Crime Stories with Nancy Grace - Mayhem in the Morgue | Alcohol, Meth, or Showing Off for Women?

Episode Date: September 14, 2025

Content Warning: This episode contains graphic descriptions of fatal injuries and autopsy findings related to a fireworks-related death. If you’re sensitive to detailed accounts of trauma, please proceed with caution.   What happens when alcohol, bravado, and high-powered explosives mix? In this explosive episode of Mayhem in the Morgue, Chief Medical Examiner Dr. Kendall Crowns breaks down a July 4th case that began with fireworks and ended in fatal blunt force trauma. What seemed like a freak accident soon turned into a full-blown forensic experiment, complete with shattered ribs, broken equipment, and one very disgruntled physicist.   Highlights (0:00) Welcome to Mayhem in the Morgue with Dr. Kendall Crowns (0:15) The fatal trifecta: alcohol, meth, or women? (1:00) Fireworks 101 — and why they don’t belong on your chest (2:00) A party turns tragic (2:30) Autopsy reveal devastating internal injuries (3:30) The physicist with a luggage scale (4:30) Broken scales slow-mo failures and scientific dead ends (5:00) Enter Bonnie: the PhD student with the right tools (6:15) Blistered thumbs and the final answer — 90mph to the chest (7:00) The final cause: intoxication, bravado, and a deadly decision   About the Host: Dr. Kendall Crowns Dr. Crowns is the Chief Medical Examiner for Travis County, Texas, and a nationally recognized forensic pathologist. He las led death investigations in Travis County, Fort Worth, Chicago, and Kansas. Over his career, he has performed thousands of autopsies and testified in court hundreds of times as an expert witness. A frequent contributor to Crime Stories with Nancy Grace, Dr. Crowns brings unparalleled insight into the strange, grisly, and sometimes absurd realities of forensic pathology.     About the Show Mayhem in the Morgue takes listeners inside the bloody, bizarre, and often unbelievable world of forensic pathology. Hosted by Chief Medical Examiner Dr. Kendall Crowns, each episode delivers real-life cases from the morgue, the crime scene, and the courtroom. Expect gallows humor, hard truths, and unforgettable investigations, ranging from courtroom drama to deaths that even seasoned pathologists struggle to explain.   Connect and Learn More Learn more about Dr. Kendall Crowns on Linkedin, catch him regularly on Crime Stories with Nancy Grace and follow Mayhem in the Morgue where you get your podcasts.   📣 If you liked this episode, don’t keep it to yourself—follow the show, share it with a friend, and leave us a review.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is an I-Heart podcast. This episode discusses the death of an individual in their subsequent autopsy. If things like this upsets you, this is not the episode for you. Welcome to Mayhem and the More with your host, Dr. Kendall Crowns. My wife once asked me, where are the most common things associated with people's deaths? And my response to her was alcohol, methamphetamine use, and showing off for women. So today, we're going to play a little quiz called, Is it Alcohol, Meth, or Women? So this case occurred on a July 4th evening.

The scene was a 30-year-old male. He was out on a lake with friends. They were firing off fireworks and having a good time. At some point in the evening, this scene decided to pick up a fireworks mortar and launch it off his chest. So let's stop right there. For those of you unfamiliar with fireworks, A fireworks mortar is a consumer firework that uses launch tubes, which are commonly called mortars. These are fiberglass, pressed wood, or cardboard, or plastic.

They are a long tube with a flat base at the bottom. What the mortars are used for is to launch the mortar shells, which can be spherical or cylindrical, and they can be almost two inches in length. They have a lift charge that launches the firework into the air and also lights a time-delay fuse, which after a period of time lights, lights, what is called the brake, which is a bursting charge in stars. And the stars are the colorful things that fall from the sky. The ones that the decedent was using were 60 gram mortar shells, which means 60 grams of chemical composition, which includes gunpowder. Just for reference, a shotgun shell has about 28 grams of gunpowder. So these aren't fireworks you want to fool around with or do something crazy. So let's get back to the story. So he launches this fireworks off his chest. The fireworks

shoots out across the lake and explodes. And everybody's like, oh, that was crazy. And they turn around and the scenes laying on the ground unresponsive. Emergency medical services is called. And when they arrive, he did not have a pulse. And he was declared dead at the scene. He was brought to the medical examiner's office and I performed an autopsy on him. He is a well-developed, well-nourish male. He looked at his age of 30 years old. He had a large abrasion on his chest, on the left side, overlying his heart was the surrounding bruise. Internally, underlying this abrasion, there was a fracture of the sternum, which is the mid-portion of your chest plate,

and fractures of the left ribs, a laceration of the heart, contusions of the lungs, and bleeding in the sacs surrounding the heart, which is called the paracardium. So he had a hemopacardium, and bleeding in the chest cavity, which is a hemothorax.

