Morgue (4 page)

A toxicologist friend mentioned my name as the go-to guy on gunshot wounds. West already knew my name and reputation. He even had a copy of my book on gunshot wounds. So he eventually reached out to me in September 2012, ten months before Zimmerman's trial was to start. They might not be able to pay me, he said, but it was an important case that raised important questions for America.

I had retired six years before as Chief Medical Examiner in Bexar County, Texas, where I had built one of the nation's most respected forensic medical facilities. I had performed more than 9,000 autopsies, examined over 25,000 deaths, and continued to consult in unexplained or questionable death cases all over the world. Now George Zimmerman's defense wanted me to connect the forensic dots in the last three minutes of Trayvon Martin's life.

I knew the furor that had engulfed America. I knew that race politics had confused the issue. I knew there were facts that had been misunderstood or overlooked. But I also knew the truth about what happened was hidden somewhere within the evidence.

I agreed.

To simplify it, my job as a medical examiner is to determine how and why a person died. In legal terms, the
cause
and
manner
of death. The cause is the disease or injury that killed him—maybe a heart attack, a gunshot wound, AIDS, or a car crash. The manner is one of four general ways a human can die—natural causes, accident, suicide, or homicide—plus a vexing fifth: undetermined.

Our determinations impact the living more than the dead. The dead are past caring, but the living can go to jail. Lives can be saved from viruses and germs. Innocence can be determined. Questions can be answered, suspicions authenticated. So medical examiners bear a heavy burden to reach an unbiased, fact-based, scientific conclusion, no matter what a dead person's family, friends, enemies, or neighbors wish it to be. Truth is always better than what we merely wish to be true.

Countless times I've delivered grim news to the relatives of suicides, and they've protested. Families often don't want to believe that a loved one felt so unloved that he killed himself. They want it to be a gun-cleaning accident or a missed step on a high bridge. They want a medical examiner to declare it an accident so they can carry on, officially guilt-free.

I've even seen relatives breathe a sigh of relief when I tell them a son or daughter was murdered, as if suicide would have been a worse way to go. It's not about the dead, but the living.

Sometimes what I told them they didn't want to hear, and sometimes what I told them they wanted to hear. But it didn't really matter either way, because I was telling them the truth.

I don't take sides.
What I know
is vital;
how I feel
is irrelevant. The forensic pathologist's mission is the truth. I'm supposed to be impartial and tell the truth. Facts have no moral quality, only what we project upon them.

Mysteries are, by definition, unanswered questions. If we could understand them, not only would they cease to be mysteries, but we'd probably consider them unworthy of being understood. Humans are funny that way.

This world itself isn't reasonable. We yearn for clarity in all things but too often embrace the murky: conspiracy theories, supernatural explanations, and mythology, among them.

I'm not a deep thinker. I don't seek profound meaning in the behavior of humans, or the stars, or the alchemy of little coincidences. We are occasionally astonished by these things simply because our world stubbornly refuses to reveal meanings, if they exist at all.

Forensic science is not magic or alchemy, even though complex technology and intricate research can take curdled blood, bullet fragments, bone shards, and flakes of skin and turn them into justice. I look for those tiny bits of truth that death leaves behind. Forensic science can see what ordinary humans often cannot, but science isn't enough. We need credible, honorable people to explain it all. Good men and women must interpret science for true justice to happen.

How long can a man with an exploded heart speak (or hope, dream, or imagine)? Can we precisely determine the moment a human's primitive instincts tell him he might die? Does every human interaction truly leave a trace?

I grew up with such questions floating in the air, and my career has been marinated in them, as this book will show. But the answers don't always satisfy.

And when they don't, my phone rings.

So it was with George Zimmerman.

Fact is, the community of medical examiners is very small—only about five hundred board-certified forensic pathologists live in the United States. Before West called, I already knew some details about the wound and that the bullet hole in the hoodie was a contact shot. I knew about the dueling conclusions of contact wound versus an intermediate range wound, but I knew why these observations were not incompatible. I shared my thoughts with West, who seemed surprised to hear them. He knew if I was right—and I was—that his whole factual case could pivot on it.

