Crime Stories with Nancy Grace - Body Bags with Joseph Scott Morgan: Corey Micciolo - Forced To Run to Death

Episode Date: May 12, 2024

Corey Micciolo did not meet his father until he was 5-years-old. Soon thereafter Corey landed in the middle of a custody battle. From the first time he was left alone with his father, Corey came home with bruises, busted lips, and more. His mother complained but nobody listened. Only now are people paying attention because of an awful video showing 6-year-old Corey Micciolo being forced to run on a treadmill and falling off, over and over. Each time he falls off the treadmill, his father puts him back on and turns the speed up, allegedly.  Christiopher Gregor is on trial facing murder charges for allegedly killing his own son in what the media calls the Treadmill Abuse Trial. On this episode of Body Bags, Joseph Scott Morgan will explain what really happened to Corey Micciolo and why 6-year-olds don't drop over dead, and Dave Mack will fill in the rest of the story of how Corey was given to a father that never bonded with him while his mother begged for anyone to listen.   Subscribe to Body Bags with Joseph Scott Morgan : Apple Podcasts Spotify iHeart     00:38.98 Introduction, talk about weapons 05:17.90 Discussion of exorcise as punishment 10:01.23 Talk about making 6-year-old run on treadmill 16:01.12 Discussion of bruises and injuries 21:06.32 Talk about Corey's health is fine, except for bruises 26:20.26 Talk about Corey tells doctor about football and treadmill 32:41.40 Discussion of children don't die of natural causes at 6 37:27.82 Discussion of injury to abdomen 39:12:19 Conclusion Final Diagnosis, Blunt Force impact, laceration of heartSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is an iHeart Podcast. Body Bags with Joseph Scott Morgan. Weapons. We talk a lot about weapons in forensics. And sometimes you come across things other than knives and guns, anything that you can bludgeon somebody with, bare hands, ligatures, fire. You think about all those things and you think about, well, those items, those elements can be easily weaponized. Weapons of convenience, many times. But I have a question. Is it possible that someone could potentially lethally weaponize exercise? We're going to find out.

And we're going to have a discussion about a six-year-old boy who unfortunately is no longer with us. I'm Joseph Scott Morgan, and this is Body Bags. I was never a grand athlete, Dave. I played football in high school around a lot of really great athletes, people that went on to have pro careers. But all of us suffered equally in football. It proved well when I went off into the military because it's like, okay, I can do this because of what I'd gone through in high school with football. And there were times when I felt like

my coaches, as I know your coaches, were using exercise to punish you. And it really wasn't exercise. Like you're trying to improve yourself. And it really wasn't exercise. Like you're trying to improve yourself. What they're trying to do is improve your mental state. Pay attention to detail. You know, Joe, I understand what you're saying there. But, you know, you're talking high school, college, military, using exercise, not for exercise, but for discipline.

And I get it. But we're talking about a six-year-old boy here. We don't even really know exactly when Christopher Greger and Corey's mother, Brianna Mishlow, first met. We know that Brianna Mishlow was 17. Christopher Greger was 21 when Brianna Mishlow gave birth to Corey. Greger was reportedly not in the boy's life until he was five years old. And it was only at that time when Brianna Mishlow sought child support from Gregor that a paternity test was done.

And when he came back with, well, I'm not paying child support, I'm getting custody. And he did. He got custody of Corey Mishlow. Now, the very first meeting that Corey allegedly that Corey had with his dad, the very first time they were alone Corey allegedly returned home to his mother with a busted lip according to New Jersey online Michelin didn't believe Christopher Greger's excuse that he accidentally kicked their son while playing soccer so

she reported it to the DCPP and DCPP caseworker accepted the story as told by Christopher Greger doesn't accident kicked him while we were playing soccer. No big deal. They just didn't even investigate. Greger was able to wrest custody of Corey away from his mother, Brie Mishlo, because Brie had an ongoing drug problem at the time. At one point, Greger was able to have Brie M Michelo's visitation taken away due to drugs. Michelo had her visitation restored after she completed a drug treatment program. But for over a year after that first meeting, she claims that Corey was routinely abused by Gregor,

and she reportedly suspected the father was using a treadmill as punishment tool during their visitations. Bree Michelo called authorities 100 times reporting her son Corey's abuse. Breanne Michelo saw an emergency change of custody after seeing the bruises on Corey's body on April 1st. OK, April 1st is a big day. Breanna Michelo has her son. She sees these bruises all over his body. She takes him to the hospital. She gets a doctor who's an expert in child abuse injuries.

