10/08 keys dive fatality investigation

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For those of us who are not Navy Diving Experts, Medical Examiners, or Prosecutors could someone please explain what it takes to reclassify a death.

As I've been tracking the story:
Tank valve found turned off
Swam away from the boat
Surfaced
Continued swimming away from the boat
Ligature marks on the deceased's neck
Some light debate over whether the story or dive computer data aligns

What is the burden required in a case like this? Not that I'm taking notes or anything, but it seems quite odd from the outset.
 
I don't work in Florida, but things are pretty common to most states. The coroner or medical examiner determines, so far as possible, the means and manner of a death. The means is the physical cause. The manner is one from homicide, suicide, accidental, or natural. A coroner can revise a determination on the basis of the coroner's own medico-legal judgment. It's administrative and therefore not an adversarial matter, as in a trial. Coroner's sometimes conduct full formal courtroom type inquests with evidence presented and witnesses sworn, but more often make their determination in private. State laws often merely require an "inquest" without defining the term. I have, for instance, as an investigator, conveyed what I learned to a justice of the peace acting as coroner, and that communication was the "inquest" in an obvious natural death.

In most places, criminal authorities are not bound to accept the coroner/ME manner of death, but where there may be reason to change a verdict, it's usual to start with the coroner's verdict and amend that first. You obviously don't want to be trying someone for a criminal homicide without the coroner agreeing with you, if you can help it. But note that "homicide" isn't necessarily criminal. Lawful executions, for instance, are non-criminal homicides. The manner of death is a matter of the coroner's opinion. The threshold of proof is merely whatever it takes for the opinion to form. The publicly change that opinion, a coroner usually wants to be able to cite some additional evidence, rather than just rethinking what they knew the first time.
 
you can't tell the difference between a "boat check" and a "buoyancy control problem" from a dive computer, and that isn't too surprising of an omission.

i also wouldn't be surprised if someone turned off a tank valve during an incident with a fatality and later forgot they did that. stress makes memory act funny, and people are terrible witnesses.

ligature marks are hard to explain away, unless it was just a neck seal from an exposure suit.
 
There's also never been any detail provided of how she might have died, just that at one point the survivor looked back and she was dead. That seemed an odd story at the time.

If he turned her air off in the process of killing her, he's pretty dumb to have left it that way.
 
This is one that's just going to have to wait on what comes out of a renewed inquiry. It's a complicated collection of the sort of things that often muddle an investigation and lead to an unsatisfactory result, as it did here. I'm leery of depending much on media accounts, but the statement that the manner of death would have been homicide if it had happened on land doesn't seem logical, and I suspect a good deal of the muddle was the relative rarity of suspected criminal homicides discovered in diving environments. I expect to see it eventually settled by determining the reliability and nature of the "strangulation injuries" and whether or not all innocent explanations can be eliminated. And surprising things can come out of renewed investigations long after the fact. There are peculiar psychological forces at work in people who have done bad things that often produce the most amazing actions that a thorough investigator can discover. Of course, nothing in the story indicates any official new or ongoing investigation.
 


A ScubaBoard Staff Message...

moved to Scuba Court Cases
 
Hey Lamont, this was the description of the injuries to the victim's neck from the first article http://keysnews.com/node/23734 in the previous thread about this:

An autopsy later revealed neck cartilage fractures and a series of small bruises to the muscles of the front part of Page's neck -- injuries that would suggest strangulation, Monroe County Medical Examiner Hunt Scheuerman said in a recent interview.

Nevertheless, Scheuerman, who was then relatively new to scuba-related autopsies, ruled the cause of death "undetermined.

"Had this person been on dry land, I unequivocally would have said this was strangulation," he told the Free Press last month.

Moderators, perhaps this thread should be merged with the original thread in this forum, since the information has already been gathered there. There are three threads about this death on this board that I know of.
 

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