E459 A Coroner
Episode Stats
Length
2 hours and 30 minutes
Words per Minute
198.48341
Summary
Dr. Toby Sabwa is a doctor of death and a coroner in the state of Louisiana. He has been in the profession for 18 years and has been with the coroner s office for the past 15 years. In this episode, Dr. Sabwa talks about the difference between being a medical death investigator and a death investigator for the coroner's office.
Transcript
00:00:00.000
you know life's better with a good hack like learning the secret menu at your favorite
00:00:04.720
restaurant or stumbling upon a buy one get one sale at the mall well there's a wireless hack
00:00:10.640
too and it's called visible visible's like ordering from the secret menu in wireless
00:00:16.080
you get unlimited data and hotspot and plans started just 25 a month for one line taxes and
00:00:23.120
fees included plus visible runs on verizon's 5g network for great coverage fast speeds and a
00:00:28.960
seamless connection and it's all digital don't like going to the phone store visible doesn't have
00:00:35.120
them you switch from your phone and manage your plan in an app now that's a hack if you're ready
00:00:41.120
for wireless that lets you live in the know make the switch at visible.com plans start at 25 a
00:00:48.000
month for our best features get the new visible plus pro plan for 45 a month terms apply see
00:00:55.440
visible.com for planned features and network management details you've waited all year i'm
00:01:01.200
you know it because that's how long that's how long it takes if you want to get through a year you got
00:01:05.120
to wait a year that's clockwork baby but college football is back and so are the traditions the
00:01:12.160
tailgates and the great offers from draft king sportsbook yep kick off the season with draft king's
00:01:18.160
sportsbook download the app now and use code theo new customers can score two hundred dollars in
00:01:25.040
bonus bets instantly when they bet just five dollars on any college football bet only on
00:01:34.320
all right i have some new tour dates to announce uh we've just added a third show in milwaukee
00:01:59.200
on september 9th at the riverside theater tickets for that are on sale now i'll also be in
00:02:04.240
oakland california akron ohio washington dc las vegas nevada um some of those have new shows those are
00:02:13.600
all at theovon.com slash t-o-u-r and thank you so much for your support new merch for you merch heads
00:02:21.680
out there we've got some new shorts that's right the rat life shorts in blue salmon and sand we've also
00:02:30.160
got the new tie-dye be good to yourself teas in aqua creamsicle and indigo get that and more only at
00:02:38.880
theovonstore.com today's guest is a uh a doctor of death baby he's that coroner and he's that death
00:02:47.600
man he sits right there on the doorstep of the devil and when the buzzer rings he answers it
00:02:53.840
uh he's based out of lafayette louisiana and um they got it all going down there all type of death
00:03:02.640
happening and he's going to tell us more about it i'm grateful for his time today he's 18 years in
00:03:23.120
i'm sitting here with a corner today mr toby sabwa and you are a corner i am actually um a death
00:03:48.400
investigator for the coroner's office the corner is somewhat of a political position uh involves
00:03:54.480
being a doctor so we have a doctor that's a coroner over or parish and then the majority
00:04:00.400
of the work's done by death investigators like myself now in louisiana they know you as the
00:04:05.760
coroner just you know it's too hard to to break down medical death investigator versus coroner or
00:04:11.600
coroner's office oh it's too hard to break down a good oyster dressing recipe over there for somebody
00:04:16.160
that's right you know i'm saying you put too much information on somebody in louisiana they're
00:04:19.520
gonna start punching that's right especially at a time of death yeah they're not they're not
00:04:23.680
registering all that so we go with coroner's office but we are legally death investigators okay so when
00:04:29.680
does someone call a corner and and what is a corner death investigator i'm gonna call it a corner for the
00:04:35.120
episode that's fine okay what is a corner so a corner is um an elected position but what we do is we
00:04:45.040
go out when someone dies or we're called every time someone dies that lives within our parish okay or
00:04:51.360
county or county in louisiana it's parishes um so we will we're called if it's a natural case or if it's
00:05:00.000
a homicide suicide any of the manners of death um there's different rules for people that may not be
00:05:06.800
from louisiana or from our city and state um if it's a natural cause it would go back to that state of
00:05:13.280
residence but anytime it's an accident or just your general natural death it comes to us okay we have
00:05:18.720
to pick up the phone and decide you know is this natural causes or is there foul play we work closely
00:05:24.160
with police okay so the police give you a call that's right we get a call from the sheriff's office
00:05:30.240
the local city police um hospitals nursing homes and they say toby we gotta yeah we have a case we have
00:05:39.120
a we have a so in health care we say patients okay in the coroner's office it's subject so we have a
00:05:44.240
subject here who's um an 86 year old laying in bed okay and so then i know what questions to ask and how
00:05:50.800
to pick the case apart and do you guys physically go to the scene we do uh okay not all scenes i mean if
00:05:57.520
it's an 80 year old who's on hypertension medicine and blood pressure medicine heart medication um that's a
00:06:04.480
gimme yeah that you know has a really really uh history of medical history we don't necessarily have
00:06:11.360
to go out for those the police are there to call foul play right but if they're laying in bed and they
00:06:15.600
were found by their spouse you know it's normally a natural case if they see something that may look
00:06:21.120
suspicious then we'll go out all right but for the majority of the naturals we don't we we can release
00:06:26.240
those by phone and direct them to a funeral home not even a zoom you don't even have to do zoom
00:06:30.160
or nothing nothing no we just we just take the call get the information we we still investigate
00:06:35.520
the death but we don't have to go out for everyone okay so when you do go out do you take like a
00:06:41.680
toolkit with you or what do you guys is there like what do you bring with you how do you approach a scene
00:06:47.840
like if it's a sure a death yeah so subject so we have a bag of gear that we use now in louisiana
00:06:53.680
we're a poor state and a poor parish when i started they gave me a can of off and a badge really
00:06:59.520
said tell us when they did no i'm teasing oh but but but but basically basically um we go out so
00:07:06.400
we we have so we have tools that we use on scene you know we need we need a flashlight to see around
00:07:11.200
sometimes um the biggest thing that we do on scene after investigating the scene which goes into a lot
00:07:17.280
of things um we'll do toxicology we'll draw blood um if the person suspect suspected overdose or
00:07:24.000
overdose might be a possibility and most of the overdoses by the way are accidental
00:07:29.040
overdoses people hear od and they think intentional but so if we think drugs were involved we'll bring
00:07:35.440
a spinal needle um or just a regular syringe we can we can draw blood out of the heart which is
00:07:41.840
like a pulp fiction scene the movie with the long spinal needle i'll go right in we go right in the
00:07:46.320
heart there's no pulse so getting blood out of veins when they're deceased is is not a thing that we
00:07:51.760
can do so we take blood from the heart or we can go in through the side of the eye and that's called
00:07:56.960
vitriol fluid and how much is in the eye so we get about you know four cc's out of the eye it's not
00:08:04.000
always uh some have more than others really but we'll go in we'll tap in through the side of the
00:08:10.000
eye oh you're not into the eyeball yeah i'm into the eyeball so i take a two or three inch long needle
00:08:16.320
and i go in at a horizontal angle just to puncture it and then i aspirate the fluid out of there
00:08:21.920
that's in the eye that's in the eye yeah so that's toxicology and when you're getting it out the
00:08:26.800
eyeball um there's less of a chance that it could clot up because we send these uh specimens to uh
00:08:34.720
forensic toxicology labs so when you're going through the heart and the lungs sometimes it
00:08:39.200
can have blood clots in it and other things and they may not be able to perform the test
00:08:43.600
99.9 of them with blood are fine but um it is nice having that and then the heart's not always easy
00:08:50.400
to find whether you know it could be a car accident uh they could have some major crushing
00:08:54.720
going on in the chest it could be a gunshot wound where there's no blood left in the heart that we
00:08:59.280
can get oh so the eye is a second option and then if that doesn't work we can actually put a slit in
00:09:05.440
the belly and pull out a piece of liver and send part of their liver off to a lab to be analyzed so
00:09:11.360
we we have a syringe with several different size needles um and tools to use if we have to cut
00:09:17.360
into them to grab liver to send off and so that's all for taking toxicology that's right okay and what
00:09:23.440
death determine toxicology like which so you said if it seems like a natural death you guys can almost
00:09:27.840
do it over the phone right it's not if it's a different type of death where there could have
00:09:32.560
been a homicide or an accident then you want to show up and do toxicology correct we and we do more
00:09:37.680
than toxicology we're investigating the scene everything around it the home oh i mean we have to
00:09:43.360
we look at everything uh not only the body but the surroundings a lot of times that'll paint a picture
00:09:48.960
of of what's going on with that individual case um for instance i had a case where you know the the
00:09:55.520
deputy was new um he thought it was suspicious because the 80 year old wife woke up and noticed
00:10:02.240
her spouse was cold and the timeline on on that on that case the the deputy said he's really cold and
00:10:10.480
she's just finding him well that's natural you know you're sleeping you may not notice your
00:10:14.640
significant other is cold to the touch until yeah especially if you don't have any type of intimate
00:10:18.400
relationship right well you're 80 years old you've been sleeping together for 50 years you know um but
00:10:25.120
he thought it was suspicious um so in that regard i went out and said no she just rolled over and noticed
00:10:31.280
that he was cold there's no foul play here this 80 year old lady didn't whack her husband you know
00:10:36.800
after marriage for 50 years and if she did without showing signs of any trauma then good for her yeah
00:10:41.840
you know they've been married for for way too long but no yeah so some natural yeah at some point
00:10:47.040
somebody you got to give her the benefit of the doubt yeah yeah we'll go out when they question
00:10:51.840
something like so say on a scene are the police or sheriffs are they happy to see you or are they
00:10:56.080
do you sometimes do they think oh this guy tries to contradict what we think usually no no they're
00:11:01.360
they're they really like when we come out a lot of times detectives will wait to hear if we're
00:11:07.360
responding if we're responding then there could be something abnormal then detectives will also come
00:11:13.440
different different agencies use their detectives in different ways some respond to all others don't
00:11:20.320
it just depends on the time and place okay but there are many difficult scenes to respond on but
00:11:26.080
they're looking they're looking to us to help them um you know rule out foul play and and other things
00:11:33.440
like that so you guys have separate training than they do correct we're we're medicine based they're
00:11:38.320
law enforcement based although you know those guys really um do a good job as you know especially
00:11:44.480
the ones that have been there a while sometimes they'll call things that i may have not noticed
00:11:48.400
yet you know and they'll say hey what about this and they'll also give us a description of what went on
00:11:53.280
they can look at the history of that of that subject to see you know this person's been arrested several
00:11:58.160
times for drug abuse or domestic violence etc so they're giving us information that we can use
00:12:03.840
yeah on that scene on and on that investigation yeah so take me through like an interesting call
00:12:09.680
that's coming in you know especially down there in louisiana dang yeah you know i knew people that
00:12:14.400
could you know they couldn't learn the alphabet and they took their own life that's right we see a lot
00:12:19.040
of that you know there's a lot of preventable deaths that we can talk about but you know a typical
00:12:24.160
call in louisiana is um anything from heart disease suicide od um but to be more specific um
00:12:33.680
we've had many that they find a body floating in the bayou and that can be different you know because
00:12:39.760
they've been exposed to water so you know they may be bloated more some of the the surface evidence
00:12:45.600
or the trace evidence that we use is not there because they've been floating you can see where
00:12:50.240
turtles and and other animals in the water have nipped at them oh yeah so it can be somewhat
00:12:56.240
gruesome and then hard to tell you know why are they in this water you know they're dressed in
00:13:00.400
regular street clothes they weren't you know they weren't swimming they weren't swimming they weren't
00:13:04.640
fishing and they're in the water um sometimes people od and their friends have no clue what to do with
00:13:09.760
them so they throw them into the bayou yeah um sometimes these guys are just you know hanging
00:13:15.520
out and they slip and fall and hit their head or they pass out you know we don't always know what
00:13:20.320
got them to the bayou now how do those bodies look if you roll up on a box because i've always wanted
00:13:25.120
to find a deceased body i think a lot of that's a bucket list of mine i see them every day but i've
00:13:29.440
never rolled up on one yeah yeah yeah um that is why is that a bucket list thing for people
00:13:35.840
i don't know but it happens often i had a guy cutting the grass at a at a rent house and found
00:13:40.800
a body god did he get any intel or he just got lucky no he just got lucky he was cutting grass
00:13:46.640
and boom he found that body a lot of times if you work and stay focused and you keep working towards
00:13:51.440
i mean you know it's better than some lazy dude who's doing nothing finding a body right at least
00:13:55.280
that guy's out there doing something well when that lazy person finds a body you got a question how'd
00:13:59.360
you find this body you know um we had we had one recently that was just a
00:14:06.000
driver was passing by and there was a lady in the ditch now what was interesting was her arms
00:14:10.320
were removed she was a mexican female damn that's interesting so they removed her arms
00:14:17.520
because of her tattoos so this was a oh the killer this was a hit job correct and they didn't want her
00:14:23.280
identified you know so they see this in a ditch and they call us and then we got to figure out well
00:14:28.160
where's the arms you know so um there's interesting cases like that where people just you know they
00:14:34.400
right time right place and they find bodies and so you said did you roll up on that scene with no
00:14:38.960
arms yes yes so when you get there what's going on like are people milling around is somebody
00:14:46.320
you know like what's the scene like when you roll up on it well in that regard there's no families
00:14:50.960
present you know um it's different than most you know it's a lot of sheriffs uh standing around
00:14:57.600
looking at the dead body now we have jurisdiction on that body and legally they're not supposed to
00:15:02.080
touch that body until we get there okay so of course i would get there look at the scene you know
00:15:08.480
to try to find out does she have family around here what's she doing in this area she's not from here
00:15:14.800
um they'll do an investigation the law enforcement will do an investigation on their part
00:15:19.200
and then i'll start looking at the body for obvious signs of foul play and in this regard she
00:15:24.000
had no arms so we knew something wasn't right and it wasn't like an alligator or an animal came out
00:15:29.920
and removed her arms this was intentional wow you know so in that case we would get them to an autopsy
00:15:36.240
oh yeah and do you look for the arms or you just think just kind of put a note like
00:15:42.480
keep an eye like keep an eye out for arms or whatever like what do y'all do about the arms you
00:15:47.120
don't worry about it well the sheriff's office and law enforcement they worry about that they
00:15:52.320
worry about that okay yeah i mean of course we all look around the scene to see if they find
00:15:56.240
anything because there could be evidence on those arms um but many times they go you know unfound
00:16:04.240
um oh gosh it'd be crazy yeah i mean i had a guy find a foot once it was from a from a fatality but
00:16:11.600
they called me and this was you know weeks later hey we found a foot would you come pick it up they
00:16:16.480
don't want to touch it even you know so i throw a bag in my car and i go grab a foot it's it's it's a
00:16:21.840
different lifestyle you know yeah you know if i get pulled over yeah you know carrying anything uh
00:16:27.360
yeah man i got a foot in my car yeah bro i got a ten and a half in the trunk absolutely absolutely
00:16:34.000
dude that's wild man yeah that's interesting and you put that foot in the trunk you put it in the
00:16:38.640
back seat what do you do yeah well in that case i figured it would be pretty pretty gnarly so i
00:16:44.000
actually brought a disposable ice chest and packed it in there and then got it to the funeral home that
00:16:48.400
uh they brought her body to um she may have been sent to cremation but uh either way the funeral
00:16:54.960
home would take care of that body part okay enough traveled was with worse and you know in louisiana
00:17:00.160
it doesn't snow often um they had a we had a case years ago where there was an infant death and the
00:17:06.800
autopsy place is in um the autopsy place is about an hour and a half away from our where we live okay
00:17:13.120
or where we work in our parish so um they had a baby that had passed away and they asked hey it
00:17:18.400
was snowing really bad hey can you meet us halfway with this child and i'm in my personal car i'm like
00:17:24.000
sure so the baby of course is in a body bag yeah um so i'm driving down the highway with a with a baby
00:17:30.560
and how big that body i mean it's like a gallon or something well it's you know it's like a duffel bag
00:17:35.440
for a baby oh yeah but you know you again you get pulled over and i have an unmarked car i'm in
00:17:41.680
street clothes or normally scrubs and you know what are you carrying at least you're not in a miata or
00:17:46.160
something yeah yeah you don't worry bro you get pulled over in a miata and you got a baby in a
00:17:50.320
duffel bag bro i kind of i kind of went over the speed limit just to kind of maybe maybe man if i could
00:17:55.280
only get pulled over here you know uh it would be an interesting case but no you know it's sad for when
00:18:01.920
we lose babies like that but the fact of the matter is the baby needed to go to autopsy
00:18:07.120
and we'll do anything we can to to assist in that regard and if it meant driving through the snow 30
00:18:14.480
45 minutes you know we'll do that yeah that's uh some of the things that we do to help so your
00:18:20.080
responsibility then you feel a responsibility to determine how people died is that it correct we
00:18:26.480
figure out why they died we put all the pieces of the puzzle together okay some are are cut and
00:18:31.600
dry you know we can look at their medication their age you know do they smoke drink how much do they
00:18:39.600
weigh are they unhealthy you can tell that by their homes too i mean so i'm a cajun investigator right
00:18:46.480
the first thing i look at is their fridge i don't even look at the body i walk in the house and i open
00:18:50.880
the fridge wow and you know when there's pizza bones and a spoon and a in a in a jar of beans and maybe
00:18:58.800
some rotten popeyes and a couple of 40 ounce beers i know this person wasn't living a healthy lifestyle