And Corey is examined. He has 14 bruises in various stages of healing on his body. 14. The child is six years old. He's a month away from turning seven. Got bruises all over his body. And Brianna M michelo reaches out to get an emergency change of custody because of this and it's denied she takes cory back to christopher gregor's house the next day and on april the second cory gets out of the car

walks to his father's front door, opens the door. No problems. Walk and talk and everything's fine. The night before at the hospital, no problem with his lungs, no problem with it. He's in other than all the bruises on his body. He's fine. He goes to his dad's house and in a matter of hours, Christopher Greger calls. Brianna Michelot, I need Corey's insurance, health insurance stuff. I got to take him to the hospital. He's throwing up. He's slurring his words. And so he hangs up after getting the information. He doesn't tell Brianna, he doesn't tell Brianna where he's taking her son, which

hospital. So she's trying to figure it out. She's calling around all the hospitals. Can't find where her son is. She finally calls the police and says, look, I'm not the custodian, but I'm in fear. My son's going to die. His father has taken him to the hospital. Won't tell me where, you know, and the police then tell her your son has passed. She had just been denied custody. Okay. Had sought an emergency change because she was in fear for her son's life. And now they're telling him, even though she doesn't even know where her son is, he's dead. What has come to light is that when Brianna Mishlow took Corey to the doctor, the doctor who specialized in child abuse,

she was able to talk to Corey about where these bruises came from. And at first he tried to say it was football. Playing football with his dad. Practicing football with his dad. But he mentions falling off the treadmill. There's a videotape from March 20th. Showing six-year-old Corey being forced by his father, Christopher Greger, to get on a treadmill in the workout gym at the apartment complex.

Christopher Greger doesn't know there's surveillance cameras. The surveillance cameras catch Christopher Greger putting his six-year-old son on the treadmill and making him run. And when he falls off, he turns it up, makes it go faster. Christopher Greger kept turning the treadmill up faster and faster and faster as his son tried to run and keep up but fell off six times hitting his face hitting his sides getting dinged all up getting beat up by the treadmill but six different times cory michelo fell off the treadmill because it was going too fast

and christopher gregor picked him up and put him back on there and made him run again at one point he's frustrated and he bites c Corey on the head, allegedly, and puts him back on the treadmill. If not for that video, the case would not be going on now. Hey, Dave, have you ever fallen on a treadmill? I have. It's one of, well, first off, there's a crowd around. It's very embarrassing. But secondly, if I fall on a treadmill, other than having to call an ambulance and a bone surgeon, I'm not getting back on the treadmill immediately. And I'm a grown man.

I fell once. Yeah. And it was the last time I was on one. Yes. Yeah. I fell once and it was the last time. You feel completely out of control with the thing. Particularly, you have to understand the controls and all that. I don't know what actually elevates a six-year-old to have the cognitive ability to be able to

control the thing. They don't. So, that leads to this idea of weaponization of, let's just face it, of a piece of athletic equipment or workout exercise equipment. It's a means to an end. Now, I don't know. If we had one of our psychology friends on here, they could probably talk about things like, well, it's not about the child. It's about the inconvenience of the child. It's not about the injuries. It has everything to do with the fact that he's angry at the mother and maybe even at the state of New Jersey for saddling him with a child that he was not aware of. But, yeah, at the end of the day, it comes down to this little boy. It is about Corey.

And, you know, that's one of the things that's very frustrating when you start covering trials and areas in true crime over and over and over again, the victim is always forgotten. Always forgotten. It doesn't matter what context. You look at this situation and this Gregor fella, his name is going to go down whether he is found guilty by a jury of his peers or not. His name will go down in infamy because it is associated with Corey's death. But Corey's not going to be remembered.