He had no other evidence of injury and no other natural disease processes. So his cause of death was Blon-force injuries, and his manner of death, was accident. His toxicology findings will discuss shortly. So I had the cause of death, I had the manner of death, but I didn't understand how did this fireworks mortar cause his death? I wanted to find out what kind of force was involved. So how could I do that? So what I thought was I would

approach the local university where I work and go to their physics department. I met with one of the physics professors and he told me that he could help me out and figure out what this recoil force was. and I bought some more fireworks mortars. He and I met at a police training center that had a large open field. When he showed up on that day and got out of his car, he walked over, and the equipment he brought with him was a luggage scale. And I said to him, what is that? And he goes, well, this is a scientific instrument.

I go, well, it looks like a luggage scale. And he said, well, it might be a luggage scale, but it'll be able to measure the force. It'll be able to do what we needed to do. This luggage scale looked like a fancy weight scale. It was made out of metal, and it had a dial. where you could see the amount of weight that was on it. But there was no way of calculating that weight unless we were looking right at it. And there was no way I was going to stand next to it when those fireworks launched.

So first thing I said to him was, well, how are we going to document how much force there was? And he said, well, let's just set up a camera right next to it. We had two cameras at the time, so, okay, we could set one up. But I was a little concerned about it getting damaged. And how were we going to slow it down enough to be able to see this dial move? We set it up. We launched the first mortar shell and the explosion. happened, the mortar shelf shot into the air, and the mortar itself shot off the scale and fell

on the ground. When the physicist and I walked over, the scale was severely dented and broken. And he became very angry and said, well, that stupid firework just broke my scale. I can't believe this. And I said to him, I go, well, are we going to even be able to measure anything? He goes, I don't know. I'm done. This is ridiculous. He picked up his broken scale and left. We looked at the video from that one firework launch. It was so fast. There was no way you can even read the dial even when we slowed it down. So I had to find someone else to help me. I went back to that university and I approached a mechanical engineering professor. He told me that he could help and that I shouldn't have used a physicist because the physicist wouldn't have been able to figure that out

anyway. And engineers were better for the job. So he assigned to work with me, a PhD student by the name of Bonnie. And Bonnie and I had a meeting and we discussed how we could measure this recoil force. And what she came up with is she could make a force plate, which was made from metal, had sensors put in it, and then had the sensors connected to a computer, which had very long wires, so you didn't have to be next to the firework when it launched, so it was incredibly safe, and it was well constructed. So with Bonnie's help and her force plate, I purchased more fireworks, and this time we asked the fire marshal if we could use an area to fire off the fireworks. He said that we could use a fireman's training station, which had a nice large open field, but his one request was that he could watch the fireworks be launched as well and invite whomever he wanted, which I had no problem with. So at noon, on a nice sunny day, we went to go launch these fireworks. The fire marshal and his five friends showed up complaining that we were launching fireworks in the middle of the day, and there wasn't going to be any fancy show, and that was kind of dumb. I explained to him, we weren't there for the fireworks, we were there to collect data, which he understood, of course, but he was still disappointed.

Bonnie set up her force plate, hooked it up to a computer. We were about 10 yards away from the mortar and the force plate, so we were in a nice safety zone. So, I began launching the fireworks, and Bonnie began collecting the data. We launched off so many fireworks that day. I actually had a blister on my finger from using a lighter over and over and over. And after about three hours of launching fireworks, we had collected the data that we needed. Bonnie processed the data and came up with the following findings. The recoil force of the fireworks mortar was equivalent to being hit in

the chest by a baseball thrown at 90 miles per hour, which is a significant amount of force. So I had my answer. When the firework launched, the recoil force went back into the decedent's chest, fracturing his sternum and ribs, and pushed the broken bones into his heart, lacerating his heart, which caused bleeding. So with that information, I was satisfied with what happened. Case closed. So it's time for everybody to check their answers. And what was your answer? Was it alcohol, meth, or was it women? Well, it's a trick answer. It's two of the above. It was alcohol and women. His alcohol level was 0.22% in the blood, which means he roughly drank about 11 beers within the hour before his death. The other thing is, is there was women at the lake, too. He was trying to impress him by showing them how hard he was by launching this firework off his chest. And in his attempt to show off to women, and being intoxicated, he ended up dead. In closing, remember, always you. use fireworks appropriately because they aren't very dangerous. And for your men out there, listening

to the show, most women aren't very impressed by you doing dumb things. So just don't do it. That brings us to the end of the episode. I hope you learned something. And I hope you were entertained. Until the next time. This is an IHeart podcast.