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Position: Coroner's Report
Email: chuser@durangoherald.com
A New York state medical examiner certified that Vincent Viafore’s death was a homicide because his “kayak drain plug (was) intentionally removed by (an)other.” The New York Times reported that...
DATE: Nov. 4, 2015 | COLUMN: Coroner's Report
Some medical experts have decided that shaking can’t kill babies. These experts regularly testify for the defense when murder charges are brought after an infant’s death has been attributed to...
DATE: Sept. 30, 2015 | COLUMN: Coroner's Report
Fictional medical examiners have no trouble telling if somebody drowned. In real life, that determination can be hard. The classic finding in drowning is a cone of white froth bubbling out of the...
DATE: Sept. 2, 2015 | COLUMN: Coroner's Report
Last month, the anti-abortion activist group Center for Medical Progress released an undercover video of a Planned Parenthood doctor graphically describing techniques by which fetal organs for...
DATE: Aug. 5, 2015 | COLUMN: Coroner's Report
During a science field trip to the Staten Island morgue in 2005, high school students saw a familiar name on a glass jar containing a brain. Jesse Shipley, a classmate’s brother, had died two...
DATE: July 1, 2015 | COLUMN: Coroner's Report
On my bedroom wall hangs a family portrait almost 100 years old. Dressed in their Sunday best and formally arranged in two rows, my paternal grandmother, Clara; her parents; three brothers; and...
DATE: June 3, 2015 | COLUMN: Coroner's Report
Certain inherited diseases confer a significantly increased risk of sudden death. Genetic tests for many of those diseases are available, but most coroners and medical examiners don’t order them....
DATE: May 10, 2015 | COLUMN: Coroner's Report
Dr. Charles Hirsch, under whom I trained, said few people have 20 years’ experience. Lots of people have one year’s experience repeated 20 times. Some people spend years repeating their errors,...
DATE: April 12, 2015 | COLUMN: Coroner's Report
“What looks like neglect from my perspective is sometimes the best people can do given the tools and capabilities they have,” one of my colleagues said. The comment was part of a debate about...
DATE: March 8, 2015 | COLUMN: Coroner's Report
When a child dies from a head injury, an “undetermined” manner-of-death certification may be seen as an act of cowardice or an act of courage. Brookelynn Palmer, the 13-month-old daughter of...
DATE: Feb. 7, 2015 | COLUMN: Coroner's Report
A great many of the death certificates filed in this country aren’t worth the paper they’re printed on, and neither are the scientific studies based on them. I’ve expressed this opinion in writing...
DATE: Jan. 11, 2015 | COLUMN: Coroner's Report
Almost 20 years ago, two men in Fort Myers, Florida, got into an argument, and the one who brought a baseball bat to a gunfight wound up dead. I did the autopsy. I don’t remember what the argument...
DATE: Dec. 7, 2014 | COLUMN: Coroner's Report
Fort Lewis College is updating about a dozen panels at the Clock Tower in the center of campus to better recognize the past, "in a way that's fully inclusive of our Native American community on campus and the families directly affected by Indian boarding schools."