00:19:04.880
yeah i know this person was listed in a mystical too that's right that's right so i'm thinking heart
00:19:10.320
disease from the get-go okay um so you know again we look at their home the cleanliness the order of
00:19:16.640
their home um you can tell how people live so a lot of times the body is is is a reflection of its
00:19:23.280
environment that it lives in absolutely wow so i was called to one case where the deputies said um
00:19:30.160
this one's um this case is unusual we'd like you to come out and so then i go out and they had
00:19:36.640
noticed some blood dripping on the floor on the floor blood stains out of the body just in no just
00:19:41.920
on the floor okay that's all they'd noticed right they saw that and then the body was an adult male on
00:19:46.320
a couch okay um so i walk into the house and i mean we're we're reading everything the minute we
00:19:52.000
get on scene even even you know what friends and family are there how do they look who's their
00:19:56.560
neighbors uh what area they live in so i walk into the house and this was kind of in the country
00:20:02.400
and uh the first thing i see is he had mickey's malt liquor memorabilia everywhere so i said okay okay i
00:20:09.520
like this guy's style you know he's a middle-aged guy yeah he's a kappa sig probably yeah so i'm
00:20:14.960
looking at that and then i asked the detectives to show me the the where the the blood stains are
00:20:20.480
well i go and i look and there were some cobwebs over the door so i could tell that that home hadn't
00:20:26.320
that that area of the house hadn't been used okay just from the cobwebs and stuff okay there but
00:20:31.440
when i opened the fridge there was a intact hawk's head in the fridge with fur on it oh i mean that's
00:20:39.200
odd you know and yeah and then so then i look in the oven and the guy's making cracklings in an
00:20:43.760
oven now if you've ever made cracklings you know you're stirring those in grease when you're baking
00:20:48.640
cracklings on a tuesday night and you save the hog's head to make hog's head cheese later you're
00:20:53.760
going to definitely have heart disease you know there's no foul play here fellas and that blood
00:20:57.920
probably came when he was moving the hog's head from the kitchen to the ref i mean from the counter to
00:21:03.280
the refrigerator oh from the actual hog you think yeah yeah absolutely so you know again when
00:21:09.040
you're on your last limb for a snack you know yeah that's crazy when you're baking cracklings bro
00:21:14.400
you're gonna have high cholesterol at a minimum um but you know again the blood stains triggered the
00:21:20.320
the law enforcement to to call and uh the fridge told me the story yeah as well as the way the guy
00:21:26.480
lived he smoked cigarettes he had you know alcohol everywhere um the papa was a rolling stone you know he
00:21:32.880
he that environment told me you know the what was going on with him right it gave you a lot of clues
00:21:39.360
right there yeah cracklings uh you got to have the heat's got to be so high on cracklings man you
00:21:44.800
can't do it in an oven i don't think i've never tried it i i don't know but he was you know he
00:21:49.920
definitely tried to pull up how to make crackling see if you can pull that i just want to get this
00:21:53.920
recipe my sister would make them out there they lived off uh in gonzalez so we make them you get a big
00:21:58.240
large black pot right you put it out in a yard you got to cut that stuff up the fire under it you cut
00:22:02.720
that fat up and then you put it in grease yeah and you just constantly stir that grease
00:22:08.720
pour into a pot deep enough that the top of oil is at least six inches from the rim
00:22:13.440
place over medium high heat when the oil reaches 225 degrees on a deep fat frying thermometer add the
00:22:20.640
pork cubes and start stirring to prevent clumping yeah so it's high oil i guess you can bake them
00:22:28.080
if you bake them long enough but god that's risky though yeah it's just it can't taste good i don't
00:22:33.840
know yeah i couldn't imagine it because you got to really get them to pop and i just couldn't imagine
00:22:38.240
them doing it well and you do dumb when you're drinking you know maybe it was one of those nights
00:22:43.040
like hey let's bake some cracklings yeah who knows let's give it a run yeah yeah yeah yeah i don't know
00:22:47.280
if it did and now did that fellow have a wife or do they seem kind of lonesome no he uh he was single
00:22:52.560
he did have a family children you know on scene but he he lived alone now say if you pull up on
00:22:59.600
like let's go back to that water body right right what happens to a body when it's in water because
00:23:04.320
i think sometimes a lot of people fantasize that's one of the fantasies i'm gonna find a body right
00:23:09.200
now it's either in the woods by the interstate or i'm going to walk down by a creek bank and there's
00:23:13.600
going to be a body right there i think that's some of the general fantasy of humans um what does that
00:23:18.480
body realistically look like depending on how long it's been in yeah so you know it bloats
00:23:25.200
you get a lot of bloating in the water the whole body puffs up uh normally the tongue protrudes out
00:23:32.480
oh you don't think about that the gases and the the gases and the decomposure you know the bodies sink
00:23:38.720
and then they rise when when the gases start to fill up the body and that's when we find them a lot of
00:23:44.320
times they'll be snagged in a in branches on a bayou or in the river um but that body's going to
00:23:50.720
bloat a lot and then again turtles and other animals out in the water will start pecking at
00:23:56.480
them so um it looks a little bit more traumatic than it than it is um but if we're unsure we can
00:24:03.520
always send that body to autopsy to try to determine exactly what happened and they'll take
00:24:08.400
them apart and a lot of times they'll cut into their heart and realize well this guy had a massive
00:24:12.800
heart attack i see you know so there was no foul play or he's full of drugs and there's no external
00:24:18.640
trauma so nobody hit him in the back of the head and threw him in there yeah maybe pull up a little
00:24:25.040
water bloat for us oh yeah so that's you know you can find anything online these days that dude looks
00:24:34.000
like a simpsons character huh he does sorry to say that i feel that it's a human being um oh my gosh
00:24:41.360
you so we go from looking pretty healthy to not healthy pretty how pretty quickly i mean that's
00:24:46.640
unbelievable yeah and you know especially in louisiana it's so hot and so humid and you'd just
00:24:51.600
be amazed at that people that live with no electricity oh bro if you leave a baby in the yard for 30
00:24:58.000
minutes bro i'd have algae on one side yeah yeah i mean it you know it's um it's just like that nature
00:25:04.960
really reign supreme down there it really does um with the busy fall season just around the corner
00:25:11.600
you may be looking for wholesome convenient meals for jam-packed days some days you're you're just so
00:25:18.000
jam-packed they're like gosh i'm just jam-packed factor is america's number one ready to eat meal kit
00:25:26.400
they can help you fuel up fast with chef prepared dietitian approved ready to eat meals
00:25:32.000
meals delivered delivered straight to your door i've had them what did i have the other day i had
00:25:36.240
a beautiful little it was a chicken um and a mushroom beautiful little deal i don't remember exactly what
00:25:43.680
it was but god it was tasty and i was grateful that i had it just had to heat it up refresh your
00:25:51.280
healthy habits without missing a beat choose from 34 plus weekly flavor-packed dietitian approved ready to
00:25:59.120
eat in two minutes that's right and they've got all types over there depending on what you want to
00:26:05.520
eat you know they got calorie smart meals protein plus meals you can put it together they have breakfast
00:26:13.840
items as well including apple cinnamon pancakes bacon and cheddar egg bites and potato bacon and egg
00:26:20.880
breakfast skillet head to factor meals dot com slash theo five zero that's right and use code theo five zero to
00:26:31.840
get 50 off that's a lot that's code theo five zero theo 50 the number theo five zero at factor meals dot com
00:26:44.400
slash theo five zero to get 50 off that's right factor meals dot com slash theo five zero blue chew
00:26:56.000
i've taken them them nibblers baby them edible them them they're uppers them they sex uppers that's what
00:27:04.800
they are if you want to bring the heat in the bedroom but really if you just want to be assured that
00:27:10.640
you're going to have a little extra uh a little extra churn in that butter maker baby that's what i'm
00:27:17.360
talking about blue chew dot com blue chew is a unique online service that delivers the same
00:27:24.720
active ingredients as viagra sialis and levitra but in chew up chewable tablets and at a fraction of the
00:27:33.680
cost the best part it's all done online so you don't have to go into a and it would dark alley or go
00:27:40.560
and you know sneak behind your your uncle's uh lazy boy and make a dirty deal back there
00:27:48.480
you can do it out in the open that's right does it work do you think you need it try it for a month
00:27:55.040
for free and you'll see you're gonna love it you could be missing out on the best sex of your life
00:28:02.320
with blue chew men everywhere excited to see the postman because when your package has arrived
00:28:11.920
wiener that's right and we've got a special deal for our listeners try blue chew free when you use our
00:28:18.720
promo code t-h-e-o at checkout just pay five dollars shipping that's b-l-u-e-c-h-e-w.com
00:28:27.280
promo code theo to receive your first month free visit blue chew.com for more details and important
00:28:34.240
safety information we thank blue chew for sponsoring the podcast i'm just amazed at how many senior
00:28:41.760
citizens live with no running water no electricity in august when it's 100 degrees outside yeah but
00:28:48.240
it's all over louisiana you know these these senior citizens have a hard time paying for their
00:28:53.040
medication much less an expensive electricity bill and then some people are just really hardcore on
00:28:58.960
drugs you know we had a house one time that in the kitchen there was a piece of plywood and when
00:29:04.640
the officers slid the plywood back that's where they were using the restroom they were shitting in
00:29:08.960
a hole in the kitchen and then they would cover it up with a piece of wood i mean that's that that's
00:29:13.840
pretty hardcore in your home but you'll see Vietnamese too really you'll see that you know with people
00:29:19.920
that just abuse drugs to the point of you know they're living in condemned homes or yeah what's
00:29:25.920
that been like with uh the drug use and stuff like do you guys do you guys come upon a lot of like ods
00:29:31.040
and stuff what's that has that changed the way you even approach the industry i mean how busy has that
00:29:35.840
gotten things yeah that's um you know when i first started you know 18 years ago we would have occasional
00:29:43.760
ods accidental ods um but that has increased by a thousand since uh fentanyl has hit the streets
00:29:52.400
fentanyl and crystal meth um the ods are every day every day you know it affects every age group you can
00:30:02.480
imagine you know really the opioid epidemic came um and that you know that was started the the the whole
00:30:10.000
opioid thing was started when hospitals started using surveys to uh to compare themselves to
00:30:16.720
other hospitals it was called the press gainy and one of the the questions in that in that survey was
00:30:22.720
how did we treat your pain so and then the reason behind the survey was hospitals all have the same
00:30:29.040
equipment you have the same mri as the hospital 20 miles down the road all your equipment's the same
00:30:33.920
but what can you do better than another and that's customer service so all these patients would
00:30:38.560
get these satisfaction surveys in the mail and i worked in the hospitals and so we would we would
00:30:43.200
actually skit things so when they got home they would remember key words and they would they would
00:30:48.800
rate us or they would give us a good rating for instance do you have no did they have enough time
00:30:54.080
for you in the hospital so we were instructed to say is there anything else i can do for you i have
00:30:59.040
time so it was this uh it's a plan it's a strategy wow yeah and so then how did we treat your pain
00:31:05.360
was another one and the press gainy it was called yeah and it was a i mean it's a great program you
00:31:11.120
know it teaches people how to really people in hospitals how to really you know go the extra mile
00:31:16.160
for patients we do things that we don't think about we you know we close that door before we you know
00:31:21.360
do a test on you so you're not exposed um but we don't you don't really know that we're doing that
00:31:26.800
so things like hey i'm going to close this door for your privacy and you know it it's it's it was a
00:31:31.520
great program but one of the things was uh pain control so you think that that was do you think
00:31:36.480
that that was the motive of the program or do you think that that was just a side effect of the
00:31:40.880
program that was a side effect so you don't think that they strategize this program just in order to
00:31:45.920
get people to be able to give them to for them to notice okay for them to get that answer about the
00:31:50.960
pain right no no not at all it and it was absolutely a side effect if you will of that um
00:31:57.520
press gainy it's called yeah let's bring it up i don't know if that's still a uh serve they still
00:32:04.480
do surveys of course but in the 90s that that was one that 98 of all hospitals used um a lot of
00:32:13.120
hospitals were owned by the the same corporation so you had five or six hospitals in your area and
00:32:18.240
they would do side-by-side comparisons of each other and we all wanted to have the highest rating
00:32:24.000
right so your hospital wants to go for the best rating we're ranked number five in the nation we're
00:32:27.840
ranked number three in the parish two in the state exactly so this is press gainy right here and they
00:32:33.120
are get to know your patients like never before uh see patients from every angle to prioritize and
00:32:38.400
predict their needs um you scroll down a little i just want to see what it is so it's about patient
00:32:44.480
experience tools yes so this is a company that helps uh practitioners i guess know how to best
00:32:53.040
treat their patients is that right correct okay press gain so when you go to the hospital even
00:32:58.480
today when you get home you'll get a survey in the mail i see and then you know you fill out that
00:33:03.280
survey and mail it back same as when you call at&t and they say would you hold you know to complete
00:33:08.880
this customer service survey but so then you know how did we treat your pain was one of them and so
00:33:15.120
then physicians started ordering more pain medication not intentionally to hurt the patient this this
00:33:20.320
wasn't the the goal um but you'd get a patient with a broken arm and instead of getting 15 tablets
00:33:28.240
on discharge they'd give you 60. so a lot of the opiate um addiction started from the over utilization
00:33:35.440
of prescribing pain medication you know a dentist might give you 40 whereas the 40 hydrocodones or
00:33:41.680
lortabs or oxycodones you know the instead of giving you 10 they would you know give you 40 or 60. so the
00:33:48.720
government came in and with the opioid epidemic and they tamped that down and put in regulations so
00:33:54.320
we would we wouldn't hand out so many pain pain pills we the addiction rose by 100 but it took a
00:34:02.080
long time for them to come in and do that yeah it did and so you guys were experiencing a lot of
00:34:06.640
overdose deaths not so yeah yes but you know the overdoses um weren't necessarily from just taking
00:34:14.320
hydro apap you know there was always like a poly drug abuse meaning multiple drugs being used but
00:34:20.720
those were still rare at the time we didn't get as many overdoses as we do now you know um i miss crack
00:34:27.920
the crack days were so much easier than the fentanyl days uh because why is that because it's that much
00:34:34.240
more lethal um oh crack is yeah fentanyl fentanyl is much more you know the crack epidemic was a thing
00:34:42.960
um but then the the when the pain epidemic hit that's when we really started losing people
00:34:49.440
um so what's the difference between like a crack death and a fentanyl death well i mean it's basically
00:34:54.720
going to be a cardiac event um fentanyl you know you stop breathing um that's a very powerful drug the um
00:35:05.040
the back to the the opioid um the docs were giving out medication people were getting addicted and then
00:35:12.560
the government came in and stopped it and they just cut everybody off and they made it to where
00:35:18.320
physicians could get in a lot of trouble if they over prescribed and then i think they came back
00:35:23.120
after that just recently and said hey we didn't mean not to treat people with pain because then you
00:35:27.680
have a lot of people turning to heroin you know when you're taking opiates and you're on them for you
00:35:32.880
know five or six years and you're addicted and then one day you just can't get any um a lot of people
00:35:38.960
turn to heroin we we really didn't have a great uh system to get people in to rehabs you know if you
00:35:46.000
want to if you want to commit somebody for drug abuse uh they have to go voluntarily and you can
00:35:52.320
imagine that not everyone wants to go another role of the coroner's office uh we have the ability to
00:35:58.080
remove you from your we can take you and send you somewhere against your will yeah and that's a
00:36:03.760
that's the other arm of the coroner's office oh i didn't know that at all but what but so you get
00:36:08.880
but how do you get those calls because you think the corner or death investigators are just getting
00:36:13.600
called about death so who's calling you yeah well law enforcement they they know that oh they say hey
00:36:19.280
this guy over here we need we think he should be 51 50 or something yeah he needs to be in a hospital
00:36:24.880
okay we need to get him to an er and into a psych hospital can you guys help us with that right so
00:36:30.160
we yeah so that we fill out paperwork the coroner actually signs off on the paperwork and then the
00:36:35.200
police can go and remove you against your will and bring you to an er but we send all these patients
00:36:40.640
to the er and a lot of times they're let go you know i can have a 18 year old girl that's shooting
00:36:46.880
heroin and smoking crack and drinking and she gets to the er and they say well yeah you have a problem
00:36:53.040
but drugs are your choice so therefore i'm going to discharge you and the the reasoning behind that
00:36:58.240
is we have a broken system i don't know how you fix that but so then they get to the er and the er
00:37:03.840
doctors know i can't force this person to go to rehab yeah you know that if you want to quit it has
00:37:08.880
to be your decision um so a lot of those patients are let go and then unfortunately we'll get a coroner
00:37:14.640
call on an od from one of those exact patients that we sent to the er so you see a lot of repeat
00:37:20.720
offenders hypothetically it's repeat offenders when these people show back up or repeatedly
00:37:26.640
have harmed themselves with drugs and then a lot of second third times it's death absolutely i mean
00:37:31.520
the the most patients i say most patients a lot of patients have a psychiatric diagnosis so when
00:37:38.080
there's a dual diagnosis you can put them in a rehab um in a psych facility but even that is a
00:37:43.520
five to six day stay and then they're discharged and then they have to get home and take their
00:37:47.600
medication that was prescribed which they don't so then they end up coming back through their
00:37:51.760
coroner's office and going back to the er you know some of these guys on drugs it was one that really
00:37:57.120
really um that was really hard to deal with recently was a veteran um i know his family they they had
00:38:05.360
played some audio recordings of this guy just crying at night um saying he needed help but then he would
00:38:13.040
turn to meth and get high and then refuse refuse help yeah i mean this guy had had kills under his
00:38:19.200
