This Past Weekend - E459 A Coroner
Episode Date: August 22, 2023On this episode of This Past Weekend, Theo Von chats with coroner Toby Savoy about what it’s like being a death investigator in today’s world. They talk about about why he got into the business of... corpses, the job no rookie wants to get, bloated bodies in the bayou, his take on the opioid crisis, what he’s learned after 18 years on the job, and why you can never really trust your cat… ------------------------------------------------ Tour Dates! https://theovon.com/tour New Merch: https://www.theovonstore.com ------------------------------------------------- Sponsored By: Celsius: Go to the Celsius Amazon store to check out all of their flavors. #CELSIUSBrandPartner #CELSIUSLiveFit https://amzn.to/3HbAtPJ Babbel: Go to http://babbel.com/theo to get up to 55% off your subscription. Factor: Go to http://factormeals.com/theo50 and use code theo50 to get 50% off. BlueChew: Go to http://bluechew.com and use code THEO to receive your first month FREE - just pay $5 shipping. Hexclad: Find your forever cookware @hexclad and get 10% off with promo code theo at http://hexclad.com/theo! #hexcladpartner BetterHelp: This episode is sponsored by BetterHelp — go to http://betterhelp.com/theo to get 10% off your first month. DraftKings: Download the DraftKings SportsBook app and use code THEO. New customers can score $200 in bonus bets instantly when you bet just $5 on any college football bet. Gambling problem? Call 1-800-Gambler. In New York, call 877-8-HOPENY or text HOPE NY (467369). In West Virginia, visit w w w dot 1 800 gambler dot net. In partnership with Hollywood Casino at Charles Town Races All games regulated by the West Virginia Lottery. Please play responsibly. In Connecticut, Help is available for problem gambling call 888-789-7777 or visit c c p g dot org. On behalf of Boot Hill Casino & Resort (KS). 21+ in most eligible states but age varies by jurisdiction. See draftkings dot com slash sportsbook for details and state specific responsible gambling resources. Bonus bets expire seven days after issuance. Eligibility and deposit restrictions apply. Terms at sportsbook dot draftkings dot com slash football terms. ------------------------------------------------- Music: "Shine" by Bishop Gunn: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F3A_coTcUek&ab_channel=BishopGunn ------------------------------------------------ Submit your funny videos, TikToks, questions and topics you'd like to hear on the podcast to: tpwproducer@gmail.com Hit the Hotline: 985-664-9503 Video Hotline for Theo Upload here: https://www.theovon.com/fan-upload Send mail to: This Past Weekend 1906 Glen Echo Rd PO Box #159359 Nashville, TN 37215 ------------------------------------------------ Find Theo: Website: https://theovon.com Instagram: https://instagram.com/theovon Facebook: https://facebook.com/theovon Facebook Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/thispastweekend Twitter: https://twitter.com/theovon YouTube: https://youtube.com/theovon Clips Channel: https://www.youtube.com/c/TheoVonClips Shorts Channel: https://bit.ly/3ClUj8z ------------------------------------------------ Producer: Zach https://www.instagram.com/zachdpowers/ Producer: Ben https://www.instagram.com/benbeckermusic/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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You've waited all year. I mean, you know it because that's how long it takes. If you want to get through a year, you got to wait a year. That's clockwork, baby.
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Aqua cream sickle and in to go get that in more only at TheoVonStore.com. Today's guest is a doctor of death baby. He's that corner and he's that death man. He sits right there on a door step at a devil and when the buzzer rings, he answers it.
He's based out of Lafayette, Louisiana and they got it all going down there. All type of death happening and he's gonna tell us more about it I'm grateful for his time today. He's 18 years in the profession
Today's guest is Mr. Toby Savwad.
And you are a corner.
I am actually a death investigator for the corner's office.
The corner is somewhat of a political position, involves being a doctor.
So we have a doctor that's a corner over or a parish.
And then the majority of the work is done by death investigators like myself.
Okay.
Now in Louisiana, they know you as the coroner.
Just, you know, it's too hard to break down
medical death investigator versus coroner or coroner's office.
Oh, it's too hard to break down a good oyster dress
and recipe over there for somebody.
That's right.
You know what I'm saying?
You put too much information on somebody in Louisiana,
and it gonna start punching.
That's right.
Especially at a time of death.
They're not registering all that.
So we go with coroner's office. but we are legally death investigators. Okay. So when does someone
call a corner and and what is a corner death investigator? I'm going to call it a corner for the
episode. That's fine. Okay. What is a corner? So a corner is an elected position. But what we do is we go out when someone dies or we're called every time someone dies that lives within our parish.
Okay, our county, our county in Louisiana.
It's parishes.
Um, so we, we'll, we're called if it's a natural case or if it's a homicide, suicide, uh, any of the manners of death.
Um, there's different rules for people that may not be
from Louisiana or from or city and state.
If it's a natural cause, it would go back
to that state of residence,
but any time it's an accident or just your general natural
death, it comes to us.
