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Position: Coroner's Report
Email: chuser@durangoherald.com
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
Two weeks after Hurricane Irma, the Miami Herald reported that Florida’s unofficial death toll had risen to 75. Depending on the practice philosophies of Florida medical examiners, that figure...
DATE: Oct. 8, 2017 | COLUMN: Coroner's Report
In May, Frank J. Kerrigan, 82, got the phone call every grieving family longs for. “Your son is alive,” said Bill Shinker, a family friend who had been a pall bearer for Kerrigan’s son, Frank, 11...
DATE: Sept. 1, 2017 | COLUMN: Coroner's Report
Sarah Traynor, 7 years old and mildly autistic, was found hanging by a jump rope attached to the top bar of a swing set in her backyard. The Supreme Court of Victoria at Melbourne, Australia,...
DATE: Aug. 4, 2017 | COLUMN: Coroner's Report
Quaaludes were popular before my time, but I saw cocaine and methamphetamine sweep the country and witnessed a renewed taste for heroin. Now, we have the “opioid crisis” – an epidemic of deaths...
DATE: July 1, 2017 | COLUMN: Coroner's Report
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