So my task was to document Martin's injuries, trace the path of the bullet and its physical damage, and examine Zimmerman's injuries to show whether they were all consistent with Zimmerman's account of the struggle. I wasn't hired to contrive an opinion to help the defense but to offer my expert opinion about whether any of it supported the shooter's account. I wasn't a hired gun coming to town to do the defense's dirty work. I hate that medical examiners sometimes appear to say what they've been paid to say—and undoubtedly, some might—but I don't work for the defense, the prosecution, the killer, the family of the victim, or the cops. I didn't get this far by selling my opinion to the highest bidder.

But the rest of the world had already taken sides. Without the benefit of facts, a lot of people saw this tragedy through the prism of their own biases and reached unyielding conclusions. This wasn't the first or the last time this had happened in my career, but it was among the most stark.

Don West sent me a thumb drive containing all the forensic material I'd need: Martin's autopsy report, crime scene photos, a video reenactment of the shooting that Zimmerman did with detectives the next day, toxicology, gunshot tests and residue, witnesses' 911 calls and statements, biological, trace, and DNA evidence, Zimmerman's medical records and his cellphone data.

This was a complicated case only in cultural terms.

Forensically, it wasn't complicated at all. It was tragically simple.

*   *   *

The second-degree murder trial of George Zimmerman began on Monday, June 24, 2013, almost sixteen months after the fatal shot was fired.

The prosecution's opening remarks began with calculated shock.

“Good morning. ‘Fucking punks, these assholes all get away,'” state's attorney John Guy blurted out to the six-woman jury. “These were the words in this grown man's mouth as he followed this boy that he didn't know. Those were his words, not mine.”

Over the next half hour, Guy repeated the profanities several times as he outlined the prosecution's case against Zimmerman.

“We are confident that at the end of this trial you will know in your head, in your heart, in your stomach that George Zimmerman did not shoot Trayvon Martin because he had to,” Guy said. “He shot him for the worst of all reasons, because he wanted to.”

Don West opened for the defense with a lame knock-knock joke that fell flat, but he quickly got to the meat of the case.

“I think the evidence will show that this is a sad case, that there are no monsters,” West said. “George Zimmerman is not guilty of murder. He shot Trayvon Martin in self-defense after being viciously attacked.”

Zimmerman watched from the defense table and Trayvon Martin's parents sat in the gallery as West suggested Martin's deadly weapon was a concrete sidewalk, “no different than if he picked up a brick or smashed [Zimmerman's] head against a wall.”

“Little did George Zimmerman know at the time in less than ten minutes from him first seeing Trayvon Martin that he would be sucker-punched in the face, have his head pounded on concrete, and wind up shooting and tragically killing Trayvon Martin,” West said.

The first shots fired, the trench warfare began.

Prosecutors played other 911 tapes where Zimmerman reported strange black men in the neighborhood … phone buddy DeeDee described her phone calls with Martin up to the point of the confrontation and denied the term “cracker” is racist … the lead detective said there were no major inconsistencies in Zimmerman's various accounts of the shooting, although he'd probably not suffered the dozens of blows he'd told police at the scene … a medical examiner who reviewed the case said Zimmerman's injuries “were not life-threatening” and “very insignificant,” not even bad enough to require stitches (and had no answer when asked by O'Mara if George Zimmerman's very next injury might have killed him) … several eyewitnesses told conflicting stories about who was on top during the struggle … Martin's parents both said the voice crying for help on the 911 tape was Trayvon's … and five Zimmerman friends claimed the voice on the 911 tape was clearly George's.

The central question—
who was the aggressor when the shot was fired?
—remained unanswered ten days into the trial.

I took the stand on the eleventh day, just a day before the defense expected to wrap up its case. It was perhaps a blessing that Trayvon Martin's mother had left the courtroom because a victim's mother should seldom be forced to hear what I must usually say in a trial.

