WASHINGTON, 12:11 p.m. EST November 21, 2002 - The D.C. medical examiner denies that a woman was alive when her body was placed in a bag, taken to the city morgue and stored in a refrigerated box.
Deborah Wilson, 49, was found Friday morning in her apartment bedroom, apparently suffering from cardiac arrest. According to a document obtained by The Washington Post and reported Thursday, an investigator who removed Wilson's body from the cooler to declare her dead instead detected a slight pulse.
What happened between the 911 call and four hours later when Wilson was finally pronounced dead remains in dispute. She may have been alive after she was placed in a morgue cooler, and normal procedures for determining whether a person is alive or dead were not followed, the Post reported.
Medical examiner Jonathan Arden told News4's Mil Arcega that his employees may have felt what they thought was a pulse, but Arden said he is certain Wilson was not alive when her body was stored. Arden said final autopsy results would not be available for another two weeks.
The first call for help came into the D.C. Fire Department at 10:59 a.m. from the security office in Wilson's building, according to fire officials. Maintenance men doing fuse box work apparently entered Wilson's sixth-floor apartment and found the woman kneeling beside her bed, the woman's family told the paper.
Wilson, who was disabled and unemployed, lived alone in her apartment in the large, multistory building.
Paramedics arrived and "obviously thought the person was dead," said Fire Department spokesman Alan Etter. They called the medical examiner's office, which dispatched a team to retrieve the body, according to interviews.
The medical examiner's team arrived at 1:30 p.m., found police and two family members, and Wilson "on her knees like she was praying," according to a source at the scene. When the body was removed from the bed, "she sighed and she moaned," the source told the Post.
The supervisor from the medical examiner's office heard the noises and said, "It's just aspirations. No big deal," the source was quoted as saying.
The newspaper said the decision to take Wilson to the morgue was made without the usual input of an investigator from the medical examiner's office -- because no investigator showed up. Wilson's body arrived at the morgue and was placed on a cart in "the box," a refrigerator that holds about four dozen bodies. At 2:40 p.m., a physician's assistant removed the body from the cooler to legally declare Wilson dead, according to a written report by investigator Mary Beth Petrasek, which was obtained by the Post.
A second official confirmed that she too felt a faint pulse, Petrasek wrote.
Petrasek checked for a pulse again and "a pulse was still felt," according to the report. The medical examiner's staff called D.C. paramedics, and Wilson was placed on a cardiac monitor but showed no heart activity, D.C. Medical Examiner Jonathan L. Arden said. She was formally pronounced dead at 3 p.m.
"It's a shock," Clarissa Cuffee, Wilson's niece, told the Post. "We have no idea what's going on."
Well, no shit it's a shock. I didn't want to do another news entry so soon, but after reading this, I had to. I have a few problems with this. First of all, the medical examiner's team found her kneeling. Dead bodies don't kneel unless they were propped that way by someone-post mortum. I have a problem with them saying that her sighs and moans were no big deal, they were just aspirations. These medically trained dick-heads still can't tell the difference? There is a huge difference in the way moans and sighs sound as opposed to aspirations. You don't have to be a forensics expert to know this. Third of all- the pulse. It is so easy to feel a pulse. It's not rocket science. We all know where our pulses are, how to feel it and how to count it. There is nothing on a dead body that imitates a pulse. And not only was a pulse felt when she was in her home, but there was a pulse hours later when she was removed from the cooler. Conveniently, the fucking medical examiner states that the autopsy report won't be available for two weeks? Why??? The report is available much sooner than that, especially if she did supposedly die of a heart attack. It sounds to me like he needs time to cover his sorry ass mistakes. He wants everyone to believe she was dead when she was found in order to avoid a lawsuit and to avoid having the medical community discover what a fucking whack job this asshole is. This poor woman lived through almost half a decade of God knows what, has a heart attack, fights to survive, gets put into a cooler for hours and still continues her fight to live. I guaranty you that what killed her was that motherfucker's scalpel cutting into her very much alive flesh. I think this goes without saying, but he needs to not only have his credentials taken away, but he needs to be charged with murder. This woman was only 49. She had so much life left to go and he robbed her of that and her family of that. I hope he rots in hell for this.
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