belt you know and and we don't want to label people well he's just a meth junkie i mean these people all
00:38:25.440
have problems and they didn't they didn't grow up saying i want to be this person but this one in
00:38:31.520
particular you know went to iraq and killed some people and now he's back and he's messed up and
00:38:36.320
he can't make the right decisions and eventually he'll die but he has to ultimately agree to go
00:38:42.800
get help so it it's a hard process on some yeah um we lose we lose people you know yeah and it's tough
00:38:50.480
waiting for somebody to get well enough or have enough of a break through their own vision or
00:38:55.680
perspective to see that they need help that's the hardest thing to try and you can't really influence
00:39:01.040
anybody you know i mean you can but it's just nobody wants to hear that people don't want to
00:39:06.480
hear often you need help they just don't accept it you know or yeah you can try drugged up sometimes
00:39:11.920
um yeah and you do interventions and stuff and sometimes people don't want that i tell families
00:39:16.480
you know because we have them where you know the families will send them they'll go to a psych unit
00:39:22.240
then they'll get out and they'll die either by suicide or drug overdose and a lot of times i'll tell
00:39:28.880
families look you have to try you have to try you can't force your child to go to drug rehab a lot
00:39:34.800
of people are nervous about sending people because the sheriffs show up and they put you in a corps and
00:39:40.080
they bring you to the eeyore and a lot of families just are scared to do it and i always tell them you
00:39:45.200
know we we don't know the outcome of this but you have to try yeah you have to get them in front of
00:39:51.040
somebody professional and if they get out and they keep doing the same thing over and over at the end of
00:39:55.440
the day you know you tried yeah yeah man that's such a battle it's heartbreaking to see the effects
00:40:01.600
of all that um of all like the opioid epidemic and just the all the fentanyl deaths but are you
00:40:08.080
noticing less of those are you noticing no so fentanyl deaths are every day every day and it's you
00:40:15.360
know i go out throughout the state well throughout the parish and i've been giving lectures and i'd love
00:40:20.640
to do more um on fentanyl it's a hundred times stronger than morphine or i forget the exact the
00:40:28.080
exact numbers on that but it's extremely potent overall drug overdose deaths rose from 2019 to
00:40:34.880
2021 with more than 106 000 drug overdose deaths reported in 2021 and that was during the pandemic
00:40:40.960
deaths involving synthetic opioids other than methadone primarily fentanyl continue to rise
00:40:46.800
so imagine a football stadium that holds a hundred thousand fans okay uh tiger stadium maybe almost
00:40:53.200
pretty much almost so that's how many people we're losing a year next time you watch a football game in
00:40:59.840
a big stadium just imagine that many bodies yeah and and that's the ones we know about you know there's
00:41:05.440
so many unknowns that we don't catch yeah but we're losing that many americans to it and it's it's young
00:41:11.200
kids um oh it's unbelievable the the they can they they have pill presses now so i can take an oxycodone
00:41:20.240
a real one and i can take a a fake one and put it in front of a pharmacist that has 40 50 years
00:41:26.000
experience and he can't tell me which one is real and which one is fake wow and they do the same thing
00:41:31.520
with xanax um adderol so all these things kids take everybody has a crazy aunt and they've heard the
00:41:38.160
word xanax before so you have a high school kid maybe the the girl's having boy troubles maybe
00:41:44.000
she's on her period and a friend says hey take a half a xanax it'll help you relax and that one
00:41:48.800
tablet is fatal yeah you know and that happens because it's a pressed pill you're saying it's
00:41:52.960
a pressed pill right yeah and so pressed pills is where they basically replicate it but they use fentanyl
00:41:58.560
up in there correct because it is more powerful it's cheaper to replicate than making the actual
00:42:04.560
product correct you can't get the actual product so they make it look identical to the real thing
00:42:10.320
right and people don't know if you're buying especially you're some kid you don't know no you
00:42:13.760
don't and you know what i was told was you can bring back you can smuggle across the border a
00:42:19.520
coffee bag of fentanyl versus you know 20 pounds of meth and you're going to have a higher profit margin
00:42:25.840
on that little bag of coffee which contains fentanyl than you would on all that meth so the
00:42:30.880
quartels are sending in loads and loads of of fentanyl and it's it's it's snowballed into heroin
00:42:37.200
you know so we see when we were younger you know movie stars did heroin yeah you know we didn't see
00:42:42.480
much of that coming up but now it's like you'd have money to do it right now it's everywhere you
00:42:47.680
know that the some of the people you just you'd be amazed at how many good-looking young kids
00:42:55.040
do heroin but actually it's not heroin you know there's one form of heroin called china white which is a
00:43:00.400
snortable form yeah people brag about that a lot in the recovery meetings yeah using that yeah you
00:43:05.440
can snort it you don't have to shoot it so what they're doing is they're selling it but it's
00:43:09.200
fentanyl fentanyl comes in a microgram microgram dose so when you get a milligram dose i mean that's
00:43:17.120
just a fatal a fatal dose so we're seeing it every day and when you roll up on a case like that right
00:43:22.960
where are those cases at what does that look like what does that body look like as you come up on it
00:43:27.680
yeah so they're normally in a natural position on the couch or in bed but we know you know this
00:43:35.520
person has had repeated run-ins with the law a lot of times we'll we'll see the evidence you know
00:43:42.800
they have a belt you know they've been shooting up they have their belt they have their syringes
00:43:47.360
and again nobody touches the body until we get there and we can and i can talk to the family and get it
00:43:52.880
out of them fentanyl is the worst that we've ever seen and now they're mixing it with other drugs like
00:43:58.640
xylazine which is a vet drug you hear it referred to as trank this is creating these massive ulcers on
00:44:05.200
people but they're even having to make fentanyl stronger when someone dies on fentanyl the the users
00:44:12.400
in the area you think they'd be scared of it like i don't want to i don't want to get that batch but
00:44:17.120
they want it they want to know where that person got that batch so they can get a better buzz from
00:44:22.160
it oh dude one time i was with my dad and he um when he would take us to the park and he would sleep
00:44:28.000
in his car while we would play or whatever and uh he gave us like a bunch like a case of kit kat bars
00:44:34.480
or whatever and we're breaking them and throwing them out to this squirrel right and the squirrel ate a
00:44:39.760
bunch of it and died right and because i guess they can't have chocolate or whatever but in the distance
00:44:45.360
dude you saw like 30 other squirrels hopping over yeah and by the end of the day bro we'd
00:44:51.360
oh i have to remember that when we squirrel hunt we'd uh oh yeah bro you get a kit kat i don't know
00:44:56.080
if it works with that new white chocolate one but i know like the original one old school one bro i
00:45:00.960
mean you could look in the distance of the park and you just saw them all just hopping over you know
00:45:05.760
don't tell somebody from louisiana that kit cats are gonna skyrocket and that's what we do we squirrel
00:45:10.320
hunt oh dude you'll shoot anything if it's in a friggin tree out there there's a parish
00:45:15.680
if a rope swing gets a little wild somebody will gun it down there's a parish in louisiana and
00:45:20.560
up until literally a few years ago the school board opening day squirrel season the school board closed
00:45:25.440
down so everyone could go in the woods on that opening day i mean can you imagine that the whole
00:45:30.480
town is absent on opening squirrel season yeah everybody all the men and kids are in the woods
00:45:36.240
and all the women are in the bars that's a party you know uh that's a party squirrels but yeah um
00:45:42.480
so the fentanyl deaths has been high that's been really really great it's out of control yeah
00:45:46.160
it's out of control ods used to be you know death is seasonal we have different deaths in different
00:45:50.560
parts of the year we know what to expect oh really yeah so you know um winter time you're gonna get
00:45:57.440
your um you know a lot of naturals because the weather's changing oh yeah you're gonna get hunting
00:46:02.480
accidents you know cajuns falling out of tree stands right breaking their neck you know they they you know
00:46:08.480
everything imaginable in the woods you got you got cajuns with guns in the woods so um
00:46:14.800
then you get into um the springtime weather starts getting nice in louisiana we don't have many many
00:46:20.800
months of nice weather so then here comes the motorcycles so we started getting motorcycle deaths
00:46:26.080
a lot of organ donors right there lots in the springtime a buddy of mine's office is full of
00:46:30.640
motorcycle helmets and i asked him when i'm like why don't you have motorcycle i mean literally around
00:46:34.960
his whole office and he run an autopsy clinic and he said i just keep the helmets on all the ones we
00:46:40.320
do yeah so so that's a little bit of a collector's item he's got going yeah so those all had living
00:46:45.920
people in them that died on motorbikes absolutely yeah motorcycles are dangerous and i'd love to own
00:46:50.720
one but in louisiana we have so many roads that that pop out on major highways and you're doing 60
00:46:56.960
miles 70 miles an hour on a motorcycle and a car pulls out you're done right yeah you know but
00:47:02.000
we see that in the springtime summertime we see drownings um so every season brings its own uh
00:47:09.280
type of natural yeah yeah manners of death manners of death you know the holidays are expect the
00:47:13.920
unexpected really you get for us you get the most brutal uh you know tear-jerking sad cases
00:47:21.760
especially around christmas and new years uh whether it's um like take me through something yeah so um
00:47:27.920
a family you could have you know a family dies or or children a lot of children that
00:47:34.880
so a family that uh mom and dad have three or four kids three or four kids are killed two days before
00:47:40.800
christmas in a car accident i mean how do you deal with that as a parent it's hard enough to lose one
00:47:46.400
much less all but again that's the holidays we we get these these heart-wrenching cases um i always tell
00:47:54.560
people to expect the unexpected and during the holiday time you really have to be careful and
00:47:59.920
louisiana we drink 24 7 you know all day oh yeah you know it's just it's just what we do in louisiana
00:48:07.120
and so driving a lot of people going to christmas parties and events and pull out drinking and driving
00:48:12.640
there's you know there's preventable deaths and oftentimes i'll tell friends and family that you
00:48:18.000
know if you have to go somewhere and it's a two-lane highway versus a four-lane even though it might take
00:48:24.160
15 minutes longer to get to your destination take that bigger highway where you're not one-on-one
00:48:29.360
with traffic because i'd guess that 70 of the cars you're passing are drivers under the influence and
00:48:36.560
that's all year long i mean you realize how close you come to other cars when you're on a back road
00:48:42.320
you know trying to get somewhere well especially in louisiana bro yeah there's no lights the roads are
00:48:46.960
dark and also i remember even back in the day man if when you got out of work you got a freaking beer
00:48:53.040
yeah you would have you see people all the time driving home at the stock going across the
00:48:57.440
causeway or something they wave at you and they show you their beer bro it was part of it's part of
00:49:02.080
the culture i don't know about anywhere else but in louisiana we have places where you can pull up
00:49:06.320
drive-in windows and get margaritas that's just common oh you could stick your head in a stranger's
00:49:11.120
fucking house window and they'll put a shot of brandy in your throat that's right that's right
00:49:14.640
you know if you need it so yeah that's just louisiana bro it's just part of it you know i think um
00:49:19.760
so that makes road road safety that much more dangerous um take me on like has there ever has
00:49:25.840
there been a case like take me on a kind of a heart-wrenching case you know and i don't know
00:49:30.400
i feel horrible even saying that like but take me on one that really took your heart out of your body
00:49:34.880
man um well first i want i want to give my condolences to the the police officers that have
00:49:40.000
been shot the lately you know where i'm from the parish that i live in neighbors of our
00:49:45.360
no parishes next to us we are in vermilion where you guys in saint landry okay so lafayette parish
00:49:52.240
evangeline parish just in the last week they've had four three or four incidences where officers have
00:49:57.360
been shot and killed um so it's really sad you know those are those are always tough uh police
00:50:04.240
officers are good guys you know we were all scared of them when we were younger yeah but you know when you
00:50:09.200
get to know these guys and they're they're they're all great people and um it's hard to see i had an
00:50:15.600
officer uh that was shot uh years ago and it was such a surreal thing to zip up an officer in a uniform
00:50:23.840
he had the black stripe across his badge i guess that was around 2015 when they started doing those
00:50:30.400
black stripes on their badges and it was such a surreal event uh to do but back to you know those
00:50:38.720
heart-wrenching cases for me it would be friends family of friends um yeah if you had to roll up
00:50:45.280
on somebody and then it's somebody you know yeah that's the thing is when i'm getting to a car
00:50:50.080
accident you know in my hometown um i start seeing cars that i recognize and as i'm walking up to that
00:50:58.640
to the wreck you know i i might see a nissan ultima or something oh yeah for a minute your heart drops
00:51:04.480
like oh is that so and so um my best friend lost his wife unexpectedly and and uh so they had moved
00:51:13.200
in from tennessee and he had lost his wife unexpectedly and uh that was really hard they
00:51:19.440
had you know three young children at the time and um it was hard dealing with that case a 13 year old
00:51:26.720
girl taught me more that night than i mean still to this day when it was right around christmas and
00:51:33.760
i can remember having to take them to the er to show them their mother and um it was tough she said
00:51:40.960
mr toby all i want for christmas is my mom and you know we we put so much effort into christmas and
00:51:46.960
presents and holidays and here i have this 13 year old girl it really puts things into perspective for you
00:51:52.880
you know um and still to this day i do my job because i was able to save my best friend's life
00:51:59.360
by being able to remove him uh when he was depressed you know suicide is real um and he ended up getting
00:52:06.560
help and i had to i had to help him get help but you know i feel if i wouldn't have reacted after that
00:52:12.960
event that he may not be with us right more so that's that's what keeps me going in this in this case
00:52:19.120
so there's some personal involvement there in certain situations your ability to you guys are
00:52:23.520
like oh well if there's drug use here i can help send this person or you know help commandeer them
00:52:28.080
in a direction maybe that could help them if they're willing to go if there's like uh if i'm associated
00:52:33.840
with the the someone who's passed and i'm associated with a friend i can lead them into um therapy or
00:52:40.160
keep tabs on them or i've seen enough instances right where you you statistically know hey bud there's
00:52:47.120
probably a 50 chance you're going to stay alive after you've lost this person in your life you
00:52:52.400
you really need to keep tabs on yourself or get some help absolutely wow absolutely um that's funny i
00:52:58.800
didn't know the corner you know i didn't know some of the access points that they had and some of like
00:53:03.280
the direction signs that uh that the coroner's office can point people in you know you don't think
00:53:09.440
about that you just think about somebody rolling up you know and making a call you know right
00:53:14.640
you know satan's line judge you know you rolling up and you just the referee you call them into
00:53:19.760
heaven or you call them out you know only the coroner can arrest the sheriff and that's from
00:53:26.560
the early on you know 1900s if not earlier so when a sheriff the sheriff needs to be arrested only the
00:53:32.960
coroner can go out and do it which is interesting um yeah there's all kinds of things that we do there's
00:53:38.800
also sexual violence and and when rapes are involved that goes to the coroner's office and they do
00:53:43.440
you know we we normally send people to get rape kits done but uh domestic violence and things like
00:53:48.880
that also fall under the coroner umbrella we do a lot of things um and is it straight rapes or gay
00:53:56.240
rapes like do they all happen um it would be uh well i guess they all happen um but i don't know how to
00:54:06.800
answer that one uh when when a woman is assaulted and it could be a woman or man absolutely wow
00:54:12.880
absolutely we'll refer them um you know to a to an er where there's the appropriate staff to do that
00:54:19.360
yeah we're rural we're a rural coroner's office you know so now how can they trump how can somebody
00:54:25.600
trick you how do they trick the corner say if somebody say there's a police officer or something
00:54:30.000
right say or somebody in a town wants to trick the corner a body is deceased ah okay and they want to
00:54:37.040
to and maybe they did it right or there's some espionage going on how do they trick how do they
00:54:44.880
get it past the corner because i've heard that if you can trick the corner sometimes you could get
00:54:50.000
away with murder that would be a true statement but it's hard to trick the corner right um i don't know
00:54:57.520
that well if someone does we had a case for instance where um the the wife shot the man and he was laying
00:55:06.000
there deceased he was a farmer there was a shovel on the ground and you know uh farmers don't put
00:55:12.240
their tools up dirty they're going to clean that shovel before they put it up so there's a muddy
00:55:17.440
shovel laying on the side of a deceased man and uh the the wife said it was self-defense so when we
00:55:26.640
walked up to the shovel we just picked it up and dropped it from you know two or three feet and all
00:55:32.080
the dirt fell off so you mean to tell me you shot him twice he we could see that he grabbed his wounds
00:55:39.840
and so did he lay that shovel down nice and gently after you pumped a few in him yeah you know or did
00:55:45.840
you stage that there so things like that you know that that always don't make sense you have to really
00:55:53.120
think about some of those things but we have ways we can tell if let's say you strangled someone or
00:55:58.240
use the pillow you know there's no yeah you know that's a that's one that's often thought about
00:56:03.120
when we're doing our assessment we can see a thing called petechiae so it's basically retinal
00:56:08.240
hemorrhaging so when we look into the eyes we'll see little red dots and we know that that person was
00:56:13.440
strangled or suffocated so let's just say uh you know i kill somebody and then i hang them well
00:56:20.080
i can tell if they if they were breathing when they were hung versus not and that's all based on
00:56:27.360
that retinal hemorrhaging really yeah so so we have a lot of uh another thing is uh lividity
00:56:34.960
the liver mortis so once if you die laying on your back um after a few hours your your your body will
00:56:41.680
appear red on the surface that's laying on the ground because blood when it stops flowing drops okay
00:56:47.280
so if i walk into a house and you're laying on your stomach but your back is red
00:56:52.800
well somebody moved that body for sure you know so we can tell when people try to you know and a lot
00:56:59.280
of times it's they rolled them over to do cpr you know most of the time it's innocent but there's ways