It's going to be the horrible acts that have alleged to have been committed. So when you think about the environment in which this child was placed, and you and I can both speak to this, I think, because of our backgrounds from the perspective of a little child. You get that bubbling up anxiety that comes along with it that you're going to have to be in the presence of your abuser or the person that goes to great lengths to make your life miserable. Let's frame it that way. And I came through it at a particular time in life where I had more of a cognitive ability to kind of process it as I got older. Unfortunately, Corey's never going to have that chance because in a world of a six-year-old, you probably think that the world is safe and that people love

you and that they're not going to let any harm come to you. But unfortunately, with Corey, it wound up being a fatal exercise. Over the years, I worked a lot of cases involving more than I care to remember, not just children that had been abused, but I worked a lot of cases involving elder abuse as well, which again is a completely, Dave, you and I could sit down and talk about elder abuse for longer than you and I both would care to. But there's a common theme that happens with people that are perpetrators and alleged perpetrators when they're trying to explain how events occur in the life of those that they are expected to protect. And what always amazes me, I think, is that if there's some kind of critical injury that has been identified by a healthcare professional, the person in charge will always say, well, they fell. And then when the healthcare provider or,

Lord knows, a forensic pathologist is trying to assess what they're looking at from a physical presentation. They're thinking, well, yeah, he said he fell, but how many times did he fall? Because, you know, the thing about our body becomes almost like a little roadmap, a history of what we've endured. And for those that are kind of hearing us talk through this, just imagine any time that if, okay, if you get up out of the bed and you've got a nightstand or something that's adjacent to your bed, or there's something that protrudes out a piece of furniture and you bang your leg, okay? Let's say you bang your leg four times over a period of 12 days. Well, each one of those injuries is going to look different.

And it's kind of simple science because your body in life is always trying to repair itself. And so these areas of swelling, contusions, even lacerations, they will begin to kind of resolve. Now, they're going to resolve in ways that might not be favorable. Even broken bones try to resolve themselves, and you get really horrible consequences as a result of a bone not being reset. But to say the least, it provides for us forensically a roadmap as to kind of the history. It's almost, I love to equate it to this, Dave. It's almost like cutting down a tree and look at the rings at the tree, because you can tell by virtue of, you know, people that deal in this sort of thing, they

can look at it and say, well, this was a drought, you know, this was a heavy rain year or, you know, whatever the case might be. In kind of a very more condensed perspective, you look at an individual's body and you can begin to assess not just the pattern of the injury, but what stage that injury is at relative to resolution. You know, bringing that up, and I'm so glad you did because that actually was something that was brought up at trial. By the way, you know, this case is ongoing right now. I've had to cover a lot of it, and I was shocked at the testimony of a couple of different people, but in particular, the pediatrician who looked at Corey. I wanted to point something out. Corey was forced to run on the treadmill March 20th of 2021.

It was April the 2nd when Corey Michalow died and that 12 day period from the treadmill incident to his death is difficult to explain. But listening to you over the years, I told you this before we started listening to the pediatrician testify as to what she saw on Corey Michalow, the bruising that she saw, I had to actually stop the testimony and walk away twice because this six-year-old boy had 14 bruises on his body in various stages of healing. Some were fresher than others. There were actually two places on his body that were actually discolored, but were white because the pigment hadn't come back in the healing process, which I need to talk to you about. But that's what I wanted to make sure everybody understands that the treadmill incident happened on March 20th and Corey died April the 2nd. Now, in between that time, Corey's physical being was he was fine. He wasn't fine, but he was

a six year old boy with bruises. And when he was brought back to his fine but he was a six-year-old boy with bruises and when he was brought back to his father's house you know or this is so frustrating joe i know bro are we not supposed to protect children is that not our job it is our job it's the job of those individuals that that we elect to office or that are appointed to office to protect. And as parents, there's a whole group of people that are expected to protect children. And this is so rote. They are the most precious resource that we possess. It goes far beyond money.

