Morgue (7 page)

On a stormy June 24, 1975, an Eastern Airlines 727 crashed on its approach to John F. Kennedy International Airport in Queens. A mile from the runway, Flight 66 from New Orleans rose unexpectedly on a mammoth updraft, then slammed violently down in a microburst, sheering off its left wing on a row of light poles and falling to pieces in a spectacular disintegration.

One hundred thirteen people died in the fiery crash (although eleven people miraculously survived). It was America's third worst airline disaster at the time.

The charred and dismembered dead lay scattered everywhere. Within moments, a special phone rang in my father's Manhattan office, and he rushed to the scene to supervise the collection and examination of the remains. A slow parade of morgue wagons, packed with pine boxes full of human pieces and parts, filled the ME's office and a temporary tent-morgue on the crash site to overflowing. Working through the night and into the next day, my father and his team identified the dead, notified the next of kin, and prepared all 113 victims to be transported to their final resting places around the world.

And why wouldn't it have been unimaginable for my father? It wasn't his first mass-casualty disaster. It wasn't even his third or fourth. He'd been on the scene of the 1960 midair collision of two passenger jets over New York that killed 134 people, including six on the ground. He'd also worked with the remains of 95 people killed in the 1959 crash of a Boeing 707 that nose-dived into Jamaica Bay. And the 1950 Kew Gardens train crash that killed 78 commuters. And Eastern Airlines Flight 663, which killed 84 people when it crashed into the sea off Long Island in 1965.

If he hadn't seen all the ways a human can die, there were very few left for him to see.

One of my father's most notable cases, however, came after he retired as Chief Medical Examiner in 1978, and ironically didn't involve a death at all.

Three days before Christmas in 1984, a nebbishy electronics dealer named Bernhard Goetz, who was white, was surrounded by four black teenagers on a Manhattan subway. They wanted money from Goetz, who'd started carrying a concealed five-shot Smith & Wesson .38 after he was violently mugged in the subway a few years before.

Fearing he was about to be robbed by the youths, Goetz stood up, whipped out his handgun, and started shooting. He emptied his gun and wounded all of them. Nineteen-year-old Darrell Cabey took a single shot in his left side, and the bullet severed his spinal cord, paralyzing him as he slumped into a subway seat.

Crime in New York was at an all-time high and race relations were near an all-time low when the media dubbed Goetz the “Subway Vigilante.” Goetz gave the world its seminal “stand your ground” case. One question obsessed the public: Had Goetz fired in self-defense, or was it a deliberate racist act?

It was the same question that echoed in the eerily similar shootings of Trayvon Martin in Florida and Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, decades later. And just like those later cases, the nation erupted angrily about Goetz, split mostly down racial lines. Both sides made up their minds before the facts were collected.

At Goetz's trial for attempted murder, prosecutors argued that Cabey was sitting when he was shot and thus hadn't been a threat. The defense hired my father to examine Cabey's wounds and the crime scene, and he delivered a controversial opinion: Cabey had been standing when he was shot. The trajectory of the bullet was lateral and flat, not downward, my father said. Cabey couldn't have received the wound while sitting unless the six-foot-one Goetz had knelt beside him—which he didn't.

The jury of seven men and five women, including two African-Americans, was convinced. It acquitted Goetz of murder and assault charges, but convicted him of illegal possession of a weapon. He served just over eight months in prison. Cabey later sued and won a $43 million civil judgment against the bankrupt Goetz (who ran unsuccessfully for New York City mayor in 2005).

To New Yorkers, Goetz had committed another serious crime: He owned a gun. Only cops and criminals owned guns in New York City, and the city fathers deemed everyone else too dumb to be trusted with firearms.

In 1978, my father retired at age sixty-five, but his expertise was still sorely needed, and he still had enormous energy. He continued to consult on many death cases around the nation, and he joined me in writing a 1992 textbook called
Forensic Pathology
, which has become one of the science's preeminent references and remains in print today.

