prosecution. This is not a perfect world....
DATE: Oct. 7, 2018 | COLUMN: Coroner's Report
Lukis Anderson couldn’t remember any murder. “Nah, nah, nah. I don’t do things like that,” he told his public defender when the DNA results came back. “But maybe I did.” Anderson, a 26-year-old,...
DATE: Sept. 3, 2018 | COLUMN: Coroner's Report
Police detectives across Europe called her “The Woman Without a Face.” She’d murdered at least six people and committed some two dozen lesser crimes in three countries. In 1993, a 62-year-old...
DATE: Aug. 5, 2018 | COLUMN: Coroner's Report
A researcher from Harvard University called after I responded to a survey sent to members of the National Association of Medical Examiners. He wanted to know what criteria medical examiners use to...
DATE: July 9, 2018 | COLUMN: Coroner's Report
One of my colleagues asked for advice after an unnamed “outside agency” requested an autopsy on a fetus stillborn to a mother who used illegal drugs. The implication was that someone within the...
DATE: June 3, 2018 | COLUMN: Coroner's Report
Dr. John Plunkett was 70 when he died in April. He was a forensic pathologist from Minnesota and one of the most influential skeptics of the concept of shaken baby syndrome. In 2016, Plunkett...
DATE: April 16, 2018 | COLUMN: Coroner's Report
In December, Dr. Bennet Omalu, the forensic pathologist who first described concussion-related brain damage in professional football players, resigned his position as forensic pathologist for San...
DATE: April 9, 2018 | COLUMN: Coroner's Report
It’s fortunate for athletes that some immigrants from President Donald Trump’s expletive-deleted African countries were welcomed rather than rejected as hut-dwelling undesirables. Bennet Omalu, who...
DATE: March 5, 2018 | COLUMN: Coroner's Report
Perhaps partially in response to the “opioid epidemic,” some prosecutors are eager to throw the book at drug dealers. Because of a 2014 Supreme Court opinion, medical examiner testimony can be a...
DATE: Feb. 3, 2018 | COLUMN: Coroner's Report
Dallas McCarver, a superstar body builder, who looked like a normally-pigmented Incredible Hulk, died on Aug. 22 at the age of 26. McCarver, aka “Big Country,” had plenty of risk factors for an...
DATE: Jan. 6, 2018 | COLUMN: Coroner's Report
My friend “John,” a conscientious and responsible guy, could have been killed because of a bad mistake. While driving at 60 mph, he looked down to plug in his cellphone. John never saw the string...
DATE: Dec. 1, 2017 | COLUMN: Coroner's Report
DNA testing procedures developed by the medical examiner’s office in New York City have come under attack, calling into question the validity of some DNA-based convictions. The office recently...
DATE: Nov. 3, 2017 | COLUMN: Coroner's Report