It goes far beyond any kind of physical possessions that we have, period. End of story. And there is a monumental failure all the way around in Corey's case. And look, I could really bring down the thunder in a situation like this, beginning to think about this and thinking about everything this child has endured. But this is a great lesson, I think, in the sense that when you're an investigator and you're out in the field, you have to fight these feelings in your mind and everything that went wrong and be able to assess the science that you're looking at. And unfortunately, the science points to quite a bit of negligence, I think, in certain people's world. Well, that's about as far as I want to go at this point.

But I'll put it to you this way. It makes my blood pressure want to blow the top of my head off because it's so infuriating. My face will turn red after I have veins poking out of my forehead over it. What I'm watching when I watch Christopher Greger with Corey Mishlo, I see a man who has no emotional tie to this child. It's like they miss the bonding that takes place between a parent and a child. It's an emotional bonding. It's a physical bonding, you know, where you sit and you hold each other and you watch TV or whatever you do.

And it's that time that Christopher Greger didn't have with his son that allowed him. Because when you watch this, it's not like watching an actual father with his son, because that's not what men do. But what he did to this child was abusive. In my mind, he's alleged to, he's not alleged to have made him run on the treadmill. We have video of this. His own attorney at the start of trial during opening statements actually had to say, you're not going to like him. You are not going to like Christopher Greger. And he's right. The issue is, did he cause his death? You know, was it running on the treadmill and the injuries? But the thing is, Joe, is there are at there were other injuries. And that's why we need to get into the bruising of what the pediatrician

noticed on his body, because she said that in court she stood up, they asked her to show, and I've learned this from you, when you start talking about certain parts of the body and use terms that I'm sure I was supposed to have learned them in ninth or tenth grade biology, but I memorized, studied, and forgot it. Okay, hang on. I've got to insert a soundbite here and just simply say, OK, just got talk to us. Normal people talk. I'm just I'm just a JD. Yeah, I'm not a doctor.

Yeah. You know, and that's what that's what happened on the stand as his pediatrician started talking about what was on his body. But the reality is they said, would you stand up, please, and face the jury and show them? You know, so this doctor stands up and she shows them where the bruises are. Again, six-year-old boy with 14 bruises in various stages of healing, and she is showing the jury. And she starts with left cheek. He's got

a bruise on his left cheek. Now, I'm going to be honest with you, Joe. If I'm around a child that has a bruise on his face like that, I don't care who his dad is, who his mom is. I'm asking what happened? What happened there, buddy buddy and if he doesn't have a very quick answer oh i had a go-kart crash i ran into a tree my brother hit me you know if he doesn't have a quick answer i'm following up yeah because you know if you've got an individual that you're questioning about and they're searching you know they're trying to come up in their mind with, well, how can I explain this? Right. And it's almost impossible. And of course, you know, Corey, the sweet little kid is Dr. Deacon, who is actually the pediatrician. She's having a conversation with his child

and she's asking him, son, how did these, how did these injuries come about? He says, well, my dad's trying to teach me football. That's all fine and good. You can teach your child football. You can take them out in the yard. You can throw. You can, I don't know, work on pursuit angles. You can do all those sorts of things.

Yeah, catching the ball. You know, no matter what it is. But are you telling me that, remember what we talked about earlier, are you running Oklahoma drills? And if you're not familiar with what an Oklahoma drill looks like, look it up on YouTube. I'll suffice, or bull in the ring. And it's bull in the ring. And I'm not saying this happened, but we're talking about full contact.

Yeah. You know, when, and I'd come home, you know, in high school, I'd have bruises all up and down my arms and that sort of thing. Yeah, but this is a dad with a six-year-old son. I know, when, and I, I'd come home, you know, in high school, I have bruises all up and down my arms and, and that sort of thing. Yeah, but this is a dad with a six-year-old son. I know. Come on. And so you can't. They're playing catch. Yeah, I know.

You're playing catch at this point. Right. And at best, you'll maybe teach them some rudimentary past, past routes, you know, that you want to run with them, you know. Yeah. That kind of stuff. But it doesn't rise when you have a clinician like this pediatrician that is doing the assessment on this child. I can only imagine as they're assessing this, they've seen this before, Dave.

