017. DEATHS DUE TO ACCIDENTS

Last time in my column I mentioned a death in the bath by electrocution. Readers may tend to believe that it is an uncommon mode of death. This however is not true. After I wrote this article, a celebrity has died in similar circumstances and before I start my present column, I find it pertinent to give the salient features of this death so that the readers are kept up-to-date on these matters.

On July 8,1994 Miss Magdalena Jaworska, a 33 year old beauty, who had been Miss Poland 1984, died from electric shock when she was taking a bath. She used to keep her electric hair drier in her bathroom and used to dry her hair while lying in the bathtub itself-admittedly an unusual practice. Presumably when she was drying her hair, the drier fell in the bath and the unfortunate girl got electrocuted. Readers may note that this case is remarkably similar to the one, I mentioned in my last column, where in place of electric drier, an electric heater was found in the bath-tub. That death also appeared to be an accidental death, but on detailed forensic investigation it was revealed that it was in fact a case of homicide. The death of Jaworska seems very bizarre to me, and who knows......?

This time I would like to tell you about a very interesting case which came to me last year. On 16th September,1993 a dead body of a 55 year old male was brought to me. He had died in a car accident. I was told by the police that he had been crushed by the car of a wealthy businessman Mr. Ramlal Verma. On that day he was going in his Maruti car to some place at Vasant Vihar. The time was 11 pm. It was pitch dark. He was a little bit drunk too. Suddenly he found that a person had been crushed under his car. He panicked and tried to speed away from there, but fortunately a police patrol car was passing from there. They sensed something wrong and chased the vehicle. And thus Ramlal Verma was caught.

On the face of it, the case appeared to be an open-and-shut case. But Ramlal contacted the best of lawyers and they came up with an ingenious suggestion. According to them, the person had fainted on the road due to some weakness. To be sure, Sohan, the person who had died, was a little bit undernourished and he belonged to a low socio-economic status. It was conceivable that he did have a fainting attack. According to the plea taken by Mr. Verma, his car passed over his body only after he fainted. In other words, Mr. Verma did not hit the deceased while he was walking; he was inadvertently run over by no fault of Mr. Verma. If this hypothesis could be proved, Mr. Verma could definitely walk away with a much lighter sentence than otherwise. The police and the family members of the deceased however maintained that Mr. Verma had run his car over Sohan, because he was doing drunk driving.

So ultimately the question boiled down to this: Was Sohan walking while he was hit by the car, or was he lying on the ground already? If the post-mortem could prove that Sohan was walking while being hit, Verma would get a much more stern sentence than if it turned out that Sohan was lying on the ground at the time of accident. The later situation would prove Verma's contention that Sohan had fainted on the road and he (Verma) had no time to react to save him (Sohan).

In the beginning the police was very skeptical, if I could prove such a tricky question. But when I assured them that such a question could indeed be answered by the application of sheer logic, they began feeling much more comfortable. To understand how this can be done, let us understand a little bit about how victims are injured in automobile accidents.

When a person is struck by a car, he generally receives injuries on his legs, because these are the lowermost part of one's body and are on the level of car's bumper. In fact in most cases of accidents by car, the pedestrian receives fractures of the legs, which go by the name `Bumper fractures'. By measuring the height of these fractures from the heels, one can actually measure the height of the bumper of the car. Sometimes the car bumper may only cause abrasions and tears. Their position on the legs may tell the position of the victim while the accidents occurred. For instance if these abrasions and tears are on the front of legs, it is quite obvious that he was facing the vehicle. If these injuries are on the back of the legs, it denotes that the victim might be hit unawares while he was facing away from the vehicle. The mechanism of most of pedestrian injuries could be understood from the accompanying line diagram.When a victim is hit by a car, he may either be thrown forwards or may be scooped up on the car itself. The part that is first hit by the car are usually legs. Injuries caused by this primary impact of the vehicle are called `primary impact injuries'. After this primary impact, the victim is scooped up on the car. Thus he receives further injuries on the head. These injuries are usually caused by the windscreen of the car. The windscreen may be broken and pieces of glass may be found embedded in the face of the victim. Since these injuries are caused by secondary impact of the car, these injuries are known as `secondary impact injuries'. After the victim receives the secondary impact injuries, he is usually thrown on the ground. Contact with the ground causes a third set of injuries to the victim, which are known as tertiary injuries.

If a person is lying on the ground and is run over by the car, these typical injuries would be missing. Instead there would be injuries typical of run-over accident. These injuries cause severe crushing and `flaying' of the body parts which come under the vehicle. By seeing these typical injuries we can make some idea as to what happened to the victim.

When I brought Sohan's body to my post-mortem table, the first thing I did was to look at Sohan's legs to look for bumper's fracture. Sure enough, there were bumper fractures on the legs. Their position on the body told me that when he was hit by the car he had his back turned towards the car. Thus obviously, Sohan had been taken unawares. I also measured the height of these fractures from the heels and later measured the height of the bumpers of Verma's car. I was amazed to find that the two were almost identical. This clearly proved that Sohan was indeed standing while Verma's car hit him. Had he been lying on the road as alleged by Verma and his lawyers, he could not have received the bumper fractures in any way.

Further, when I examined Sohan's face, I found that his face had multiple abrasions and cut marks, as if produced by glass. As the reader can guess now, these were the secondary impact injuries, produced by the windscreen of Verma's car. I looked at Sohan's face carefully with a hand lens, and I was able to locate some tiny pieces of glass embedded in his face. This was the final undoing of Mr. Verma. If Sohan was lying on the ground, how could the glass pieces get embedded in his face? Thus I could prove that when Verma's car hit Sohan, he was standing on the road; perhaps walking in the other direction when Verma in a tipsy condition hit him from behind. The court accepted my arguments and Mr. Verma was convicted. This was a victory of Forensic Science.

Finally a word about this series which I am running regularly in this prestigious magazine. I am getting a lot of letters daily in my office regarding these columns. Many readers want to know some additional information regarding a particular case. Some others have additional interesting information to give me. Still others have ingenious suggestions to give me regarding the solution of a particular case. Till now I was corresponding personally with these knowledgeable readers, and satisfying their curiosity at a personal level. A better way to deal with this situation would be to take up some interesting queries out of these and answer them in the column itself, so that more readers can benefit from each other's experiences. The editor of this magazine has kindly agreed to make this column an interactive one, in which a part of the space would be given to the reader's queries and their experiences. Readers are invited to send their queries, suggestions, additional information and other tit-bits, either to me directly or to the editor, so that these pieces could be taken up in my subsequent columns.

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