00:57:05.200
to tell so that's when the forensics come into play you know we we look for deception when we're
00:57:10.720
talking to people we get stories from family members and even social media you'd be surprised that
00:57:16.880
since the uh evolution of social media that how much that helps us yeah i saw that they had that
00:57:23.280
case in south carolina that murdoch case or something yeah you saw that or not where the
00:57:27.280
man allegedly killed i think he was convicted of shooting his wife and son but they had some
00:57:33.200
social media of the kids where it was just it had been a few minutes earlier and they could hear the
00:57:39.200
dad's voice in the background so they determined that they had been in the same space at the same time
00:57:44.480
or something mm-hmm cell phones you know facebook you know i have i've had a case where the guy
00:57:51.200
posted i'm sweating like a whore in church and then he's found deceased and he's holding his chest
00:57:56.320
well that tells me he had a heart attack after i examined him and rule out foul play you know maybe
00:58:02.000
maybe uh an adult saying man you know people like to say you know how bad they feel on social media
00:58:07.360
you know my leg's killing me today well we can tell if they threw a blood clot by so when somebody
00:58:13.360
throws a blood clot they have this cyanotic or bluish color from the nipple line up and that's
00:58:19.200
that tells us okay they threw a blood clot we just throw a blood clot well so uh basically a piece of
00:58:24.720
fat gets clogged up in your uh pulmonary and cardiovascular system and you die i mean there's
00:58:31.040
it could happen to any one of us at any second of the day oh god i mean you throw a blood clot it's
00:58:36.400
called a pulmonary embolism and what you do right when it happens what do you do if you want to live
00:58:40.400
you start cpr but sometimes you can't save them i mean most of the time it's really hard now
00:58:48.080
um there are tests that can determine if you're likely to have one so they start you on blood
00:58:53.440
thinners okay you know very common that people are on blood thinners people with heart disease
00:58:58.160
um though we can manage that with blood thinners but you can't stop them all depending on the size
00:59:04.080
of the clot yeah it's called the dvt deep vein thrombosis and majority of people in louisiana
00:59:10.320
what happens is the veins and the legs narrow oh yeah i've seen some and that's from anything from
00:59:16.000
nicotine to poor you know high cholesterol bad shrimp oh yeah bad shrimp too much boudin cracklins
00:59:23.440
you know all your arteries and veins get clogged up and there's not much much room for error there so
00:59:28.800
a piece of fat breaks off and you're out lights out you know we we've had people in the er i mean
00:59:34.720
i'm sorry and i see you they're there for a blood clot and they code and there's not much we can do to
00:59:39.920
save them but you know we'll look at social media and the person might say you know hey i just recently
00:59:46.480
had a surgery on my leg or my knee's been throbbing or my legs are throbbing or my calf is you know
00:59:52.000
swollen people post all kinds of things yeah so that can help us paint that picture um as to what may
00:59:58.480
have happened in the death some of you guys have seen me in the past uh on social media uh cooking
01:00:04.960
up a beautiful little steak or little cutlet in a um in a pan a real pan that looked like it had been
01:00:14.240
through the civil war or something you know it was like an infantry style pan but that has changed for me
01:00:20.720
now that i'm using hex clad and today's episode is sponsored by them the revolutionary cookware
01:00:29.200
company hex clad when choosing pots and pans you used to have to pick between the performance of
01:00:35.680
stainless steel the durability of cast iron and the convenience of non-stick but with hex clad you can
01:00:42.160
finally have it all hex clad's patented technology finally gives you the benefits of all three in only
01:00:50.320
one pan that's right and i'm telling when you when whatever you bring into these pans if you're
01:00:56.400
trying to make you a bouillabaisse or a souffle if you're trying to make a curry or a um
01:01:03.600
reggaeton whatever you trying to make they will this will get it done all of hex clad's products are
01:01:12.800
backed by a lifetime warranty that's right you will literally never have to buy another set of pots and
01:01:19.120
pans for the rest of your life some would say that gordon ramsay is the toughest critic in the world
01:01:26.560
and these are the pots and pans that he uses get 10 off with the code theo at hex clad dot com that's
01:01:34.400
10 off at h-e-x-c-l-a-d dot com with the code theo bon appetit let's eat with hex clad's revolutionary
01:01:44.880
cookware this episode is brought to you by better help that's right i've gotten therapy i've gotten better
01:01:52.640
help um you know i've had times where i wasn't seeing the world as comfortably as i should be
01:02:01.520
you know and it wasn't just a little thing it wasn't just something that i knew would pass it
01:02:05.120
was something that that was building and gaining momentum inside of me and it kind of scared me
01:02:10.480
you know if you're struggling if there's something that's off it's i mean we're humans we have a voice
01:02:17.280
and we need to use that and we need to get feedback from someone who knows what they're talking about
01:02:22.080
better help can help set you up with a licensed professional that's right it's entirely online
01:02:29.280
designed to be convenient flexible and suited to your schedule just fill out a brief questionnaire
01:02:34.080
to get matched with a licensed therapist and you can switch therapists at any time there's no charge
01:02:40.240
and i want to iterate that if you are going to a therapist and it's super comfortable and easy
01:02:45.760
but nothing's changing then that might not be the best scenario you can always try a new one here
01:02:51.040
or there you can go back to the first one if you want visit betterhelp.com slash t-h-e-o today to
01:02:58.480
get 10 off your first month that's right that's better h-e-l-p dot com slash theo this episode is
01:03:06.800
sponsored by better help thanks to babble i know what that means do you well recently i've been learning
01:03:17.280
to speak espanol con babble spanish with babble and you can too because with babble you can start
01:03:25.200
speaking a new language in just three weeks that's it babble offers it tres semanas on me you know what
01:03:33.520
i'm saying the best way to learn a language is through immersion living where the language is spoken
01:03:39.440
natively and using it every day one in five americans have learn a new language on their bucket list
01:03:45.520
if that's you check it off the list this summer with babble because with babble you start speaking
01:03:52.800
a new language in just three weeks that's beautiful wow science says our ability to learn new languages
01:03:58.800
peaks when we're children but since you can't go back to being a six-year-old babble is the next
01:04:04.160
best option here's a special limited time deal for our listeners
01:04:08.720
let's get you started right now get 55 off your babble subscription but only for our listeners at
01:04:17.600
b-a-b-b-e-l dot com slash theo get 55 off at babble dot com slash theo spelled b-a-b-b-e-l dot com slash theo
01:04:29.280
rules and restrictions apply i had a corner so yeah i guess there's a lot more to the corner than i thought
01:04:35.760
you know there's a lot of avenues going on over there it's a lot of investigation
01:04:39.600
yeah into very basic stuff like home appearance body appearance you know weight were they compliant
01:04:46.400
with their medicine did they see their doctor um did they go to the doctor often um there's so many
01:04:52.480
things that that we can tell about a someone that's deceased now what about like a suicide like
01:04:59.840
say there's like a hanging or something you know what's that kind of how what does a body look like i feel
01:05:05.120
so morbid asking about some of this yeah well how much would you be surprised what bodies look like
01:05:12.640
from certain events that's what i think i'm because in my mind i think you i envision walking up on a
01:05:19.280
body and it's still like oh yeah it has you know that's jerry right you know but would you even know
01:05:25.440
a lot of times who the person is absolutely you can tell who they are things that change of their eyes
01:05:31.120
they're we call that fixed and dilated okay their eyes are open and staring into space their pupils
01:05:37.440
have dilated um so you know their their their face kind of has a different appearance or we can tell
01:05:43.280
by their eyes that they're not with us um that's actually what he's looking at there is the retinal
01:05:49.360
hemorrhaging wow so if you try to smoke uh if you try to suffocate someone or when they hang they'll have
01:05:55.680
those retinal hemorrhages from from the uh from the veins in your eyes yeah and you know you can't
01:06:03.120
breathe so it causes those hemorrhages to form but bodies look like bodies you can tell you know it's
01:06:10.480
suicides are tough um you know there's uh they're supposed to leave the body hanging
01:06:17.520
or in its natural state until we get there we we need to look at the ligature marks which is actually
01:06:22.880
the rope where they made the knot where's it at and then of course it bruises the body so when you
01:06:27.840
have a perfectly symmetrical um line on their neck you can tell if somebody maybe grabbed the wire and
01:06:34.800
choked them and used force to do that because it's an even line but when it's not even and the ligature
01:06:40.720
mark is consistent with how they were hanging then we can tell and there's you know either there should
01:06:46.400
be petechiae so we know that this person uh died by hanging uh one of the you know and we use humor
01:06:54.080
it it's it sounds bad but we use humor to get through some of these cases no we had we had a
01:06:58.640
police officer interview and he said the same thing he goes sometimes you'll see cops standing around
01:07:02.480
laughing they have to do it you have to because what you're dealing with is is really hard to see so
01:07:08.240
you we're not you don't pick on the you know you don't make jokes about the deceased yeah per se but
01:07:13.440
you know you joke with the officers and you try to lighten the mood some everybody can relax a little
01:07:19.040
bit more um and one thing for hangings is you always put the rookie on the front of the body so
01:07:24.800
when you have to cut a body down um you know you can't just cut them and let them drop you want to
01:07:31.440
protect their body so you put the rookie cop in the front and so when you cut that rope you got to catch
01:07:37.520
it that last little bit of air comes out of their mouth and so that's the worst place to be standing
01:07:43.360
is when you're actually removing someone from a rope because they exhale oh that's that last puff
01:07:48.320
huh it's that last yeah it's like a fart but out of the front exactly and it's right and it's rough
01:07:52.640
so oh yeah it's a long one brother so when you say hey you know uh put john on the front everybody
01:07:58.400
that has experience knows it's not where you want to be dang and who catches them you got to catch
01:08:02.960
them well the you know everybody kind of helps who's there whoever is around oh i thought it was
01:08:08.400
like the bouquet at a wedding or something yeah sometimes it is um we we rely on the fire department
01:08:14.240
and those guys do a great job we have bodies that are you know um house fires or or more more so um
01:08:22.480
motor vehicle accidents where the body's been burned beyond recognition and they're stuck to the
01:08:27.200
seat you know we can always call out the fire department and those guys come and
01:08:30.960
you know cut bodies out of cars and they'll help us put them in the body bags same as as you know
01:08:36.400
decomposure you know you get bodies that that have been in a home with no electricity for three or four
01:08:41.440
days or weeks and the body is basically liquefied really i mean it's so it's like a skeleton with
01:08:48.160
like a puddle near or what is it like is it yeah it's you know it's it's like really sunburned and bloated
01:08:55.440
and seeping fluid and um the worst smell you could imagine i mean everybody says when you smell death
01:09:02.560
you'll you'll know it if you smell it again um but you know scraping those bodies up is tough you know
01:09:09.360
and sometimes you you know it's a large person you got to get the fire department out recently i had one
01:09:14.080
that was up a staircase that uh like kind of like the one you have here that spins up and the person was
01:09:19.760
300 pounds so we had to call in some extra muscle to get that subject down you know so fire department
01:09:26.160
really comes out and helps us and how big is a body bag if it's a body big y'all make big bags yeah they
01:09:31.680
make you know small medium large and extra large you know for those people you ever needed to you
01:09:36.560
ever needed to double bag somebody um yeah it depends on the body bag itself um we can do things to
01:09:44.880
you know when it's really messy uh suicides uh gunshots to the head we can wrap the heads in
01:09:50.800
bags before we put them in the body bags and things like that and that body bag in some ways is a very
01:09:56.320
very sacred thing not sacred that's the wrong choice of words but that's where all the evidence is so if
01:10:01.280
you're working a homicide when you put that body in that body bag and seal it only we can do that
01:10:06.720
and once it's sealed it's not allowed to be broken until it gets to the autopsy facility
01:10:11.840
because you'll have evidence on that body you know even the maybe the sheets they were laying in and
01:10:17.200
all that can go into a body bag and we've had cases where the funeral homes uh you know for whatever
01:10:23.040
reason wanted my new body bag so they would take the person out of the body bag and put them in an
01:10:28.640
old one that's patched up with duct tape and send them the autopsy and you can't do that just to save
01:10:33.520
the money they wanted to keep the bag ahead that's a nice bag i'm going to keep that one and throw them
01:10:37.120
in this one you can't do that that's that's that's really important evidence you know so
01:10:41.680
but not you know we body bags are or an important thing that we use sometimes it's just to get the
01:10:48.880
body out where there's a lot of people around so we'll put them in a body bag and or on the side
01:10:53.360
of the road we'll have them put in the body bags but they're also uh used in the collection of evidence
01:10:58.640
and so when you open a body bag getting everything in there and an officer walks through the body bag
01:11:03.600
it's like man you just walked through my my evidence are you shocked sometimes by like the
01:11:08.560
ineptitude sometimes of all of certain newbies or just whatever on forces yeah and you know
01:11:14.480
you learn to deal with it not people just don't know they don't know what they don't know agree
01:11:18.320
man but i've had you know i've had uh so when i see an officer struggling in a home and the smell is
01:11:24.320
really bad um if i see you struggling i'm going to slow down because i can deal with it i've i've trained
01:11:30.880
myself to where the the smells and things don't bother me but you know i'll watch that officer kind of
01:11:37.040
eyes are getting watery their their face is red they don't like where they're at and i'll kind
01:11:41.680
of slow my investigation down like what's his date of birth and oh let me go dig for that so just as
01:11:46.480
a way to kind of help them well no i'm put them through it i put them through it you know i'll slow
01:11:51.040
down when i see them struggling you're gonna make them put them on the grill a little yeah that's right
01:11:55.120
that's right boy you know do you know where his last address was and they're like oh my god oh i just
01:12:00.880
want to get out of here yeah you know but i've had officers throw up on bodies really right on top
01:12:06.240
of the body yeah and we're sending that to autopsy you know so it's like you just put all your dna
01:12:11.280
on there like a baptism at arby's baby right there that's horrible yeah well speaking of arby's we can
01:12:17.120
talk about that one later but what happened there was a death at arby's yeah in lafayette oh of course
01:12:21.360
they found a lady in the cooler did they yeah yeah wow yeah we got to meet huh yeah i mean poor thing
01:12:27.440
though she she was she was uh she was stuck in there and she got stuck on accident yeah i think
01:12:34.800
the lock malfunctioned and they found her the next day but that was in a small town oh there's a dead
01:12:40.480
body in orbeys i mean even my brain went to oh man did somebody put her in a freezer i'm not thinking
01:12:45.920
i'm not thinking walk-in cooler i'm thinking small cooler here we got it right here new iberia
01:12:50.800
uh arby's manager who died in the freezer um the family's attorney inspected the arby's this week
01:12:57.680
and is now telling all as part of his inspection attorney paul skrabanek locked himself in the
01:13:02.720
arby's freezer to get a sense for what she went through in her last moments the thermometer read
01:13:08.000
between negative 20 and 30 degrees as soon as they opened the door i got a feeling that i didn't want
01:13:12.880
to be in there with the door shut uh pierces your clothes you go stiff he was in the freezer for
01:13:19.520
four to five hours is that what it says go back skrabanek says oh the woman was in there for four
01:13:24.800
to five hours employees that was uh that they're it's under my understanding from talking to one of
01:13:31.200
the employees that there was that was there with her son when he found her that she completely frozen
01:13:37.840
wow hypothermia do you think that's a nice way to go kind of no not at all i mean look you you know
01:13:44.880
you ever get cold i can't imagine you know what that poor lady had to deal with yeah uh in that
01:13:52.000
in that circumstance um and her son is just wait yeah it's tough um what does that body look like
01:13:59.360
did you roll up on it no i that was in another parish but you know i'm i'm i'm sure she was cold
01:14:05.120
and stiff with you know um but pretty normal what position do people die in a lot is there
01:14:13.040
is there a lot of you i've always fathomed that i would be holding my crotch i know that may sound
01:14:17.360
crazy yeah no but i think it's like a protective mechanism you know like right i think i would be
01:14:22.480
like yeah just holding your figs and yeah or like that maybe i don't know where my head would be but
01:14:28.640
or you think you'd rather die with your mouth closed or open what is like a cooler not cooler
01:14:34.880
but like what's like yeah i mean we find bodies and all you know a lot of people collapse fall
01:14:40.960
face forward a lot of people in bed i think mouth open probably yeah like you know then you're almost
01:14:47.920
like yeah opera singing yeah something we're like hey bro you know we find them we find bodies or a
01:14:54.800
lot of guys holding their jump uh some not not all but but it happens sometimes yeah absolutely
01:15:01.120
absolutely yeah i always wonder is there a position that's best say i'm gonna die
01:15:06.000
right right and the only the last thing that i can do is be helpful to
01:15:11.040
the people are gonna find my body and to the coroner's office what's the best way for me to die
01:15:17.520
to make it easier on whoever's gonna the best to make it easy on you guys and the staff well i
01:15:25.680
guess uh die in a bed you know okay that that's the easiest way that's the best way it's clean you
01:15:31.440
have covers over you uh it's easy for the family yeah families oftentimes want to see their loved one
01:15:37.120
we have to clean them up to a degree sometimes they can't see them you know because it's such a morbid
01:15:42.000
uh picture but you know um dying in bed is very common on your back um one time i had a guy a guy
01:15:51.760
die standing up and i'll never forget that they called me out to a an apartment complex somewhere
01:15:58.080
and so as i'm walking into the to the scene with one of the sheriffs a friend of mine they're like
01:16:03.680
well that's him and we're not quite in the house yet and he said he's standing right there and i said what
01:16:08.080
do you mean he's standing well the guy died standing up and i for a minute i thought they
01:16:12.800