This is not something that happens on just every blue moon for a pediatrician. They've seen it in practice. They've seen a lot of it in their training because most physicians will work at big teaching hospitals and you see all kinds of things in teaching hospitals. And you feel like you're spitting in the ocean to try to raise the water level when you're trying to protect somebody. You see kids that will come through multiple times in these environments. And you can't do anything about it to interdict it.

And unfortunately, in the case of Corey, his injuries were far worse than anything anybody could have imagined. The odd thing about being in a morgue, working with a forensic pathologist, you're standing at a table and you have no connection to the body that is lying before you while they were in life. And it's a weird place to be in day because you can look at the body, man, and you're sitting there and you're trying to consider what led them to my table. What led them to this cold stainless steel table? And you're looking down and you have time. You have a lot of time in the morgue to do assessments that other people in other medical professions don't have. You don't have a waiting room. You don't have other people tugging at you. Now, you might have other cases to do, but the thing about the morgue is that you can take your time when doing your assessment. And there is nothing that will

give a staff of forensic scientists pause more than the death of a child. I'm not saying that, you know, we don't give our due diligence to other cases, but when you have a dead little kid in front of you, little kids are not just supposed to fall over dead. They're not an 85-year-old grandpa with atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease and a history of acute myocardial infarctions or TIAs or CVAs or any of those things that come along in the brain. That's not what we're talking about.

He's six years old. Six, yeah. Covered in bruises. Now, we know there was a history of bruising on this six-year-old boy and i will tell you that in looking at this there were people who noticed things there were people who said things there was a noticeable difference after cory michelo began living with his father full-time and only saw his mother on visitation. And his first grade teacher testified that he wore clothing that was inappropriate for the weather.

It was too hot to be wearing long sleeve outfits and things like that. And teachers and you mentioned this teachers and doctors, they've seen all this before. And so they know what the signs are. So the bruising and we're only going to deal with the treadmill on on April 1st. That's when the pediatrician saw Corey. He was having a number of issues. And so as she was examining him, she was looking at the bruises and she not she marked them down and talked about them. She mentioned the bruise on the eye.

She mentioned this yellow green bruises, big ones, Joe. And she pointed out a number of other ones. And I don't know what it means. I don't know what these different bruises on different parts of his body mean. I do know that the doctor, she spoke with Corey and asked about where did these bruises come from? What happened? She said that he did mention playing football with his dad and the treadmill incident, in air quotes.

And she talked to him a little further about this. And she testified in court that Corey put more emphasis on the treadmill as the source for a lot of the injuries she was seeing, not playing football with his dad. What do the bruises mean, Joe? I'm glad you asked this, Dave, because, you know, when you're looking at a bruise that is, you mentioned the one specifically that was yellow in color. You're looking at a bruise if you're aging, which we do in forensics.

We do, well, let me back up. Practitioners, clinical practitioners that are taking care of the living, they assess to pediatricians specifically. They will look at bruises and they can age them. But we use the same tool with dead because when an individual does die, everything, and this is kind of an obvious statement, everything ceases. But the beauty of that from an investigative standpoint is that you literally get a freeze frame at that moment in time because the bruise, the contusion is not going to continue to resolve. It's frozen. It's frozen in that amount of time that the body is left preserved. You can really do a thorough assessment of the body. You know, if you find

a body that's decomposing, which this is not the case, then those things will be a little bit tougher to kind of assess. But you're looking at a bruise that's yellow, you're talking about seven to eight days, maybe nine, of post-trauma, post-impact event. Because anytime you have a bruise, there is an impact that's associated with it. That's the only way that you're going to have the presentation of a contusion. I think that the question this begs is when you look at the external presentation of the injuries, what critical areas of the body does it overlie? Now, if you look at, say, a bruise that someone might have on their bicep, that doesn't have the same level of criticality, say for instance, if a child has a bruised or blackened eye, because now you're

talking about a potential brain injury. Or if you see somebody that has a bruise to their leg, okay, maybe their outer thigh, maybe they bumped into a table. That can,'s certainly painful, and it can tell you a lot historically. But buddy, let me tell you something. If you see bruises on the abdomen, those are specific impact injuries. How many times in your life, and in my life too, I'm asking myself the same question, have I walked into something with my abdominal muscles leading the way or my abdomen leading the way where I have a specific impact site on that location. Anytime, and I'm not a boxer. You know, if you're a boxer, you get out of the ring and you're taking body shots, you know, you're going to have contusions, you know, all over you.