On September 11, 2001, Dominick Di Maio was a spry eighty-eight-year-old retiree living on Henry Street in Brooklyn Heights, just across the East River from Manhattan. On ordinary days, he could see the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center soaring over the Financial District, a little more than a mile away. He was a proud lifelong New Yorker, and he'd watched them go up.

On that day, he watched them come down.

In more than thirty years as a medical examiner, he'd never witnessed a murder, much less a mass murder, but here it was happening before his eyes.

He already knew what horrible carnage they'd find. He already knew what horrors man could visit upon his fellow men. He already knew there'd be no mystery about how all those people died.

But he never spoke a word of it to me.

That was my father. He never wanted to let death know it had touched him, and he never cried.

That stuck, too.

I grew up as strong-willed as he was. After I started medical school and started blazing my own path, we often clashed professionally. Not acrimoniously nor angrily, but vigorously. Our discussions could be epic and maybe a little loud, but I never stopped believing in my father. He set a standard I still aspire to. I still live with his expectations of me.

We carry our childhoods forward, even if we don't remember them perfectly or even as they truly were. We collect the stuff that sticks and haul it across the bridge of our teenage years into adulthood. When I check my baggage, I find my father's energy, his sense of justice, his fascination with mystery, his tendency to work away from the limelight, his ability to corral his emotions. I also find my mother's austerity, her pragmatism, her love of books and history.

And her stoicism.

*   *   *

When I entered St. John's College in Queens, New York, in the fall of 1958, I had none of the typical teenager's angst about where I was going. I'd known my purpose from the start. I was going to be a doctor.

I didn't find college that hard or stressful. I began as a chemistry major, then switched to biology, but the hardest part of my undergrad years was the traffic between my house and the campus.

Most people don't know that some medical schools will admit students after their third undergraduate year if they've successfully finished their necessary premed classes. So during my junior year at St. John's, I applied to two New York medical schools. One turned me away, saying it only took college graduates; the other, State University of New York's Downstate Medical Center in Brooklyn, less than three miles from where I grew up, left its door slightly open. It was all the encouragement I needed.

So, at nineteen years old, I passed the Medical College Admission Test (MCAT), sent in my application, and even went to SUNY for a nervous interview with some administrator in the medical school.

During a blizzard in February 1961, I went out to buy a newspaper for my mother. When I returned, cold and wet, I handed her the paper, and she handed me a letter from SUNY.

I had been accepted to medical school without a college diploma. I was to start that fall.

The first day of med school, the faculty gathered all the new students in a lecture hall for a pep talk. “Don't sweat about graduating,” they said soothingly as they delivered sobering stats on graduation rates. The more they assured us, the more we worried. Imagine somebody telling you, “It's completely safe to fly in an airplane; only one in ten of you will die in a fiery crash.” That's when I knew this wouldn't be a walk in the park, but failure wasn't an option. I couldn't be anything but a doctor.

Truth be told, I detested medical school. It was four years of Marine boot camp, but not as pleasant.

The first two years involved continuous sleep deprivation. Every day we did about twenty-six hours worth of study—not a misprint—on six hours of sleep. The next two years involved the same sleep deprivation and study but added hands-on procedures. We suddenly found ourselves doing things we never thought we could (or would) do.

Gushes of real-life amniotic fluid ruined my shoes. I went home at night with flecks of blood and vomit on my clothes. I discovered that patients often lie. I saw that it was actually pretty hard to kill somebody. And I learned to sleep standing up, braced against the walls during rounds or with my eyes wide open while a professor lectured. To this day, when I must wait, whether in an airport or in a courtroom hallway, I try to sleep.

But we also learned to stay calm, no matter the situation. I always thought doctors would be good in combat for their coolness under fire.

Everyone who was accepted to SUNY was certainly smart enough to get an MD. Lack of intellect didn't wash them out. The ones who left just didn't have the fortitude, the persistence, or the determination to survive the professors' withering cross fire. It took me a couple of years to realize what they were doing. They were brainwashing us, teaching us to think like doctors. Not lawyers, not accountants, not stockbrokers. Doctors think differently. We were beginning to adopt a certain emotional distance, learning not to get so close to patients that we couldn't do our work or so far from them that we couldn't hear what they had to say about their pain and fear.