were messing with me i'm like y'all y'all y'all gotta be messing with me what's he so i even like
01:16:17.600
tapped him on the leg before yes you know he had just the way he had fallen he was standing up at a
01:16:23.200
sink and his head just kind of landed on the he just kind of wedged himself in and his legs were locked
01:16:29.120
and that's how we found him that was so odd you know that's interesting yet if he really just kind
01:16:34.640
of locked in there he's just getting his steps in i guess i don't know if he was brushing his teeth or
01:16:40.880
what what that was but oh i didn't i didn't believe him i'm like that can't be him and they were like
01:16:45.840
i'm telling you he's standing up i said well that's that's one that's a one for the books yeah because
01:16:50.000
what are the odds that it's like when you watch those videos of those people trying to throw a
01:16:52.880
bottle in the air and make it land you know right right i've only had one die standing up in 18 years
01:16:58.480
oh wow so it's a rarity that's very rare yeah in my opinion you know now and how tough is it like you like
01:17:04.320
if there's an do you guys ever deal with animal animalia death yeah so do you guys this corner deal
01:17:10.640
with that too or no yeah we deal with all all deaths so uh now don't get me wrong we've had
01:17:16.640
people call us because they have a dead dog or they got bit by a dog and it's like oh you're calling
01:17:20.960
the coroner's office i yeah go to the er yeah call your neighbor and call him an asshole yeah you know
01:17:26.080
that's what's happening but no um animals well so if you die in a home that's locked with animals
01:17:32.160
those animals will eat you no really fast especially a cat dogs will hold out until they
01:17:39.120
have nothing left to eat but a cat will remove your head in 24 hours and i'm not talking i'm
01:17:44.320
talking literally hair on the floor no head and nibbling into their chest um even cats that were
01:17:51.520
loved by their owners or is it just cats no you think were had something with the owner and are and
01:17:57.200
they're gonna say this is my yeah no they're they're absolutely feeding on you you know i don't
01:18:02.400
care how much you love that cat and that cat loved you he's gonna eat you and you know sometimes we get
01:18:07.440
to cases where there's uh you can tell that the cat or dog had been nibbling you know it might be on
01:18:12.720
the face or the cheek or so uh the toes but and then sometimes it's unbelievable and one of it was one of my
01:18:20.160
first cases and i just never never imagined that they could do that much damage you know smaller
01:18:27.040
dogs now a lab a lab won't a labs for some reason don't eat their owners you know unless they're locked
01:18:33.200
in for months i guess they would but i find it more weenie dogs small dogs and cats cats cats don't they
01:18:39.840
don't wait you know it's like a coon ass around a barbecue pit a cajun i should say around a barbecue pit
01:18:45.920
they smell that that odor and they start nibbling so yeah yeah people start snacking early they want
01:18:51.920
to appetize next time you're petting your cat yeah just know that when you die he's gonna eat you he's
01:18:57.040
gonna pet you back with his teeth absolutely what uh and how how soon after we talking 30 minutes after
01:19:03.840
yeah probably an hour or two i guess they start notice they start they start nibbling and i love my cat
01:19:11.360
you know we have cats and dogs how could you still love your cat knowing how they're gonna
01:19:15.600
yeah i don't care if they eat me after i'm dead you know that that's cold as hell bro well think
01:19:21.280
about that man my buddy dies bro we've been friends forever right he's laying there dude and i
01:19:26.960
fucking carve a little bit of him off yeah it's pretty intense i make a fucking sandwich or something
01:19:32.160
out of my boy's fucking randall yeah well after an hour they do it they do it you know i'm kind of
01:19:39.520
new to cats we just got one to keep the mice down but yeah oh he's gonna keep the mice down or he got a
01:19:45.360
long he's playing the long game though dude yeah that's when they lay on your wrist they checking
01:19:49.520
your blood pressure dog that's what that cat's doing yeah they're waiting for you they licking
01:19:53.520
their lips wow as is the weenie dog but weenie dogs will do it too yeah small dogs i i find that
01:19:59.040
small dogs well they'll jump on jump up on the lap of their owner and you know i guess start nibbling
01:20:04.880
will they eat the wiener to jump to or not i've never seen one but absolutely absolutely you know
01:20:11.200
most of the time it's um i kind of feel like they're nudging you to see if you're still alive
01:20:16.160
you know maybe licking you at first and then when you don't respond and then they just start
01:20:21.920
you know they just go after it it's pretty intense and what about like a turf if say
01:20:27.200
the body's in the wild it's in the water or something do they eat the junk they eat the junk
01:20:30.960
off a body or not the well usually the body's covered so it's going to be it's going to be arms oh
01:20:36.800
okay so it has clothes yeah you you're going to have pants on and how big was your waist get if
01:20:41.520
you get bloated say i'm like a 34 35 inch waist how big would yeah you can go to a 43 you know
01:20:48.880
in the bloating stage the bodies my buddy thomas i think he's like a 43 or something they they you
01:20:54.480
do swell and get a lot of edema and then it starts to almost liquefy we've had cases where we've had to
01:21:00.960
we have to move the body or pull that body out and i've grabbed the leg of somebody and when i
01:21:06.480
pulled everything came off all the skin and you pull the whole leg off yeah you know not it didn't
01:21:12.320
detach the leg but all it was done if you kept pulling would it have no i don't think it would
01:21:15.840
have pulled the leg off but all the skin just just you know that does happen but the body's so frail at
01:21:22.240
that point you know what is the do you think you have some infatuation with death why are you able
01:21:28.880
to handle this sort of thing i couldn't handle some of the images that we pulled up right i mean
01:21:33.120
really you know like what what makes you think you're able to digest that visually and um
01:21:40.640
emotionally and everything and how does it digest for you yeah you know i started health care really
01:21:46.320
young in life um high school um all my friends were taking shop and i decided to take a nursing
01:21:52.800
aid class i figured i'd be able to bathe the girls well that didn't work out so well body shop homie
01:21:57.840
you know what i'm talking about i should have took shop but that would work but always had a
01:22:03.120
fascination with health care and then i went into other things and at one point uh cardiopulmonary
01:22:08.400
respiratory therapy so we managed life support systems so okay so then you're getting close to
01:22:13.360
death so yeah edge right there rt does deals with trauma you know we're the airway in that regard so
01:22:20.480
we're involved in in every uh traumatic death rt when you say the respiratory therapists okay are always in
01:22:26.400
the er working for major codes and core accidents and things like that so you're around a lot of
01:22:31.280
that so yeah i mean we manage the life support system sometimes we have to pull the plug or turn
01:22:36.400
the machine off and uh that's what you so you'd have to actually pull the plug yeah well you turn them
01:22:41.200
you just turn the power off but yeah um you think you'd at least pull the plug like at least it's
01:22:46.800
like eventually you do i mean you have to take the machine out but you know terminating life support on
01:22:51.760
somebody um by the time you're at that stage they've done uh brain tests to see if there's any
01:22:58.960
brain activity and these people don't want to live on a machine you know it's not like they're alive and
01:23:04.720
talking to you right at that stage but again we see all you know we we see a lot of trauma and i've
01:23:12.160
always had this uh i've always wanted to see i wonder what paramedics and police see um you know i wonder
01:23:18.640
what what people look like when they don't make it to the eeyore um i can remember having a my brother
01:23:26.320
was in the iraq war the first one a long time ago and he brought back some pictures and he had some
01:23:31.440
pictures of extremities and things and i was just fascinated to see that i don't know why i was born
01:23:36.400
that way i just i but i was really fascinated to see some of that and then a la carte huh yeah and so
01:23:42.240
then later in health care and seeing trauma um we don't you know for someone that's not in health
01:23:47.600
care yeah it's it's hard to see and imagine but i don't you know i don't necessarily see
01:23:55.200
my eyes or i'm looking at science and anatomy you know that's just a femur or that's just a brain
01:24:01.280
this is parts of the anatomy that that you know we've that we've you know studied and seen before
01:24:06.960
yeah so it's not like i'm seeing you you know i'm not seeing theo i'm seeing right you know i just in
01:24:13.280
general brain and knees and whatever yeah i mean people say how can you be a coroner because you see
01:24:18.800
bad stuff well an orthopedic surgeon will take your arm off and they're dealing with blood and you know
01:24:25.440
all kinds of things and they remove your arm and then put it back on you know so it's the same thing
01:24:30.720
uh kind of um it's just what we see do you ever feel like so you determine the time of death yes wow and
01:24:39.840
how do you know if you get it right or whatever like does a buzzer go off or something like how do
01:24:43.360
you that's actually tricky you know to the exact time of death okay um there are things that can be
01:24:50.640
done um you can do a liver temperature um you can you know the the stage of decomposure if there are
01:24:59.600
maggots and bugs on the body that can give you a window of how long they've been down you know flies
01:25:04.960
lay eggs and then you can even take the maggots and send them to a lab and they can tell you
01:25:10.080
what their age is and that can help you determine time of death but that that's a bit extreme we can
01:25:15.840
there's other ways you know when was the last time you spoke to to so to to johnny you know when was the
01:25:21.760
last time anybody saw him um what were his complaints when you saw him uh when was his last
01:25:28.000
facebook post when was his last phone call so you can kind of get a window into that time of death
01:25:33.760
even rigor mortis you know it comes on and then it lets go and there are certain time amounts on
01:25:38.960
that so we can figure out you know an approximate time of death you know unless you're working in
01:25:44.000
the er and they stop breathing or the paramedics are there because maybe they're sluggish but they're
01:25:48.640
not completely deceased um you know that's an exact time but other than that it's a it's a it's a
01:25:55.520
guess based on evidence okay um when they call us we issue a time of death it's when they contact us
01:26:02.640
so uh we get called on johnny by a nurse in the er or a police officer and i immediately look at my
01:26:08.960
watch and say okay time of death is 10 15 um that's not the exact time they died but that's when they
01:26:14.160
notified us so okay close enough yeah and if you get it right do you get you don't get like a
01:26:18.320
notification on your phone like nobody no there's no reward or anything for getting it right no okay
01:26:23.520
no not now it does help the attorneys and when there's lawsuits happening or um you know they
01:26:30.480
need to get as close to the time of death as they can for homicides because then it puts people in
01:26:36.320
different places you know where were you at 10 50 you know um so it's that you know that's why
01:26:43.520
sometimes it's really important to know as close as you can get to that actual time of death and is
01:26:49.200
there like a toe you guys do actually you always hear about toe tags right people put a toe tag on
01:26:53.280
a body is that true so we don't put it on the toe but you know labeling that body is very important
01:26:59.120
if i'm going to send you to autopsy i don't want to mix you up with someone else or i don't want to
01:27:03.040
send you with nothing and then they you know i always type a report on my death everything i see
01:27:09.120
i have to type and put into a report so when that pathologist is reading that report
01:27:14.720
i'm painting a picture for him and that helps him in his in his autopsy in fact i brought you one
01:27:20.080
i brought you a your own personal toe tag here hang that on the wall uh gosh this is uh you can
01:27:28.000
hang it on your toe if you want but if i should i don't know if my mom would be happy if i accept
01:27:31.360
this right now oh to be determined to be determined yeah yeah i have you also put that under sex
01:27:36.800
yeah so well i have you i think i have you in nola that's good yeah that's where i was born
01:27:42.000
at so yeah i could see myself dying over there bro that's a great conversation piece you know
01:27:46.480
yeah it is actually that's not a bad dude i thank you yeah sweet of you bro do you speaking of new
01:27:51.600
orleans did during hurricane katrina did they bring in a lot of corners to help out what happens when
01:27:56.080
there's a natural disaster like that yeah we can you know did you get called in i i didn't go to new
01:28:01.440
orleans um actually i volunteered for lafayette because there was a lot of not coroner but health
01:28:06.320
care in general oh i see so there's still yeah there's a lot of other recurring deaths and
01:28:10.720
even in the outlier areas yeah i'm just thinking of katrina katrina because it was one of the more
01:28:14.560
known hurricanes i think what else was there ida i'm trying to think what else was over by you guys
01:28:18.560
hurricanes yeah ida there was some in texas if there's a big natural disaster is it like all hand
01:28:24.400
we need all corners to this part of the country does that ever happen um well there we do have
01:28:28.960
protocols you know if a plane falls out the sky and there's you know a hundred people uh we do
01:28:33.760
have protocols we can reserve a cooler truck we can call walmart and say hey one of your big
01:28:38.400
you know freezer trucks can we you know borrow one um there's a whole team of people that were
01:28:43.680
prepared for that mass shootings and whatnot it's important to identify who each person is
01:28:50.160
so we can contact their families and and and you know um yeah we had a um you know i've worked
01:28:57.680
with the ntsb on an airplane we had a little little it wasn't a lot of bodies but what is ntsb so
01:29:03.360
that's the the the that's the uh when a plane goes down it's the federal agency that investigates plane
01:29:10.080
accidents okay and that one was unique because we had a little small cessna that fell out the sky
01:29:15.600
and um you know those guys come in and do their own autopsy and it's amazing from just wing damage
01:29:21.040
of the plane they can tell you exactly where that plane was going in what direction to try to figure out
01:29:26.320
what went wrong with that plane have you rolled up on a plane crash before so i i was called to one
01:29:31.840
yeah and what was that that had to be from your own perspective probably interesting because that's not
01:29:36.800
a common thing yeah it was it was interesting to say the least it was you know two guys and it was
01:29:42.480
actually a tough experience because somebody was flying over and in a in a in another plane and had
01:29:50.400
taken a picture of that and posted it and then they took it down so when something happens in a small town
01:29:55.760
everyone starts talking hey i heard there was a airplane accident or a motorcycle accident well
01:30:00.480
everybody thinks of their loved ones and in this case family was reaching out yeah to the deceased
01:30:06.320
and it's hard to watch that phone ring and just stare at it and know that you know this person you
01:30:12.400
know is trying to get a hold of their loved one that one that that can be tough um to see and you
01:30:19.440
know you just know that that mother or father is trying to get a hold of their son so that probably
01:30:24.240
happens often then you're at a crash site and there's a ringing phone right or any yeah any
01:30:28.960
site you know news spreads fast you know yeah i think johnny od'd within johnny's phone just starts
01:30:35.760
blowing up you know people are trying to call him i mean i lost my best friend and um we didn't have
01:30:41.440
phones back then but trying to contact him so that's very common that phones will just ring and ring and
01:30:46.480
you don't you don't want to make that notification over the phone you don't know you want to send an
01:30:50.960
officer out there or sometimes we'll go with them but you will yeah we we we don't have to
01:30:57.840
but i've done several ride-alongs it's not a not an easy thing to do um you know when we when we go out
01:31:04.800
to a scene we're often forgot and we're the the last responder right when we go out and and your loved
01:31:10.720
one is deceased whether it's sudden or natural families are in a different mindset uh they you know
01:31:16.960
rarely remember us you know from that that case and i always give people my personal sale it's like
01:31:22.960
look you're gonna have questions later i'll you know call me i'm gonna you know i'll sit with your
01:31:27.680
family and tell you exactly what went on have you ever had someone try to call you and like just like
01:31:33.600
lost and like trying to like get you to bring their loved one back to life like have you ever had any
01:31:38.880
um no but i've had them i've had people like you know maybe you didn't look at this one right or not
01:31:45.120
believe the cause of death and i can't share all that information you know i can't share everything
01:31:50.960
that i see and find um with the public so i'm a hundred percent right but some people maybe it's
01:31:57.840
a suicide and they don't believe that this person would have done that and they're you know did you
01:32:02.240
did you investigate it for a homicide and it's like well believe you me that's the first thing i do
01:32:07.200
you know um so we do get those calls from time to time um that the hardest part and we were
01:32:14.480
talking about suicides earlier you know the blood and guts don't bother me um but when for me anyway
01:32:21.680
when i read a suicide note that's what sticks with me i can remember every one i wrote i've read
01:32:27.440
for some reason it's personal at that point not hey i'll be in the barn come find me in the barn
01:32:32.480
you know maybe a child emails their suicide report a note to their family can you imagine
01:32:38.400
and and or just a long letter it it makes it more personal and that sticks with me longer than
01:32:45.440
anything else and what is what are those entail a lot of times if you're looking through them notes
01:32:50.560
what are they putting in there well you know don't blame yourself kind of thing um i'll always be an
01:32:57.600
angel on your on your shoulder and just your real personal things you know i didn't do this because of you or
01:33:03.600
you know it's it's for some reason that sticks in my brain more than than than the actual scene
01:33:10.640
um yeah it's just hard to deal with sometimes you know that that changes the the mood if you will
01:33:16.800
has there been a death that was really just blew your mind and how tough it was to deal with that's
01:33:21.520
something that maybe it attached to something you had personally in your life or an experience
01:33:25.600
that you learn about yourself yeah that's the that you know those are when you'd ask me about
01:33:29.840
personal ones i guess when i see um you know i have children and when maybe like not that long
01:33:36.800
ago i had a a 22 year old lose his dad and to watch that 22 year old walk up to his father
01:33:43.840
in an ear you know i could imagine my children coming to see me and and it you know those hurt
01:33:51.040
same as with babies and you know all those things are hard to see they really take a toll on us and
01:33:57.840
you know there is no out for us we have to deal with it best we can um they're not always easy you
01:34:05.280
know my escape is music i listen to music on the way there and i'll listen to music on the way back
01:34:10.240
and it's on the way home and it's two different types of music depending on what i've seen but
01:34:14.880
we all need that escape yeah like what will you put on like some credence clearwater or what were you
01:34:19.840