My testimony was no surprise to the prosecutors. They knew in detail what I was going to say because they had deposed me just two or three weeks before. In fact, a few hours before I testified, the prosecutors again questioned me on what I was about to say. In light of this, I thought that they would bring in a rebuttal witness to disagree with my opinions. They didn't.

I testified that George Zimmerman suffered multiple blunt-force injuries to his face and head: two swollen knots on his head, a couple of gashes and abrasions consistent with the head-banging assault he described, a likely broken nose that was pushed back into place, and bruises on his forehead where he was likely punched—all consistent with Zimmerman's story. It was possible for Zimmerman to have severe head injuries, even life-threatening ones, without any visible external wounds, I said.

Questioning continued. Zimmerman had recalled Martin lying facedown with his arms splayed out after the fatal shot, but by the time cops and paramedics arrived, the teenager's arms were beneath him. To prosecutors, this was evidence that Zimmerman was lying. West asked me if it was possible that the mortally wounded Martin had rolled over on his own.

“Even if I right now reached across, put my hand through your chest, grabbed your heart and ripped it out,” I told West, perhaps a little too colorfully, “you could stand there and talk to me for ten to fifteen seconds or walk over to me because the thing that's controlling your movement and ability to speak is the brain, and that has a reserve oxygen supply of ten to fifteen seconds.

“In this case you have a through-and-through hole of the right ventricle, and then you have at least one hole if not two into the right lung,” I continued. “So you are losing blood, and every time the heart contracts, it pumps blood out the two holes in the ventricle and at least one hole in the lung. He is going to be dead between one and three minutes after being shot.”

West turned to Martin's bullet wound. Was there anything in Trayvon Martin's wounds that might tell us the positions of the two men when the fatal shot was fired? Could I tell who was on top and who was on his back?

I could.

“If you lean over somebody, you would notice that the clothing tends to fall away from the chest,” I said. “If instead you're lying on your back and somebody shoots you, the clothing is going to be against your chest. So the fact that we know the clothing was two to four inches away is consistent with somebody leaning over the person doing the shooting and that the clothing is two to four inches away from the person [who is shot].”

There had been no contradiction between the medical examiner's intermediate range wound and the gunshot expert's contact shot. The Kel-Tec's muzzle touched Trayvon Martin's hoodie, which hung two to four inches away from his chest as he leaned over George Zimmerman. Gravity had pulled the can of fruit drink and the candy in the hoodie's front pouch—weighing almost two pounds—down even farther.

The forensic evidence, I said, proved Martin had been leaning forward, not lying down, when he was shot. That was consistent with Zimmerman's account that the boy was kneeling or standing over him, savagely beating him, when Zimmerman pulled the trigger.

If Martin had been on his back, his hoodie would have been against his skin, with no space between. If George Zimmerman had been tugging at his hoodie, the bullet holes wouldn't have lined up so perfectly.

The courtroom was deathly quiet. The jury was riveted. The prosecution's cross-examination tiptoed around my conclusion, which seemed to shut the door on their theory that Zimmerman, not Martin, had been on top in that fight.

I was excused from the stand, and Don West's daughter took me directly to the airport to catch a plane home to San Antonio. On the long flight, I thought about the two lives that intersected on a dark, rainy February night. No matter who was on top, it was a tragedy. Lives were changed, and not just for the two combatants.

None of us was there. There are no pictures or videos of the fatal moment. We cannot know what truly happened, and we certainly cannot know what was in those two men's hearts. But the scientific evidence told a story that many people didn't want to hear and refuse to believe even now.

That's how it is with truth. It isn't always welcome.

A few days later, there was nothing more to say. The case went to the all-female jury. While they deliberated, dozens of demonstrators gathered outside the courthouse, hollering slogans, waving signs, and arguing with one another about the case. Two weeks of testimony hadn't muted them at all.