The Case of the Blood, Bone Dust, and Human Juice

Today we (me, M1, M2, M3, and J) crawled through the L.A. traffic to the Coroner's Office first thing in the morning. In big letters on the side of the building were: "Coroners: Medical Examiner, Forensic Science." It was a tad morbid to be standing outside of a building housing hundreds of dead bodies, and a little unsettling to think that this isn't CSI Miami or otherwise, this is reality.There were three buildings on the premises, one main office building, one housing the crypt, and another ominous looking red brick mystery building that I know not the function of, but after today, I don't really want to find out.

The Coroner Investigator greeted us and took us first to the main office building for orientation. In the orientation she informed us of the coroner's role in a criminal investigation, and showed us pictures of homicides, suicides, and accidents. The first picture she showed was a homicide scene. The corpse was female, although she was covered in so much blood that there was really no way to tell the body's gender from the picture. You could see that rigor mortis had set in since her hands and fingers were stiff and in a claw-like shape. The woman's son was hyped on PCP and decided to stab his mother, 20 times in the neck.

The second picture was of suicide notes. One particular man was a writer and a funny one at that. On his door was a note saying, "Dead Body This Way", and in the room where the body was found were notes all over the place, one of them stating, "O.J. Was Here." The third picture was one of a car accident that happened on the freeway. The driver was a marine going 100 miles an hour. He lost control of his car and the car's nose hit a patch of dirt and all the momentum and speed propelled the rest of the car to a 90 degree tilt, smashing the top of the car into a freeway pillar. The investigator showed detailed, gruesome pictures of the passengers. The male driver was dead, and the body tangled next to him was a female passenger, dead, with 1/3 of her brain next to her arm and her mouth open, as if to scream, and her face frozen in fear. Digging a little deeper through the wreckage, the team found a car seat containing a 2 year old boy, dead, with his head smashed in and with what seemed like bloody cracks down his face. Digging deeper still revealed another car seat, with a 6 week old baby inside, dead.

After the show and tell, we were ready to venture into the second building for some autopsy action. We rode the elevator down and as the elevator door opened, we smelled it right away: that distinct smell of something rotten, and it's not long before you realize that the "something" that's rotten is human flesh. We walked into a room to suit up. We put booties on our shoes, masks, and gloves. We then walked through a door and our tour guide showed us the"decomp room" where they house decomposing bodies recently found. They didn't have any bodies in the decomp room that day. Thank God!

Next we turned our heads and saw the hallway ahead of us. To our left was the huge refrigerated crypt that the coroner investigator affectionately called, the "meat locker." Ahead of us was a door leading to the autopsy suites with two bodies on cold metal slabs on each side of the hallway, toe tags and all. The meat locker was filled with bodies.They were not neatly stacked into little refrigerated coffins on the wall, the bodies were just on metal slabs, loosely wrapped in plastic and out everywhere in the meat locker. Our tour guide effortlessly opened the plastic wrap on one of the bodies and started poking at the body to show us livor mortis (a method of indicating the possible time of death). Without a mask on and without fear, she walked into the meat locker like it was Disneyland and poked at the corpses like she was handling playdough. On the floor around the fresher bodies were little drops of blood and little puddles of this elusive pale yellow liquid that can only be characterized as human juice. The bodies of the father holding his 17 month old baby as a human shield in the shoot out last Sunday were in the meatlocker. I did not look at the corpse of the baby.

After exiting the meat locker, I was ready to go into the autopsy suits. Chills ran down my spine as I walked past the corpse gauntlet in the hallway. I remembered the coroner saying that sometimes dead bodies can jerk and spas and I walked as fast as I could past the bodies while holding my breath onto the doors leading to the autopsy suits.

In case you want more gory detail, this is what happens in an autopsy: The coroner first made a “Y” incision from the chest to the lower torso of the body, sawing open the chest cavity. Tiny bits of blood mingled with flesh flew around as the coroner made his incision, this is what they call, the “splatter factor.” Then the guy just started digging and grapping and cutting at the organs and lifting each organ up to weigh it on a scale next to the body. I think I saw what looked like the heart, I know the googey strands of bloody mesh were intestines, and the medical examiner picked something out of the body that looked a lot like top sirloin steak. Is it dinner time yet?

Next came the sawing of the skull. The coroner made a precise incision on the back of the corpse’s head with a saw, then he peeled off the face and took out the brain to weigh. While bone dusts from the skull happily flew around during the sawing, we looked on as the coroner dug out a curious mayonnaise tuna salad-ish of a brain.

After the autopsy, we walked towards the elevator to exit the building. As we were making our escape, a few medical examiners wheeled out a decomposing body: green, brown, and bloated. It was a lovely goodbye as we ended our tour in the coroner’s office.

I stormed out of the building desperate for some fresh air, I never knew LA smog could smell this good. After our trip I realized that I had left my sunglasses in the room where we masked up, down near the meat locker. Refusing to smell that rotten smell any longer, I had to let that pair of sunglasses go.

I send the rest of the day trying to figure out how to describe the smell of dead people, this is what I came up with: imagine the smell of a piece of red meat sitting in the sun for 4 days or so, now add a touch of sourness and acidity to the smell. And for the finale, add a sickning sweetness to the sour rotten smell and you've got yourself the lovely imaginary aroma of dead bodies: the sickly sweet smell of rotten flesh.

Now that you have heard the tale of the blood, bone dust, and human juice, go ahead and celebrate your bravado with a big juicy sirloin steak dinner and some tuna salad on the side. And don't be afraid to order a glass of human juice or two, if you so incline to do.