like what kind of tunes are you talking about or just something like a like a mozart or what are we
01:34:23.840
yeah no i mean my music my music tastes are all over the map but you know um heading out to scenes
01:34:29.600
i'm i'm jamming to some alice and chains or some metallica and i'm just getting in a hole yeah yeah
01:34:36.160
i'd like to yeah i'm rocking but you know when i'm leaving i'll go mellow i'll go i'll go from you
01:34:44.720
know maybe some counting crows to some sometimes uh even black gospel music i mean my brain just goes to
01:34:51.600
you know depends on the case and uh and what i see but yeah music's an escape for me you know it
01:34:57.440
gets me out of that you know i don't do that i don't do this full-time we all have other jobs we're
01:35:03.280
very uh or we're paid off of the budgets and we don't have much i mean i i literally when i go out
01:35:10.960
and draw blood on the weekends or or i vitriol fluid when i get home i throw it in my fridge at home
01:35:16.640
in the butter in the butter dish you know my kids know hey dad i found my little boy hey my dad
01:35:21.440
has dead people's blood in there yeah you know we we we work around our jobs oh damn that's satan's
01:35:27.120
condiment right there boy damn that's at last so i mean we we wow that's preserved bro we're really
01:35:33.200
on our own yeah my kids are desensitized you know they back in the the early windows 98 when you could
01:35:39.520
set your screensaver to to just roll through your pictures on your computers every once in a while one
01:35:43.760
would get away from me and it would just be this really this gory picture and i'd have to take it down but
01:35:48.880
uh you know we hope you're enjoying your air canada flight rocky's vacation here we come
01:35:56.240
whoa is this economy free beer wine and snacks sweet fast free wi-fi means i can make dinner
01:36:03.760
reservations before we land and with live tv i'm not missing the game it's kind of like i'm already on
01:36:10.880
vacation nice on behalf of air canada nice travels wi-fi available to airplane members
01:36:17.840
on equipped flights sponsored by bell conditions apply see your canada.com i've you know yeah my
01:36:24.560
kids are just desensitized to say the least but they hear me telling stories about what i'm working
01:36:29.040
with yeah and so they know how dangerous drugs are they know um one thing you know i wanted to talk
01:36:35.920
about preventable deaths and deaths that we see too often yeah that's a great question like if you
01:36:40.400
are a parent if you were or just a human being you know you mentioned earlier like the holidays is kind
01:36:44.960
of a time where you need to be a little bit more cognizant because things happen then you know things
01:36:49.600
happen fast um yeah not to take a two-lane highway if you can't a four-lane it's so funny after living in
01:36:55.760
a bigger city and you get back to a smaller place two-lane roads like highways seem so dangerous you're like
01:37:02.480
like it's crazy to think that both of us are going to pass each other safely with all the common
01:37:07.760
accoutrements they have people having cell phones whistles you know perversion toys or whatever and
01:37:14.480
some two people are going to go by each other at 70 miles an hour say yeah those people those people
01:37:19.280
are on fentanyl and heroin coke and and mushrooms and you name it and they're they're five inches from
01:37:25.920
you or your children or your family you know it's uh you really see things so for me uh ATVs and
01:37:32.320
four-wheelers scare me yeah um i've had even seasoned farmers will die on four-wheelers and
01:37:38.880
it's kind of a thing kids love to ride four-wheelers and they're just so dangerous if they flip on you
01:37:44.240
you're going to break they're going to break your neck there's a great possibility of that the same
01:37:48.720
with um you hear of polaris rangers and and other UTVs a four-wheel golf cart like four-wheel drive
01:37:55.520
things people don't consider the flip ratios on those things and i've had you know several cases where
01:38:01.760
um three or four children die on them you know you may go to tractor supply and get a get a cheaper
01:38:07.280
you know eight thousand dollars for a you know for a four by four that you four wheels and people
01:38:12.320
think well that's safer but the flip ratios are are terrible on those cheaper ones yeah um and they
01:38:18.320
flip when kids are just riding them in the yard you know so that's my big thing is four-wheelers i'm
01:38:23.920
scared to death i've always have been to let my kids ride them uh just because of what i see
01:38:30.000
yeah well i think look you're the guy who knows you're the guy who's standing at the finish line
01:38:34.400
and seeing who's craw who's finishing early yeah and what the causes of those finishes are yeah and
01:38:40.000
if you say that it's motorcycles if you say that it's four-wheelers then that's what it is you know
01:38:45.360
that that's some of the risk of things um yeah don't ride a horse if you don't know how to ride
01:38:50.320
horses mardi gras is a big deal a bunch of people in louisiana everybody gets drunk and rides horses
01:38:55.600
yeah i mean horse throws you off you hit your head you're done you're drunk on a trailer you fall off
01:39:01.440
that trailer it runs over you you're gone i mean we see mardi gras is an interesting time yeah i
01:39:07.120
literally throw a pillow in the back of my car because i might be on the road all night you know
01:39:11.280
we see a lot of motor vehicle accidents you know drunk driving drunk driving you know hold my beer and
01:39:17.120
watch this kind of deaths you know where i've had guys trying to jump other cars and you know
01:39:23.120
duallys wrapped in trees 15 feet above above the cement that that were reduced to the size of a
01:39:31.280
very small car yeah i mean sophia yeah so you know mardi gras is a interesting time to say the least
01:39:38.800
uh a lot of accidents you know obviously you get brought on all kind of calls and having a certain
01:39:43.520
level of humor like um trying to be keep things humorous if you can right you know right are there
01:39:50.640
ways you do that at crime scenes are there crimes where you just been like you guys can't help but
01:39:55.680
laugh at the uh just the fact that it even happened the circumstances surrounding yeah um
01:40:02.320
one i had it wasn't really a coroner's call but i was called out to uh death by a city police officer
01:40:09.840
so i get there and you know when i again we're in a parish of 80 000 a lot of people know me they
01:40:15.120
know what i drive you know i can't go to a friend's house and have a cup of coffee without my phone
01:40:19.120
ringing hey did so and so die i'm like no i'm just hanging out you know uh still alive and well um
01:40:26.480
but i got called one time and the guy was still alive they were doing cpr and he had a heartbeat so i
01:40:31.200
walked um as i'm walking up to the house i see the families i see their posture change like you know
01:40:36.800
oh shit the coroner's here it's not good and you know so i walk in and uh the paramedic says we got
01:40:43.040
a heart rate and i'm like he's not dead yet who called me so i immediately walk out and i wave at
01:40:52.480
the family and that guy's still alive today and you can imagine them saying you was so sick wow
01:40:58.400
the coroner came you know um those are you know we see crazy things uh one lady was told to put
01:41:08.400
jelly she had a really bad infection she was putting jelly uh between her legs okay somebody said put
01:41:14.800
some jelly on it well she was right what you mean like uh smuckers or something well that's what she
01:41:18.960
was using okay normally it would be more of a ky jelly or something for that and they her legs were purple
01:41:25.200
and i was like what what's going on here and uh her her neighbor said you know well she was putting
01:41:31.120
jelly on it and it's like wait what you were using smokers that's the wrong kind of jelly but
01:41:34.960
you know um we've seen wedding rings around penises it's like man how'd you even get that on there
01:41:40.160
yeah just wow that must have been that's a big promise yeah yeah huge um you know we see bizarre
01:41:47.360
things like that that people do um autoerotic deaths are actually very dangerous we we actually get
01:41:53.040
a not a lot but enough of them and that's where people are pleasuring themselves and also hang
01:41:57.360
themselves yeah they they're starving their body of oxygen you know okay i mean when doing that you
01:42:02.560
need a spotter because it's so common for people to die yeah when they're doing that so uh well
01:42:09.360
shit if you got a spotter you don't even need to do it usually well it depends but yeah i guess yeah
01:42:13.680
people's into different stuff and people are artistic people you know bad things can happen in that
01:42:18.160
regard um just bizarre bizarre things now uh back to the we were talking about animals i had a call
01:42:26.160
from police and they weren't sure they didn't see a gun but it appeared that someone had uh there was
01:42:33.120
foul play based on the the face and of the of the decedent okay and that was just rodents you know
01:42:39.680
that had gotten into rats yeah so it looked you know suspicious of a homicide you know so
01:42:46.240
but enough rats get in there that's right so we can get out there and say no no this is
01:42:51.120
you know we'll still send an autopsy to be sure in some in some cases but don't make a cheese out
01:42:57.520
of anything huh that's right that's right that's right um i'm fascinated by that cat that took
01:43:03.840
somebody's head off they'll take somebody's head off huh yeah completely completely and where do they
01:43:08.240
hide it somewhere no they eat it oh no i mean with bone i mean they they eat bone there's no skull left
01:43:13.600
it's gone it's a wig on the ground next to a body um if you can imagine and and down into the chest i
01:43:19.760
could see their left main stem from their lung and it's just amazing how fast a cat can eat you
01:43:26.160
so you know have a dog door have a cat door not a bad investment let them leave huh you know they can
01:43:31.920
get in and out the house uh as needed yeah we had a lady that had a cat a uh she had a panther
01:43:39.600
living in her house and she didn't even know this old lady and it killed someone a panther yeah like
01:43:45.200
a real panther yeah she didn't know she thought it was like a rescue cat or whatever and it killed
01:43:49.280
someone at a surprise party wow imagine that dogs i've had dog accidents you know i love pit bulls
01:43:58.400
they're gorgeous uh dobermans beautiful animals but i've seen people that they've just reacted and
01:44:06.160
grabbed their neck and killed them you know those animals can be great and they can be dangerous you
01:44:13.600
know what about some unique animal deaths you ever rolled up because louisiana bro you know i'm saying
01:44:17.440
anything um people some people you know now you know that other than you know having a good pet
01:44:24.080
having a pit bull as a pet and it biting the owner and getting them in the right spot you know that
01:44:29.920
no alligators no no alligators not yet now now bodies that have been chewed on by turtles and
01:44:35.200
possums and other animals when they're dumped into the water that's uh that's hard you know that's
01:44:40.480
tough but again that's you know not a whole lot of animal deaths now riding horses and not knowing
01:44:47.040
how to ride like i mentioned horses can really mess you up you know if you don't know what you're
01:44:52.080
doing it's a big animal oh yeah um at mardi gras once i saw two horses making love when the cops were
01:44:58.240
still on their back oh wow yeah well we see that and that's you know somebody joins the mardi
01:45:04.080
girl ride with a horse that hasn't been fixed a stud and they'll climb the back you know
01:45:10.800
yeah and you know that's oh that's harrowing as a kid seeing your stepdad you know yeah getting
01:45:17.440
overtaken by some animal yeah well yeah that's a that's a thing um and other crazy cases are uh
01:45:24.720
anal insertions it's like what people and what are people doing it for you for pleasure oh okay you
01:45:30.720
know we would see that a lot in the eeyore but i had a case where the guy obviously didn't want to go
01:45:35.440
to the eeyore and so he'd had a hammer and was using the backside of a hammer to put in his buttocks
01:45:41.200
right right and that can perforate your colon and then you get really septic yeah so you know things
01:45:47.440
like that um damn that was you know um another interesting case would be um huffing where people
01:45:55.360
use keyboard cleaner to get high and those deaths occur in parking lots of stores most frequently
01:46:03.760
you're going to find a huffer in the parking lot at walmart oh because they get out because they get
01:46:09.040
and and so i had one guy um actually a veteran and that's how he would stop his nightmares it was the
01:46:16.160
only thing that worked and so law enforcement's on scene and they're like we can't find any drugs but
01:46:20.480
there's air cans everywhere you know and that's dangerous the worst is when you think you're doing
01:46:25.200
like huffing like one of those things and you actually get one of those horns yeah i can imagine
01:46:30.960
that's a wake-up call oh yeah dude that's a that's the lord trying to say hey look time to stop
01:46:35.840
yeah i'm gonna rescue you real quick daddy you know that's the worst man the uh the synthetic
01:46:41.440
drugs that you see so go next time you're in a gas station just look around you know they sell kratom
01:46:46.800
they sell um oh yeah all sorts of stuff my nephew was zaza so zaza is scourge or something
01:46:56.960
look up gas station dope or whatever gas station heroin yeah he was on
01:47:02.160
so there's kratom and you know there's um the the worst one that i'm seeing now is well that that's
01:47:11.760
still for sale is tneptine it's tneptine right that's that's zaza so what that is it's an
01:47:18.480
antidepressant it's actually a tricyclic antidepressant that tags to the mu receptor which
01:47:25.120
is your opioid receptor so supposedly if you take one it gives you that opioid feeling but you're
01:47:31.280
taking an antidepressant on and off and in large amounts and that's very dangerous yeah and and
01:47:38.320
once so i mean you can take commonly prescribed lexapro for a week or two and when you try to stop
01:47:44.880
you start having these uh you start detoxing on this medication so people that get on that stuff
01:47:50.240
can't come off it's actually when i was reading on it it's worse than heroin the the withdrawals from
01:47:55.680
that stuff and speaking to gas station owners they said people come in here every day they scrounge up
01:48:01.200
30 bucks to buy a bottle of this stuff and they do it every day every day and kids can buy this kind
01:48:06.880
of stuff they can go to a gas station and buy some bullshit you know that you don't really know what it
01:48:12.000
is when when the the synthetic bath salts and the synthetic marijuana came around yeah at first it was a
01:48:20.400
synthetic marijuana and we didn't really get any uh there wasn't anything bad happening but then they
01:48:26.720
outlawed it and then it came back and that's when it got really bad uh that's when people and i'd never
01:48:33.440
seen this but people were chewing other people's faces off and it it it completely changes their their
01:48:40.560
psychopathology they just go crazy on it um and these companies they keep making them illegal but they
01:48:46.800
keep adding a different chemical to it so they can sell it again and this was this was really we
01:48:52.800
would you know we bad batches there's never a good batch but we could tell when there were bad batches
01:48:57.360
because of the psych units and we would get a lot of people that needed help being committed to bad
01:49:02.640
batches of these fake of these guys uh like we eat over those fake yeah fake marijuana or bath salts and
01:49:08.800
we'd get calls where you know jimmy's in his underwear holding a crawfish talking to god in the middle of
01:49:14.000
a street and he was on that stuff i had one guy that was doing 60 miles an hour and jumped out his
01:49:19.440
truck while driving oh and that's what he was on you hear of a red rover with somebody probably yeah
01:49:25.520
when well no i don't know what the voices in his head were telling him but he bailed on that truck
01:49:30.880
um yeah it's dark the things that can happen man and so um is there moments where like so say if you
01:49:37.680
are because you're kind of like you determine if people are dead or not right yeah well yeah they're
01:49:43.840
dead i mean yeah have you ever had somebody and they're not dead yeah that's well in that one
01:49:48.720
regard where they still had a heartbeat but okay but yeah no it's never uh or are they dead i mean
01:49:53.760
even the law enforcement people can tell you know when someone's not breathing you never showed up
01:49:59.040
and be like this guy ain't even this guy ain't dead no okay no not yet not yet if you ever like put
01:50:06.320
somebody in a body bag and you low-key had like some like you didn't like that person and you were like
01:50:11.040
not like you were personally like i'm glad they're dead but there was a little part of you like a
01:50:14.640
because we all have kind of twisted parts of our souls yeah that felt a little bit of joy you think
01:50:19.360
no no i uh i've never had that happen even even the biggest enemies um you know i don't you know they
01:50:28.480
died their family's gonna be upset it's uh yeah you know yeah but i hear you i guess the right person
01:50:35.440
hasn't died yet right maybe one day but yeah because i'm gonna i think of myself as a loving
01:50:40.640
person but i can't you know we all have we're all very complex individuals and and uncomplex and so i
01:50:47.680
think i'm just wondering if part of me if i ever put you know did the just put that zipper up on
01:50:54.080
somebody if i'd be like yep you know got him you know or something like that yeah not not yet not yet
01:51:01.920
we try to be as compassionate as we can and you know that there's family and children involved and
01:51:07.360
it's it's tough do you get invited to a lot of the services and stuff do you have to go to that
01:51:11.600
thing are you guys required to go no only no not really only for friends um really friends and and
01:51:19.040
and maybe there's a few cases that were just really hard where the family was struggling and i'll go in
01:51:23.840
there and give them a hug um you know covid was a thing and uh covid was was really rough really
01:51:31.280
my opinion on covid from what i dealt with uh when it started you know we like i said death is seasonal
01:51:40.080
and march april may it eases up that's our slow time uh we don't get as many deaths now
01:51:50.000
you know ods and suicides and homicides are 24 7 now i mean that happens every day but the the the
01:51:58.560
end of spring early summer is when we don't get as many calls and i can remember training somebody
01:52:03.920
and she would say when am i going to get something good when am i going to get something good and i
01:52:07.520
kept saying just be patient just be patient you know it's like bass fishing you might have just
01:52:11.840
some normal everyday stuff and then boom you get a big one yeah well i used to work fast food too and
01:52:16.640
i remember everybody wants to do the fries or something like the first day you're there right
01:52:21.280
you know well it's like dude you can't just do that covid came and you know we had heard uh rumors
01:52:28.400
that there was this virus and we'd went my wife and i went to colorado and we were aware but it it
01:52:35.280
wasn't out the box yet and then shortly after we got home we just started getting phone calls and
01:52:41.920
phone calls and phone calls i mean i still have ptsd from talking on the phone you know in health care
01:52:48.000
we didn't know what was going on people were dying left and right i'm talking i would have one
01:52:54.080
hospital on the phone and i'd have to say can you please hold and i would answer the other one
01:52:58.160
i'd have three calls coming in every hour and that stayed constant for you know three or four months
01:53:06.480
just the amount of deaths we had now louisiana we have a lot of unhealthy people oh yeah in general
01:53:11.920
hospital and when you know covid was the same same thing every time it was before the nurse would
01:53:18.720
tell me i'm like well wait let me guess the patient came into the ear wasn't breathing you'll put them
01:53:23.600
on a c-pap y'all ventilated them a while they failed that y'all put them on a ventilator and the