These guys don't escape, you know. Right. But those bruises will be the same age. So if you get multiple sites all over the body, you know that someone has specifically targeted an area. Say you get a punch to the abdomen, punch in the eye, or any number of other locations, and you begin to assess those. And literally what we do at autopsy is we incise those specific areas. You just don't look at it externally. You make a cut into that area, and you can actually appreciate how the thing is resolving,

and you have to track this very carefully, Dave. Is that like rings of a tree? No, it's not like rings of a tree. That analogy doesn't necessarily apply here. What it does apply to more, I think, is probably targeting areas. Because let's just say you've got a bruise. Find the bottom, the right aspect of your right rib cage, the last rib anteriorly. That approximates the area where your liver is. So on the right side. So if you have a bruise, a contusion on your abdomen approximating that area, and I'm in the morgue and I'm looking at this, you know what I'm going to think? I'm going to think, well, it's presenting with a

bruise here. It's not an easy area to bruise. I know this had required a tremendous amount of impact or velocity. When I open this person's abdomen, I want to know what the liver looks like because you can actually have contusion to the liver. There's actually another odd term I think I've mentioned before that forensic pathologists use. It's called a fracturing of the liver. We think fracturing with bone, you can, and it's truly a laceration. The liver splits. It's so dense and so heavy,

it'll split and fracture. And so that's seeping blood. And the other thing you get when you open up the abdomen, Dave, is that many times you'll see the organs, the abdominal organs floating in blood, or there'll be a presence of blood. It'll be clotted. And that also gives you an idea that something has happened in the recent past, more than likely. So the external injuries that a person, a child, and in Corey's case, that they would be presenting with all over their body, those little points of impact, it runs much deeper.

That's what I'm talking about. It runs much deeper. What you're seeing on the surface is only, it's a very superficial kind of almost like X marks the spot in a treasure hunt. When you go beneath the X at that point in time, that's where you're really going to begin to understand how vicious an event may have been that would have led to an otherwise healthy six-year-old child's death. Kids, as you well know, kids are very resilient. You know, I mean, kids fall.

They take some of the worst. A fall that my grandson, who's, you know, five, that my grandson, who's five now, he'll be six soon. A fall that Jameson might take as a five-year-old, six-year-old, it would kill you and I. Right. It would kill you. And they'll bounce back. They'll bounce back. And that's why when I had to listen to had to I had to listen to the testimony of the doctor and.

Getting away from the clinical and just thinking about a child, I'm telling you, Joe, I had to stop because the number of bruises where the bruises were on his body and the various stages that they were in the healing process, it didn't go unnoticed. OK, and I want to be clear on this,. It didn't go unnoticed. Okay. And I want to be clear on this, that it did not go unnoticed, but his mother, because of her past and because she had lost in court, she had continued to fight for Corey. She had gone back to court many times and had talked, she had reported the abuse that she saw. She was the one, his mother, Corey's mom takes him to the doctor on april 1st where the doctor documents all these bruises and injuries and after that because it it was attributed to the treadmill incident his mother cory's mom brie sought custody immediately an emergency cut

because of these abuses that she could see the boy died the next day now wait make sure make sure you tell everybody where he died where did he go into arrest okay okay here's the thing to back up okay mom cory's mom brie takes him to the doctor on april the first doctor sees these bruises yeah brianna files with the state she files with DCCP, I think is what it's called in New Jersey. She filed with them right away. Corey died a day after his mother took him to the doctor for the treadmill abuse, which was 10 days, 11 days after the treadmill incident. Brianna Michelo reported the abuse to DCPP and filed for emergency custody. April 1st, the request was denied. The next day, April 2nd, 9 a.m. in the morning, Brianna had to bring Corey back to his dad.