Not every lesson was in a textbook. We learned to think logically, to not always accept what we were told, and to question what seems obvious. Non-physicians often jump from A to D, but a good doctor goes from A to B to C to D. One must attempt to accumulate all the facts.

My classmates were fascinating, too. There was Barbara Delano, who loved to argue politics with me in those heady days of the mid-1960s, as America tilted toward the worst days of Vietnam, racial strife, and campus revolt in a tectonic shift of our cultural plates. Once she accused me of holding thirteenth-century political notions. “No,” I corrected her brusquely, “they're definitely tenth-century.” (She later chaired Downstate's School of Public Health.)

And there was Chester Chin, who was so thin that the campus nurses tried to fatten him up with daily chocolate shakes. It didn't work, and he came to detest medical school (and probably chocolate shakes). After graduation, he became an orthopedic surgeon and refused to ever return, even for reunions.

But the first of us to become famous—infamous, really—was Stephen H. Kessler. A brilliant but troubled guy, he'd graduated from Harvard and entered medical school at Downstate with me. Before long, he started behaving erratically. One day he was caught tossing scalpels like darts at the cadavers in the anatomy lab. The dean forced him to take a leave of absence after his first year, and he checked into a mental hospital.

Kessler eventually returned to medical school but was kicked out again when he was caught giving LSD to patients.

Rumors circulated that Kessler was due to return for a third try when startling news broke in April 1966: Kessler had viciously slashed his fifty-seven-year-old mother-in-law to death in her Brooklyn apartment. (Coincidentally, my father did her autopsy and counted 105 separate wounds.) Kessler claimed he'd been tripping on LSD at the time, so the media dubbed him the “LSD Killer.” It turned out he was high on lab alcohol and pills and suffered from paranoid schizophrenia, so he was eventually found not guilty by reason of insanity. He disappeared into the asylum at Bellevue and was never heard from again.

During those frantic med-school days, I often visited my father in the Brooklyn morgue. I'd seen dead bodies before, but these weren't the slides in my father's closet, or pictures in a medical textbook, or even the cleaned-up cadavers we poked and prodded in anatomy class. These were freshly dead, real people, pale or blue, with real bullet wounds, knife gashes, or no visible injuries at all.

I was fascinated mostly by the mobsters who seemed to come through my father's morgue doors with regularity in the late 1960s. The New York mob wars came and went, but the hits never stopped. The Mafia dead were always well-dressed, with alligator shoes, silk underwear, manicured hands. I'd never seen a man wearing clear fingernail polish until I examined those dead wiseguys on my father's slab.

As the end of medical school approached, I had to choose my specialty. What were the choices? There was an adage to consider: “Internists know everything but do nothing; surgeons know nothing but do everything; psychiatrists know nothing and do nothing; and pathologists know everything and do everything, but it is too late.”

There was more. I had learned in medical school that (like my father) I had no bedside manner and that I couldn't master the complex knots a surgeon must know. I realized I'd be better with patients who didn't require reassurance and operations that didn't require lifesaving knots. Pathology was perfect. Pathologists were doctors' doctors.

After my one-year pathology internship at Duke University Hospital in Durham, North Carolina—where I finally decided to pursue forensic pathology—I started my three-year residency at the Kings County Medical Center in Brooklyn. During that time, I started performing autopsies for the Chief Medical Examiner's Office in Brooklyn under my father's watchful eye. By the time I finished my residency, I had already done more than a hundred autopsies before I worked a single day as a certified forensic pathologist.

My residency changed my life in another, more significant way when one of my supervisors introduced me to her secretary, Theresa Richberg, who at the moment was bent over her typewriter, her long blond hair obscuring her face. When she looked up, I was thunderstruck. She was beautiful. I guessed her to be in her mid-twenties, and when she spoke, I heard an articulate woman who seemed to be as smart as she was pretty. And among the first things she told me in that confident voice, scented with just a tantalizing whiff of Brooklyn, was that she was engaged to be married. She flashed a diamond ring to prove it.