01:53:28.960
family withdrew care am i right and they were like yep you got it it was the same manner of death every
01:53:34.640
time and it was rampant we didn't stop now some people say i know i don't believe covid and
01:53:40.720
you're you're pronounced you're pronouncing these people and blaming it on covid sure they had
01:53:45.840
diabetes they they were obese they had all kinds of problems but the volume of deaths that took off
01:53:53.440
at that time was unbelievable and it was a lot of my it made it awkward for my a lot of people i know
01:53:59.840
my friends i've lost i've lost friends to that uh friends parents you know it was just it made it
01:54:06.240
awkward i'd go hang out with my buddy and he knows you know he knew that i pronounced his father
01:54:10.640
and there was a lot of that going on during covid people ever get mad at you for pronouncing their
01:54:15.920
family deceased no no no but it just kind of makes it all blame it on you huh no it but it it does it
01:54:22.080
made it awkward you know and so when you look back at that time right because there's tons of things
01:54:26.720
being said about covid right right especially you know things like um uh it's not real right right
01:54:33.760
so you would dispute that totally absolutely there's no doubt something came along yeah i've been up for
01:54:38.240
four days answering the phone i mean i went through i saved them i went through five five subject
01:54:45.840
notebooks in a month you know it was it was overwhelming did you think that the like the
01:54:54.880
manner of like treatment like because a lot then there was a lot of rumors like oh people put people
01:54:59.360
on ventilators they shouldn't have that's what killed them do you think that there could have been
01:55:02.880
some and we don't know you know i don't know a lot of this stuff right you may have more insight than i
01:55:07.520
do do you think that as people as the medical profession was figuring out how to best handle
01:55:12.240
people that they that that could have contributed to more deaths i think we found better ways to treat
01:55:18.400
them and make them manageable um you know steroids were the first thing that popped into all of our
01:55:23.120
heads because they couldn't breathe we need to shrink that soft tissue and give them steroids
01:55:27.600
later they said you know laying prone or on your stomach made it easier to breathe um ventilators
01:55:34.240
coming from respiratory therapy uh when the lungs get stiff you have to go to a pressure ventilation
01:55:40.080
and it's actually called ards a-r-d-s and it's a it's a acute respiratory uh failure in adults
01:55:48.240
where their lungs actually become stiff so when we're ventilating someone we're using a volume-based
01:55:53.040
uh air to open and close their lungs but when they had covid their lungs would stiffen up
01:55:59.600
and the only way to to to truly ventilate them to get their co2 down was to jack up that vent on
01:56:06.640
pressure support on a pressure ventilation that is you're sending in a pretty uh what a pretty high
01:56:12.880
psi you mean yeah we yeah we we were ventilating them with air pressure instead of just that volume
01:56:19.600
flow based and we had to that was the only way you could get their lungs to open and close and then
01:56:24.080
eventually they wouldn't they would stiffen up so when people were saying covid's not real and
01:56:28.880
you know it was you know i i knew the treatment and i knew what was going on and we've never had a
01:56:36.000
stretch where everybody needed pressure ventilation right it was like what is going on with this and
01:56:41.040
that's what happened with everybody we just couldn't ventilate them sure diabetes played a factor
01:56:45.440
sure congestive heart failure played played a factor you know we didn't get many young healthy
01:56:51.200
people that died of covid yeah but the the the rate and the amount was overwhelming so i knew it was
01:56:58.800
real and it was scary yeah you got to understand that again i told you i had a can of off and a badge
01:57:05.200
as as gear well the police departments and and even us we didn't have much ppe at the time so i would
01:57:12.080
be on scene and you know pronouncing someone with covid and i'm looking around and the cops had
01:57:19.360
homemade masks you know yeah talking tampon i mean maxi pads and panties stretch over their ears to
01:57:25.440
block their airway some guys wearing yeah like a halloween costume yeah and i you know i can remember
01:57:30.720
one time we're on a scene and you know when you find a large amount of money on a scene and you're in
01:57:36.160
that moment and you you open a duffel bag and there's you know eighty thousand dollars you
01:57:41.840
it's just human nature to do you know wow you stare at it a minute not that you would take it
01:57:46.240
it's just interesting but you deserve ten percent of it yeah i'm saying you got it you walked over
01:57:51.600
there yeah that's my tip that's that terror bro but so one time you know we this guy was he came in
01:57:57.760
he worked in a um offshore or something and you know when we're trying to figure out why this 50 year
01:58:03.840
old guy or 40 year old guy is dead and we opened his bag and um you know sometimes we'll find drugs
01:58:09.840
and other things but in his bag he had some true 3m uh masks and i can remember that and we were all just
01:58:18.880
salivating over it like wow he you know he'd probably taken them from offshore but we didn't
01:58:24.000
even have wow that protective gear and just to see him with a case of those it would be like man
01:58:29.520
i would love a box of those right about now we were scary yeah you know because we didn't know
01:58:33.520
what covet was and what it could cause and family and children and getting home i'd sit outside every
01:58:38.320
night and watch tv and stay away from my family because we were so exposed to that you know um
01:58:45.200
vaccinations that's a whole nother story but you know the i took one because i was just seeing too many
01:58:50.960
deaths um yeah i can imagine from your perspective that that had to be crazy yeah it was like here's this
01:58:56.400
new thing we don't know what's going on a lot of people are saying that it doesn't exist a lot of
01:59:00.240
people are saying that it's um you know that it's man-made a lot of people are saying these things
01:59:04.720
that like whatever methods we're using to uh treat people or what's killing them you know um
01:59:12.800
yeah there were people on social media friends of ours that were going out of their way to tell
01:59:17.680
people that it was all a bunch of then you know don't wear a mask and don't do this and and here i'm
01:59:24.320
sitting with compositions and every part of the house with deaths and i'm thinking why are you
01:59:30.400
going out your way to tell people this isn't real or it's a political hoax or what you know just it
01:59:36.800
was tough yeah well i can certainly from your come follow me around and let me show you how real this
01:59:42.160
is you know it was it was uh people had their own opinions about it so i i never got involved into the
01:59:48.960
you know who said or why it's here yeah i just well i think at first i didn't know if it was real
01:59:53.920
i don't know i've always been super untrustworthy of a lot of stuff so but um but also i never got
02:00:00.800
different people's experiences are different too some people never got sick so they never had any
02:00:06.240
you know and then they never knew anybody that got sick right so then to some people it's like
02:00:11.200
what is even going on you know and that's their reality you know um so and you can't blame them
02:00:17.040
right yeah that's what i'm saying you can't blame some people you can't blame their reality
02:00:20.880
i think some because that's their truth how could they know anything else right but then i think
02:00:26.320
there was a lot of uncertainty um and also just people not trusting the news anymore there used to
02:00:32.240
be a time where you trusted the news right you felt like it was genuine it at least had some semblance
02:00:37.760
of the best interest for humanity and that was kind of eroding right then right so i think at that
02:00:42.560
point when both those things happen at the same time you know a lot of conspiracy theories are
02:00:47.920
or sometimes what can later be seen as truthful you know a lot of stuff that was conspiracy then
02:00:52.720
now people are saying it was correct so it's just you know a lot of that's kind of um absolutely and
02:00:59.040
there were alternate ways to treat yourself joe rogan was you know right about some of the
02:01:04.160
medications and therapies he encouraged as well as uh talking about obese versus healthy people and
02:01:10.320
all that was spot on yeah you know um but it was tough to witness and see and pronounce a lot of
02:01:16.720
friends and i knew it was real right especially right where you are i mean you standing right there
02:01:22.080
at the finish line dude absolutely do you ever feel like you were like when people died does it feel
02:01:29.200
like they're going somewhere else do you feel like do you think like all right this person's going to
02:01:35.200
heaven or this person's going to hell or do you ever have any little thoughts like that or um yeah i
02:01:41.280
have opinions you know on some people that i know that i might know but me too i won't say nothing but me
02:01:46.960
too yeah um no my you know you know they're in a better place um i often think you know god it's
02:01:55.680
going to be hard to to lose my father or or my wife um and then i i witnessed my father-in-law die of
02:02:03.760
cancer and he was struggling there at the end and uh to know that he was no longer struggling and when
02:02:09.120
he finally passed it was a there was a peace you know so i i think you can i can accept that in some
02:02:15.280
regards later in life because you know you see you see the the the really bad deaths and you see
02:02:22.240
people that struggle and sometimes it's you know i'm glad they were god took them uh you know from
02:02:28.560
away from this pain and suffering so yeah yeah do you feel like um do you ever feel like people are
02:02:35.600
going like do you get any insight i guess into just being around death so much right because a lot
02:02:41.680
of us aren't around it right we can't even go you know we people want to find a dead body they can't
02:02:47.360
you know people are but you get to be around it kind of do you ever feel like that people are like do you
02:02:54.960
ever get any insight if people are leaving to a better place or if they're like do you feel anything
02:03:00.960
like that do you think you get any more insight than just the regular person sitting around wondering
02:03:05.200
what the afterlife is like or anything no um but in those instances i'm i'm so overwhelmed with
02:03:14.000
evidence and and looking at things that i'm not really again when i see someone that was suffering or
02:03:19.280
maybe they're 80 pounds and they were once 200 pounds i'm i'm you know somewhat relieved that
02:03:24.800
they're gone but um as far as for the afterlife i you know i know in my faith that you know they're
02:03:32.240
they're going to a better place so um but i have you know back to your question i've you know i guess
02:03:40.000
i've joked and said well this guy's going straight to hell you know uh sometimes you gotta but yeah he's
02:03:46.080
going straight down but but um again that's just personal joking and stuff like that yeah
02:03:53.600
um you know um so crystal meth came and that drug is is really rough on people it turns people into
02:04:03.200
monsters really it really does these people i mean they just turn into demons they do things that most
02:04:09.600
normal people wouldn't do but it's interesting when i have someone that abuses meth and i go into their home
02:04:16.480
because these people are up all night fidgeting they can't sit still electrical yeah yeah they do
02:04:21.520
electrical sometimes they want to i've had people take electrical wires and try to create things and
02:04:26.640
they shock themselves um but what's interesting sometimes is the things they make like drone
02:04:32.000
deflectors i went into a house once and they had all these weird things hanging and i actually went home
02:04:37.120
and built one just as a memorabilia but um you'll take they'll take a electrical cord or rope and then
02:04:45.120
they'll they'll sew or wrap a barbecue spatula on the end of it it makes no sense but they would
02:04:52.160
put them in all the corners of their houses and i'd ask families like hey what's that what's going
02:04:56.320
on with all this a dream catcher at an arby's yeah yeah and it's like hey that's drone that's that
02:05:00.800
that's what he said deflected the drones you know so it's kind of kind of cool like oh man you
02:05:06.160
know the paranoia would set in and it's interesting you know it's sad and it's terrible and all of the
02:05:13.680
above but it was interesting to see some of that it is some of the creativity there's a lot of like
02:05:18.160
odd creativity in myth you know you can tell when you go into a house when there's calculators taken
02:05:22.960
apart and just things that you know are disassembled everywhere you know that okay this person was was on
02:05:29.200
some type of amphetamine you ever had to go um you ever found somebody hiding somewhere real neat
02:05:34.800
like or somebody died during hide and go seek or something uh yeah well you know there was a guy
02:05:39.840
under a house once you know and uh you know no clothes on i wouldn't like that part yeah naked under a
02:05:48.800
house eating popsicles oh yeah i mean that you know that's uh that's different yeah yeah that's a
02:05:56.400
different way to do it pcp you know oh yeah makes you makes you a bit crazy um but you know truck
02:06:04.480
drivers we get truck driver deaths a lot they're from out of state why why do you get truck driver
02:06:08.960
deaths a lot well not a lot but we get them we have truck stops and a lot of times they'll pull over
02:06:13.360
and look truck drivers aren't healthy i mean they're big guys because they drive all day long yeah and uh
02:06:19.360
you know sometimes i'll i'll get called out and i'll be in somebody's truck i've never been in a truck
02:06:24.640
driver's truck before until i started doing this and i'm looking at how they live and um
02:06:30.240
you know they they notify their parents by their family by phone and so the you know maybe the
02:06:35.040
wife's flying in to get his personal belongings and the truck's full of condoms and it's like oh man i
02:06:40.560
don't want this wife coming into his truck so you know hey can we throw this stuff out you know
02:06:45.840
before the life gets there yeah give him give him a little you know i don't want the family's last
02:06:50.800
thoughts to yeah you know so there are there are uh different cases and different positions that
02:06:57.200
we're in for sure um it's it's just it's an interesting job and you know um i'm very sympathetic
02:07:04.880
and compassionate when i'm you know we we all get faster as we work we get faster at things we do you
02:07:11.120
know we learn how to do them faster and um every once in a while i have to stop and remind myself to
02:07:16.480
to slow down and to make eye contact with that family and and to be really compassionate you
02:07:21.600
know yeah um yeah that's the nature of everything i think once you get in the flow of something too
02:07:26.880
much you know yeah you do it too fast yeah and you don't stop to you know maybe spend that extra time
02:07:32.800
with them to reassure them that you know that their family's taken care of so yeah um things like that
02:07:39.360
yeah i mean it's easy to even joke about you know from being removed from it you know it's like
02:07:44.400
like it's easy sometimes to try and make levity of some of the situation you know um
02:07:50.640
what are there things you that you guys have done like in the moment or things ever that happen you
02:07:55.760
try to keep some levity in the situation because yeah the only opposite to such a dark moment is some
02:08:01.360
levity you know yeah we'll tease the officers joke around with the officers on scene not so much the
02:08:09.360
person yeah in there but um you try to pick up their spirits you know um in all sorts of ways you
02:08:18.160
know um sometimes you can ask them to to hold something and they think they're actually doing
02:08:22.640
something that needs to be done and they're just holding a needle and you know an hour later they're
02:08:27.040
still standing there holding that needle it's like you can let that go now you know um but yeah we
02:08:33.440
you know you you have to have a a bit of humor otherwise it'll eat you up yeah you know you know
02:08:40.720
what's sad is uh for folks like us uh you know we're underfunded we we use our own cars and you know
02:08:47.680
the things we do wow uh we don't have protective gear so when i go out we recently just got some but
02:08:54.000
when i go out to say a homicide which is we're seeing so many of those now yeah um african american
02:09:00.160
kids are dying by gun violence and caucasian kids are dying from drug overdoses and it's overwhelming
02:09:06.320
but when we get called out to a homicide a shooting you know in one of the cities close to us they're
02:09:13.040
rated the number one uh dangerous place to live in louisiana per capita for the homicides and in
02:09:20.800
within my parish and so it might be three o'clock in the morning and i go out to a shooting and i'm
02:09:26.480
walking up to that scene well by the time i get there i'm again last responder right so i get there
02:09:31.680
by the time i get there everybody in the neighborhood and family and friends are all on
02:09:36.320
scene so i'm parking three blocks four blocks deep and having to walk through a crowd of people that i
02:09:42.560
don't know that are upset angry high you name it yeah and i have to go to find that body and the police
02:09:50.560
officers and it can get hairy you know and i'm in scrubs you know i'm not i'm not dressed in a
02:09:56.960
bulletproof vest or anything i've been on scene where shots were fired it was a block away but
02:10:02.080
you know when you're in scrubs and shots are fired you know it's pretty tough yeah um yeah
02:10:08.080
because somebody's already dead yeah i'm gonna start saying that hey so you know yeah well there
02:10:12.880
there was a case in north louisiana where the guy had uh was shot and the paramedics were working on
02:10:18.080
him a friend of mine was actually on on this scene and so they're working on him and a guy walks up
02:10:24.240
and says uh hey man is he gonna make it and the paramedics said yeah i think he's gonna pull
02:10:28.880
through and the guy shoots him right there boom boom boom puts three more rounds in him you know
02:10:34.080
so scene control can be tough when there's you know two officers and 300 people um yeah just recently
02:10:43.520
and and again my condolences go out to this this officer who was just killed in in another parish
02:10:50.480
next door to us i mean great guy really good guy and um there wasn't many people there for scene
02:10:57.600
control and one of my friends was showed up as a marshal and the whole crowd was telling him it's
02:11:02.640
about time one of y'all died you know and and just saying things that you know y'all all need to die
02:11:07.920
and you know you have guns but we have bigger guns when you're by yourself you know at 10 o'clock
02:11:14.320
at night with 300 people cussing at you i mean that's that's that's hard and that's hard for those
02:11:20.000
officers yeah they don't get paid enough to to no and and and they don't they don't at all they
02:11:25.440
really don't nobody would and a lot of these young officers haven't been through health care
02:11:29.520
and they see things that i see we see them more frequently but still those young officers that are 22 23
02:11:36.320
they're looking at things that they've never seen before you know and like you mean victims and
02:11:41.680
stuff like that yeah yeah just well every death that i see you know decomposed bodies yeah you name
02:11:47.280
it children and babies and it's uh it's tough for those guys and i have a i'm partners in a company
02:11:56.400
where we do psychological evaluations for law enforcement oh that's wonderful yeah so we have
02:12:01.120
a team of psychologists that review they take them through different tests and instruments and
02:12:06.480
and determine if they're suitable for law enforcement and uh right now the only people that are that are
02:12:12.400
applying for law enforcement are high risk and that's what makes it tough for city police you know
02:12:18.560