We have to pick up the phone and decide,
you know, is this natural causes or is there foul play?
We work closely with police. Okay, So the police give you a call.
That's right. We get a call from the sheriff's office, the local
city police, hospitals, nursing homes, and they say, Toby, we
got a, yeah, we have a case. We have a, we have a, so in
healthcare, we say patients, but in the corner's office, it's
subject. So we have a subject here who's
an 86 year old lay in in bed. Okay, and so then I know what questions to ask and how to pick the case of port and do you guys
Physically go to the scene we do okay not all scenes. I mean if it's an 80 year old who's on high-pertention medicine and blood pressure medicine heart medication
That's a gimmie.
Yeah.
That has a really, really history of medical history.
We don't necessarily have to go out for those.
The police are there to call foul play.
Right.
But if they're laying in bed and they were found
by their spouse, it's normally a natural case.
If they see something that may look suspicious,
then we will go out.
All right.
But for the majority of the naturals, we don't.
We can release those by phone and direct them
to a funeral home.
Not even a Zoom, you really don't have to do Zoom
or nothing?
Nothing.
No, we just take the call, get the information.
We still investigate the death,
but we don't have to go out for everyone.
Okay.
So when you do go out, do you take like a toolkit with you
or what do you guys, is there like,
what do you bring with you? How do you approach a scene like if it's a death?
Yeah, so subject.
So we have a bag of gear that we use now.
In Louisiana, we're a poor state and a poor parish.
When I started, they gave me a can of off in a badge.
Really?
They said tell us when they did, no, season.
Oh, yeah.
But basically, we go out.
So we have tools that we use on scene.
We need a flashlight to see around sometimes.
The biggest thing that we do on scene
after investigating the scene, which goes into a lot of things,
we'll do toxicology, we'll draw blood.
If the person suspected overdose,
or overdose might be a possibility.
And most of the overdoses, by the way,
are accidental overdoses.
People here, OD, and they think intentional.
But so if we think drugs were involved,
we'll bring a spinal needle or just a regular syringe.
We can draw blood out of the heart,
which is like a pulp fiction scene,
the movie with the long spinal needle.
Y'all go right in.
We go right in the heart.
There's no pulse.
So, getting blood out of veins when they're deceased is not a thing that we can do.
So we take blood from the heart or we can go in through the side of the eye.
That's called vitriol fluid.
And how much is in the eye?
So we get about, you know, four CCs out of the eye.
It's not always some have more than others.
Really?
But we'll go in, we'll tap in through the side of the eye.
Are you not into the eyeball?
Yeah, I'm into the eyeball.
So I take a two or three inch long needle and I go in at a horizontal angle just to puncture
it and then I aspirate the fluid out of there.
That's in the eye.
That's in the eye.
Yeah. So that in the eye. That's in the eye. Yeah.
So that's toxicology.
And when you're getting in out the eyeball,
there's less of a chance that it could clot up,
because we send these specimens to forensic toxicology labs.
So when you're going through the heart and the lung,
sometimes you can have blood clots in it and other things,
and they may not be able to perform the test.
99.9% of them
with blood are fine, but it is nice having that. And the heart's not always easy to find whether
it could be a core accident. They could have some major crushing going on in the chest. It could be
a gunshot wound where there's no blood left in the heart that we can get. So the eye is a second
option. And then if that doesn't work, we can actually put a slit in the belly and pull out a piece
of liver and send part of their liver off to a lab to be analyzed.
So we have a syringe with several different size needles and tools to use if we have to
cut into them to grab liver to send off.
And so that's all for taking toxicology.
That's right.
Okay.
And what death determine toxicot?
Like which so you said if it seems like a natural death,
you guys can almost do it over the phone.
Right.
It's not if it's a different type of death,
where there could have been a homicide or an accident,
then you want to show up and do toxicology.
Correct.
And we do more than toxicology.
We're investigating the scene, everything around it,
the home.
Oh, I mean, we have to, we look at everything, not only the body,
but the surroundings. A lot of times that'll paint a picture of what's going on with that individual
case. For instance, I had a case where, you know, the deputy was new. He thought it was suspicious
because the 80-year-old wife woke up and noticed her spouse was cold. And the timeline on that case, the deputy said, he's really cold and she's just finding
him.
Well, that's natural.
You're sleeping.
You may not notice your significant other as cold to the touch until later.
Yeah, especially if you don't have any type of intimate relationship.
Right.
Well, you're 80 years old.
You've been sleeping together for 50 years, you know.
But he thought it was suspicious.
So in that regard, I went out and said, no,
she just rolled over and noticed that he was cold.
There's no foul play here.
This 80 year old lady didn't whack her husband,
you know, after marriage for 50 years.
And if she did without showing signs of any trauma
then good for her, you know, they've been married
for way too long.
But no, so some natural, yeah, at some point,
somebody you gotta give her the benefit of the doubt.
Yeah, yeah, we'll go out when they question something.
Like, so say on a scene,
are the police or sheriffs, are they happy to see you?