Corey Mishlow was able to get out of the car. It's 9 a.m. April 2nd. He's able to get out of the car. He walks to his dad's front door and opens the front door himself and lets himself into the house. Nothing seems out of the ordinary. He's fine. Later on, a couple hours later, Brianna gets a call from Christopher Greger asking for Corey's insurance card, saying he's lethargic. He's throwing up. He's slurring his words and I'm going to take him to the hospital. And so he does. Now he doesn't tell the mother. He does not tell Brie

where he's taking Corey, just taking her to the hospital, taking my son to the hospital. So she's left with calling the area hospitals, Joe, trying to find her son who she knows is sick. She's calling every hospital finally you know what she had to do she had to call the police station and say look i'm not the custodial mother you know he's with his dad but he's sick and his dad's taking him to the hospital but he doesn't tell me where and that's when the police tell her but your son's passed. Now she drops him off at the house at 9 a.m. He's fine. Later on that afternoon, he has passed away.

And he actually, Corey passed away in the hospital. He was actually in, he was getting a CAT scan. Yep. And actually had a seizure in the CAT scan at the hospital, surrounded by doctors and nurses. And he's right there. still still he died nothing they could not save his life nothing they could do dave he is he is on that slippery slope uh and what it tells me is that there is ongoing hemorrhage within him and it's interesting of note here you know know, he, prior to be taken to

the hospital, he awakes from a nap. Do you realize how hard it is to get a six-year-old to take a nap? It's a Herculean task to say the least, but he's taking a nap. If you've got a kid that's six years old and it's in the middle of the day like this, particularly a little boy who's full of energy, he's bouncing around, this sort of thing. He's going to lay down and take a nap like he's a three-year-old. Yeah. Feel good. And when he wakes up, Dave, he's slurring. He's slurring. He's complaining of nausea. Symptomology, just kind of the disorientation and slurring of speech that tells me that there's probably some kind of neurological problem going on conversely it can also indicate that there is a tremendous amount of internal blood loss going on and that can arise from any number of locations

remember what i was talking about with the points of impact and cory does in fact die in treatment room you know where they're going to do the the ct and know, you know what it's like to go into a CT. It's not as bad as an MRI, but, you know, they're loading you into this thing, you know, you're laying there on your back and all of that. And then all of a sudden, and they're talking to you. You ever notice how they talk to you over the loudspeaker? Yeah, why do they do that? To keep you from decompensating in there.

I always feel like I'm in a you know in a torpedo tube anyway right you know i don't i don't like being in that environment and look you got a six-year-old kid and these things are noisy too can you imagine what it's like to try to get a six-year-old calm down and to keep them alert because they have to give you directives you realize how hard it is for a six-year-old to lay still? I don't know how hard it is for me. Yeah, I know. But yet they're giving him directives and all of a sudden, Dave, he's not responding.

He's not responding to verbal commands or directives or anything like that, buddy. He is going into a cardiac arrest. How many times has this ever happened in the presence of a clinician where you've got a kid that's not suffering from terminal illness and they're surrounded in a hospital and they go into a fatal event before your eyes and there's nothing you can do about it. But in the wake of all of this and the fact that the police had been looking into this it did obviously lead to charges but just let me run this down to you real quick because

i think that it needs to be plainly stated that when when cory was autopsiedied and they began to assess those things that you remember, you remember Dave, we were talking about those things that are just under the surface. had cardiac, which means heart, and liver contusions, which means he had sustained impact injuries to his heart, to his liver. There was an inflammatory response, which means that it wasn't necessarily in the phase that it had just happened. It had happened days before. Okay. And this was kind of a rollout.

He's getting worse and worse and worse all the way along. And, you know, the final diagnosis for this child was that he had sustained, first off, consequences of chronic abuse, not acute. Acute means suddenly. Chronic means, Dave, ongoing, ongoing, and the injuries that he had sustained. He had blunt force impact of the chest, the abdomen. Dave with a laceration of his heart. I don't know what to make of this, but when I see this case, I think about what he endured. People talk about how they've been injured in life and how they've had their heart broken.

This child literally died of a broken heart. I'm Joseph Scott Morgan, and this is Body Bags. This is an iHeart Podcast.