you got to hire somebody who was shoplifting two months ago right you know so they're not getting a
02:12:25.040
a good batch of officers right now and cops in general have been put down uh you know the
02:12:31.200
whole defund the police oh yeah all that stuff's ridiculous so it's it's uh yeah and you have people
02:12:36.160
moving out of cities there's just so much there's so much crime in a lot of cities you know i was just
02:12:40.240
in memphis uh the other day and it's beautiful great city right gets really dangerous you know there's a
02:12:48.000
lot of like there's a lot of shootings a lot of black crime too you know unfortunately like when i was
02:12:53.520
growing up two of my best friends my black friends got killed by other young black men you
02:12:58.880
know i i think it's just a bummer some of that happens because it makes it scary to live in certain
02:13:04.240
places very you know and then it's like if you want to move away from places like that people say oh
02:13:09.040
well it's like white flight or you're right or it's a racial issue but it's like it's just
02:13:13.520
fear it's like you just want to be safe it's you know it's this i don't know and there's look
02:13:18.480
there's all types of violence but well it's sad to see a lot of that a lot of these kids
02:13:23.280
are uh 14 and 15 years old and they you know trading video games and hey i'll buy that game
02:13:30.720
from you okay i'll meet you and then hand the video game and shoots them yeah so they're not
02:13:35.840
it's not all drug-related deaths some of it's over you know you called me out on facebook and they
02:13:41.440
kill them i mean i don't understand that they're they're not scared to go to jail right or prison and
02:13:47.760
and they and they do when they're 18 they get let go uh to some degree but it's just it's an
02:13:53.760
overwhelming amount of young healthy kids dying on both sides i mean again the the drug abuse is
02:14:00.640
rampant and the homicides are hamper are rampant we so if you're noticing more in white community
02:14:06.160
it's drug overdose absolutely and in black community it's more gun violence absolutely yeah it's
02:14:11.920
it's man it's scary to see you know the disregard for life yeah you know and the accidental ods and
02:14:21.200
i can't stress enough that you know the synthetic drugs that are being sold in stores are dangerous
02:14:26.960
you know it throws these kids into seizures but they're being sold in stores absolutely you can go
02:14:32.800
oh you mean like at the gas station like that gas kratom crack gas crack all that kind of gas station
02:14:38.480
heroin yeah mitch yeah like a fake adderall yeah at all or you know and kids go buy this and it
02:14:46.560
you know that might not kill them but they have seizures that that's what kills them is that they'll
02:14:51.120
have a major seizure when they take this stuff can't believe we allow that stuff to be sold then
02:14:56.240
yeah it's um they say watch alabama for some reason everything starts in alabama with
02:15:02.160
that kind of stuff and then alabama outlaws it but as soon as they outlaw it something else is coming
02:15:07.360
back yeah you know so it's um it's scary raising kids you know um even on social media you know you
02:15:15.360
can you can get on um instagram or or any of the platforms and order drugs yeah and and you know
02:15:23.760
while we're sitting here i can order a pound of cocaine and have it shipped to my house and it'll be
02:15:28.480
here in three days dude you know and kids have access to that i'm going home with y'all man you know
02:15:34.320
what i'm saying yeah what do you want no i don't but no you're right though if there's vpns people
02:15:38.400
can you can get like drugs the u.s the the postal service is the biggest distributor of illegal
02:15:46.560
narcotics in the u.s you know it's it's it's scary raising kids with gun violence and you know just all
02:15:53.840
these different things that can yeah yeah it almost seems like it's a just becoming like another country
02:15:59.920
that i think that it seemed like when i was growing up you know when i was a child drugs
02:16:04.480
didn't kill you back then no you know nobody shot you um it's different you know yeah but there are
02:16:11.600
still you know there's still positive things that i can help people with one area i did want to mention
02:16:16.880
is babies yeah my godchild just had a baby and i like babies yeah i see you know we work babies we
02:16:24.320
have a not a large amount but babies die newborn babies um some of the things you can do is you know
02:16:31.920
when we raised our children they all slept in the bed with us we put them right there in bed with us
02:16:36.320
and luckily we never lost a kid but if you have a baby i've never pronounced a baby in a baby bed
02:16:43.360
or a pack and play one of those little small cribs you know it what happens is um parents will put
02:16:51.200
babies in um in the middle of a king-sized bed because they're so small they can't even roll yet
02:16:57.520
and they put them in that bed and they'll they'll basically suffocate we all used to say it was sids
02:17:03.360
but it's truly positional asphyxia so that airways like a straw and if that straw kinks but as long as
02:17:10.640
you're using baby products you know like a baby bed i've never pronounced a baby unless unless of course
02:17:17.440
they were using like an adult blanket in a baby bed so there's things you can do in that regard
02:17:22.640
you know to that's things i can teach people so not have your baby in bed with you don't put your
02:17:27.440
baby in bed with you don't put them on the couch sleeping while you wash dishes they'll roll off
02:17:32.560
they'll roll off they'll get wedged or their the the pillow is so soft that they can't adjust their
02:17:38.720
head and neck you know so there's things i can teach people that you know how preventable deaths
02:17:44.400
and babies is one of them something that i can you know share with with with new parents and yeah
02:17:50.800
no it's super important yeah so you know there's bad shit can happen when you do everything right
02:17:57.840
you know so you just got to be careful and every day is a gift you know do you think there was a
02:18:03.760
reason you got into that line of work then do you think there was like something that like you had
02:18:08.720
this like you know this dark side that led you into it it seems like you came a little bit more
02:18:14.720
through like the medical profession um or through the insurance like just was it the what were you
02:18:20.960
guys selling you said or what uh products were you working with before you got into well i was in
02:18:27.120
respiratory you know so i but i've always had a uh i've always leaned towards health care
02:18:33.040
um i've always worked in the trauma area of health care um so you learned something fascinating
02:18:40.240
about it a little bit yeah i've always just had it i was just born to do this kind of stuff
02:18:45.440
you know i don't i don't do the coroner's office for money it's not a you know i saved my best thing
02:18:51.520
my best friend's life and i look back on that and you know it was a blessing to have that yeah that
02:18:56.640
ability amen to be able to just be there and be a part yeah if you hadn't been there who knows
02:19:00.880
yeah so that's a real gift you know but yeah i don't know what what shifted me into it um it's
02:19:06.880
kind of like i was always uh set up to do this kind of stuff yeah you know and you can handle it
02:19:14.000
absolutely and to your uh yeah uh retired police officer he was like man those guys can eat yeah we
02:19:20.160
can eat you know that doesn't bother me i can eat a meatball sub or boudin cracklins in an autopsy
02:19:25.520
break room you know when you're hungry you're hungry but yeah damn boy i don't know i wouldn't
02:19:31.440
have a french dip though that seems a bit much yeah if it's pretty good i like french dip i would
02:19:37.760
do that at home i think yeah now we don't eat standing over a body you gotta stand off to the
02:19:42.800
side yeah yeah just there's a little break room yeah you'll hit it you know and plus down in southeast
02:19:50.000
louisiana bro or if you're down in southwest a lot of the bodies down there could be caused by
02:19:55.040
dustin poirier too dude if you that's right if you're down in southwest louisiana bro if you got
02:20:00.320
a good ass whooping i'm not saying he's a serial killer but i definitely know right right i bet if you
02:20:06.080
you know and you know fighting i had we had a young guy died he was punched once and it was a hard
02:20:13.120
enough hit and he collapsed and hit the cement and that's really unfortunate but again it doesn't
02:20:19.680
take much you know life's pretty fragile does it seem like that it really is it really is every
02:20:26.000
day is a gift man some of the things we get frustrated with with our family and friends
02:20:31.840
are not worth the frustration because they may not be here tomorrow or you won't be here tomorrow
02:20:37.120
you know and i learned that yeah have you learned that has that had a big effect on you that's really
02:20:41.280
fascinating yeah you're like this is not a big deal yeah it's really not you know you could be pumping
02:20:46.960
gas and a tire flies off a car and takes you out you know um i've had you know single trees fall on
02:20:54.320
cars you know just the most bizarre things but when god's ready for you he's gonna take you god and so
02:21:01.520
yeah it makes you aware of your surroundings but you can help people uh you can you know
02:21:07.760
back to the preventable deaths you can tell people what not to do and uh you know it helps you
02:21:14.080
through life you ever do you ever worry about your own ego like i would be like oh i'm like you know
02:21:21.040
like i have some special gift or something does that ever no man i'm real laid back um what you see
02:21:29.360
is what you get i'm cajun you know yeah i just kind of roll with the flow i'm not special you know i don't
02:21:36.080
get speeding tickets that's a plus that's fair it's nice knowing the police yeah um
02:21:42.000
i i keep a blood vial with uh i don't even know what i have in it maybe coffee i keep it in my glove
02:21:48.080
box in all our cars so if i'm going to houston and i get pulled over ever since ebola man cops don't
02:21:53.520
like body fluids oh so if i get pulled over you know i'll whip out that biohazard bag with some coffee in
02:21:59.600
it now hey i'm transporting this to whichever direction i'm going you know i'm bringing this to
02:22:05.040
method is hot oh it's body fluid you're good you can go you know they don't even want to shake my
02:22:09.920
hand on scene oh man you know they give me a little fist bump or an elbow you know sometimes my my hands
02:22:15.840
are dirty and intentionally i'll say hey can i borrow your ink pen and they're like no bro yeah you know
02:22:21.360
can i hold your flashlight you know i need to look at this and they like no bro so you know do your
02:22:27.680
hands get dirty on the scene yeah i mean but i'm wearing gloves right so there was a case you know i have
02:22:33.600
to put my hands in it you know the worst of the worst worst of the worst and um there was there
02:22:39.840
was a pedestrians is something i didn't talk about man pedestrians are dying and what is pedestrians
02:22:44.480
pedestrians people walking oh god man so you had mentioned you know going out and maybe having a
02:22:49.040
beer or two well you go out and have a couple of drinks one drink at a dinner meeting then you eat
02:22:53.360
dessert and have a cup of coffee and you're driving back on that dark two-lane road at 11 o'clock at night
02:22:59.440
there's going to be pedestrians there's going to be somebody walking in black clothes
02:23:06.160
on the street and you're going to run over them i mean it happens and as soon as you do that
02:23:10.560
they're drawing you blood but pedestrians are dropping like flies and we're so distracted right
02:23:16.320
because people on their phones yeah i mean look i'm i text and drive i'll be the first one to admit
02:23:20.720
it and sometimes i'm driving i hear that that rough sound when you when you venture off the road
02:23:26.480
you know and i'm like oh you know oh yeah that's the lord's braille right there that's right and look
02:23:32.320
man that that that could have been somebody standing right there it happens it used to be walk walk with
02:23:38.640
traffic now i tell people man walk against traffic so you can see who's coming because everybody's
02:23:43.840
distracted oh that's such a great point yeah that that's totally changed absolutely walk towards
02:23:48.960
traffic so you know yeah you you have to be the one who's alert now they're not alert unfortunately
02:23:53.680
people are walking towards traffic looking at their phones so even they swerve out you know
02:23:59.200
bike riding man we we were raised on bikes you know oh the team murray mafia you know and
02:24:06.000
we don't let our kids when they were younger i don't let them ride bikes in town anymore because
02:24:10.640
people aren't paying attention adults on bikes get mowed over you know it's it's adults on bikes is
02:24:18.720
weird also i think yeah you don't need to be wearing them tight pants anyway and that helmet but
02:24:23.440
if you do decide to do that yeah do it in a track yeah because man we've had friends that have
02:24:29.120
gotten hit on highways and they're not dead but you know they've taken really bad uh had really bad
02:24:35.920
accidents you know but so yeah we see i forgot where i was going prior to that but we we do see a lot of
02:24:41.200
pedestrians no i think you're just talking about preventative things you know what that were you
02:24:45.520
know like yeah things to look out for you just want to cover everything too i know that you wanted to
02:24:49.680
you know just be able to share a lot of information as to like i think we've learned a lot about like
02:24:53.920
all the different areas your job kind of encompasses you know the different types of things that you can
02:24:59.760
see that come in um you know the different responsibilities of the coroner's office that we
02:25:06.000
didn't know about um and then it's your affiliation to it you know that you're not some kind of dark lord
02:25:11.920
or anything yeah that you are i don't have any adams family tats yeah you know yeah you know you're just
02:25:18.640
a man that can handle it i'm a little different you know i'm definitely not right but uh you know
02:25:25.760
um we have a we so we have a willie nelson mannequin in my house he's a full-size mannequin
02:25:31.520
and people always like man what's that you know my kids even when they were they were scared of them but
02:25:36.480
i had a crazy aunt who had mannequins as company and she was living in you are in covington if not
02:25:41.680
if i'm not mistaken and when we moved her back she had all these mannequins and i was a young kid
02:25:46.560
and every time we would go to her retirement home they were in different positions wearing different
02:25:50.320
clothes and that was her company she was really had some psyche yeah so when we had kids i'm like you
02:25:56.640
know what i need to carry that family tradition we need a mannequin in here so uh we had one we took it to
02:26:02.480
on uh arkansas vacation with us and the the camp next to us just wasn't quite sure about us yeah
02:26:07.840
because i pointed face in their cabin right and then uh i found a willie nelson mannequin in a place
02:26:14.960
that the guy sold it to me and it's just a lot of fun it's different it's weird yeah it's cool uh
02:26:20.720
we took him to new orleans in a wheelchair and pushed him around but most people didn't even notice him
02:26:24.480
you know yeah but i would set him somewhere and just watch people walk by and say excuse me
02:26:28.800
you know so uh yeah we're different people we you know but well yeah if you play in a man if you're
02:26:34.640
taking mannequins running wheelchairs i think that that is a i understand i think it all makes perfect
02:26:40.080
sense now but yeah i think you got to have some fun louisiana's always been like that absolutely
02:26:44.480
people always having fun my mother loved willie nelson um i'm trying to think we grew up near a
02:26:50.560
prosthetic place that was making process over at this joint and they'd throw a lot of them out the
02:26:54.960
ones that didn't come out good oh wow so we're always beating the shit out of each other with
02:26:58.800
fucking legs yeah just ambidextrous legs and all kind of that's awesome yeah it wasn't really legit
02:27:05.360
you know right so kind of adjust your perspective on things absolutely you know louisiana's always had
02:27:10.400
a decent you know i think it's it's not a place where there's a lot going on but you know there's
02:27:14.720
not a lot of big businesses i don't think there's any fortune 500 companies in louisiana except maybe
02:27:18.720
energy and i feel like they probably i think that they moved out but so it's a lot it's just about
02:27:24.320
people and having fun yeah that's louisiana have a good time yeah it really is man and i think you
02:27:29.440
got to make the best time you can uh no matter what you're doing and you guys are in you guys
02:27:33.600
police officers it's just a position where you know it's not very rewarding and you catch a lot
02:27:39.600
of people on their worst day absolutely the worst days yeah nobody calls like hey corner
02:27:46.320
yeah having a great time right right like i said i can't go have a cup of coffee with a friend
02:27:50.960
without them thinking that that you know they did bad news you know small town you know yeah
02:27:55.920
dude you're almost like that plink like that uh like a uh like a roulette ball you know yeah you
02:28:01.120
just drive around the neighborhood and then you stop wherever you want especially during covid
02:28:05.200
you know you could park anywhere somebody's dead i just stayed home i mean it was like monty python
02:28:10.400
you know bring out your dad you know but i'm not dead yet that's what it was that you know it uh
02:28:16.480
yeah yeah no it's an it's an interesting it's an interesting field for sure well look man i i
02:28:23.440
just yeah well i appreciate you coming in man i appreciate you spending time and yeah um yeah
02:28:28.320
just really nice of you dude this has been cool to learn about you know i think we like to just learn
02:28:33.280
from different occupations and stuff and so now i know a lot more about what a corner does yeah it's um
02:28:38.480
it's always interesting and somebody has to do it and uh you know we try to we try to get get the job done
02:28:44.880
as compassionately and as we can yeah you know so really appreciate you having me on yeah man you're
02:28:52.480
the guy that does it man toby savoy that's right thank you bro louisiana i appreciate it yeah dude i'll
02:29:00.400
have to come down there bro and catch a body i'll do ride-alongs or not now we can yeah you have to
02:29:05.440
throw on some scrubs or a lab jacket but yeah we'll we'll bring you i'll do that yeah it'd be cool man
02:29:10.480
yeah i would love to come down we could get discovery to do a you know a rural rural coroner's
02:29:15.040
office yeah watch me check the fridge and call out groceries i like that bro yeah that'd be a cool
02:29:21.040
game show you call out the groceries then we guess who's dead or whatever yeah yeah or why yeah exactly
02:29:26.320
well it'll pretty much be heart disease but yeah yeah yeah that's true the number one killer man that's
02:29:34.000
right um things we things we live on yeah toby i appreciate you so much for your time thank you
02:29:39.360
guys for coming out it's been a it's been a great opportunity to come out here and talk and
02:29:43.440
i hope this podcast even saves a few lives people may hear what not to do you know or be more aware
02:29:49.840
of their surroundings and that's pretty righteous i was thinking about that especially during the
02:29:54.480
holidays especially about times when you're like well is it worth it to take this road for a couple
02:29:58.960
minutes faster to get home what's the really the safest possibility for myself or my family because
02:30:04.640
yeah there's a lot of dangerous turns out there these days and it's up to the individual really
02:30:10.000
in the end you know to try and put their selves in a best situation especially when our country
02:30:15.280
our laws and stuff like that aren't even going to do that anymore for us right absolutely toby savoy
02:30:20.960
thank you so much brother thank you man i appreciate it you bet now i'm just floating
02:30:26.080
on the breeze and i feel i'm falling like these leaves i must be cornerstone
02:30:35.360
oh but when i reach that ground i'll share this peace of mind i found i can feel it in my bones