The Kansas City Star reported Thursday that three bullet wounds — two of them in Anthony Crockett's head — were noticed after the man's body was embalmed Friday. The funeral home returned the 49-year-old Kansas City man's body to the Jackson County medical examiner's office, and police counted the death as a homicide.
Detectives and Jackson County medical examiners never visited Crockett's home to inspect his body. A paramedic told police he believed the death was natural after finding prescription containers for high blood pressure, high cholesterol and diabetes in the home.
Crockett's girlfriend, who had called police after finding his body, told authorities that he had heart problems for years.
Police noted blood on Crockett's face, but victims can bleed from natural causes or a fall. They did not collect forensic evidence, and by the time the mistake was realized and investigators secured Crockett's house as a crime scene, relatives already had cleaned it.
It was the second time in 17 months that a Kansas City funeral home returned a homicide victim's body mistakenly ruled a natural death by the medical examiner's office.
The other case was in September 2007 and involved Lorraine Grayson, 77, who had been beaten and sexually assaulted in her home. Police later found out that Grayson's purse was missing and her 46-year-old neighbor was charged with her death.
"This kind of mistake is a pretty bad mistake," said Thomas Young, the former Jackson County medical examiner who now runs a private forensic pathology practice.
Jeph BurroughsScanlon, a Jackson County spokesman, said standard protocol was followed in Crockett's case, but he added that the county is concerned and looking into its practices.
So are Kansas City police.
"We're going to be reviewing how we handle these kinds of cases, to see if anything needs to be changed," said Capt. Rich Lockhart, a police spokesman. "It's a system problem, and we need to figure out where the breakdown in the system occurred."
Source: http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,501465,00.html
Tod's
fire the examiner and the investigators. They're not doing their jobs.
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1Life is short. Enjoy it while you can.
Our law enforcement and legal system astounds me sometimes. It's sad because for every person who does a thorough job, there's one who doesn't. (As I'm sure it is in every field.)
2Wow. I'm not surprised that there are flaws in the system, but that it could get that bad? Wow.
3I keep thinking we've heard a story exactly like this recently (this year) also from the mid-West.
4Anyway, someone's going to get away with murder.
Fire the examiners and the investigators. There's no excuse that.
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5Life is short. Enjoy it while you can.
Wow, talk about incompetent! This is really sad, a murderer will walk free because someone didn't do their job.
6I'm gonna go out on a limb here and say that the medical examiner's office was probably overloaded.
Still, no excuse for this type of mistake.
7I'm gonna go out on a limb here and say that the medic@l ex@miner's office was probably overloaded.
Still no excuse for this type of mistake.
8And I think it's absurd that "medic@l ex@miner" is a no-no phrase according to SugarLand.
9I really hope that ME is going to lose his job. As far as mistakes go, that's huge. Natural causes vs. murder? Yeah...
10I agree, star, especially with something that obvious. This is not one of those things when the murderer simulated a natural heart attack or something.
11Sarah, that seems like a random phrase to flag...
12I don't understand why it's deemed offensive!
13maybe people say "you need get your head medically examined!!"
hahah!
14hmmm, or not.
15Seems like two bullets to the head would be hard to miss first go round.
16It's shocking to me that this happens, let alone multiple times. I don't know much about Kansas City, but something really needs to be done. And not just in that one city, but in the entire United States. If the justice system could fail at something so basic as deciding between natural causes and two bullets in a man's head, how can we trust them to do anything else? It's very scary.
17If it wasn't so serious, it would be hilarious. How many homicides were not picked up?
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