Or do you sometimes, do they think,
oh, this guy tries to contradict what we think usually?
No, no, they're, they're, they really like when we come out.
A lot of times detectives will wait to hear
if we're responding.
If we're responding, then there could be something abnormal
then detectives will also come.
Different agencies use their detectives in different ways.
Some respond to all others don't.
It just depends on the time and place.
But there are many difficult scenes to respond on.
But they're looking to us to help them rule out foul play
and other things like that.
So you guys have separate training than they do.
Correct, we're medicine based,
they're law enforcement based.
Although those guys really do a good job,
as especially the ones that have been there a while,
sometimes they'll call things that I may have not noticed yet,
you know, and they'll say, hey, what about this?
And they'll also give us a description of what went on.
They can look at the history of that subject to see,
you know, this person's been arrested
several times for drug abuse or domestic violence, et cetera.
So they're giving us information that we can use on that scene and on that investigation.
So take me through like an interesting call that's coming in, especially down there in Louisiana,
a day. I knew people that couldn't learn how to better and they took their own life.
That's right. We see a lot of that. There's a lot of preventable deaths that we can talk about, but a typical call in Louisiana
is anything from heart disease, suicide, OD.
But to be more specific, we've had many that they find a body floating in the bayou.
That can be different because they've been exposed to water.
They may be bloated more.
Some of the surface evidence or the trace evidence that we use is not there because they've been exposed to water. So, you know, they may be bloated more. Some of the surface evidence or the trace evidence
that we use is not there because they've been floating.
You can see where turtles and other animals
in the water have nipped at them.
Oh, yeah.
So it can be somewhat gruesome and then hard to tell,
you know, why are they in this water?
You know, they're dressed in regular street clothes.
They weren't, you know, they weren't swimming.
They weren't swimming, they weren't fishing,
they're in the water.
Sometimes people OD, and their friends have no clue
what to do with them, so they throw them into the bayou.
Sometimes these guys are just, you know,
hanging out and they slip and fall and hit their head
or they pass out, you know, we don't always know
what got them to the bayou.
Now how do those bodies look if you roll up on a buck?
Because I've always wanted to find a deceased body
I think a lot of you have bucket list of mine. I see them every day, but I've never rolled up on one. Yeah, yeah, yeah
That is why is that a bucket list thing for people I don't know, but it happens often
I had a guy cutting the grass at a at a rent house and found a body
Did he get any intel or he just got lucky? No, he just got lucky.
He was cutting grass and boom, he found that body.
A lot of times if you work and stay focused and you keep working towards, I mean, you know,
it's better than something lazy to do, he's doing nothing, finding a body.
At least that guy's out there doing something.
Well, when that lazy person finds a body, you got a question.
How'd you find this body?
You know, we had one.
Recently, that was just a driver was passing by and there was a lady in the
ditch.
Now what was interesting was her arms were removed.
She was a Mexican female.
Yeah, Mexican are.
So they removed her arms because of her tattoos.
So this was a, oh, the killer, this was a hit job.
Correct.
And they didn't want her identified.
So they see this in a ditch and they call us
And then we got to figure out where's the arms, you know, so
There's interesting cases like that where people just you know, they write time right place and they find bodies and say
You said did you roll up on that scene with no arms? Yes. Yes, so when you get there what's going on like are people milling around is somebody
Yes. So when you get there, what's going on? Like are people milling around is somebody?
You know, like what's the scene like when you roll up on it? Well, in that regard, there's no families present, you know, it's different than most, you know, it's a lot of sheriffs
standing around looking at the dead body. Now we have jurisdiction on that body and legally,
they're not supposed to touch that body until we get there. Okay. So of course I would get there, look at the scene, you know, to try to find out
does she have family around here, what she doing in this area, she's not from here.
They'll do an investigation, law enforcement will do an investigation on their part,
and then I'll start looking at the body for obvious signs of foul play. And in this regard, she had no arms.
So when you something wasn't right, it wasn't like an alligator or an animal came out and removed
her arms. This was intentional. Wow. You know, so in that case, we would get them to an autopsy.
Oh, yeah. And do you look for the arms? Are you just think, just kind of put a note, like,
keeping out, like, keeping out for arms or whatever,
like, what do y'all do about the arms?
You don't worry about it.
Well, the Sheriff's Office and law enforcement,
they were about that.
They worry about that.
Yeah, I mean, of course we all look around the scene
to see if we find anything,
because there could be evidence on those arms.
But many times they go, you know, unfound.
Oh, gosh, it'd be crazy. Yeah, you know, unfound.
Oh, gosh, it'd be crazy. Yeah, I mean, I had a guy find a foot once.
It was from a fatality, but they called me,
and this was, you know, weeks later,
hey, we found a foot, would you come pick it up?
They 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 a different lifestyle, you know?
Yeah, you know, if I get pulled over, yeah, you know, carrying anything, yeah, man, I got a foot. It's it's it's a different lifestyle, you know, yeah, you know, if I get pulled over
Yeah, you know carrying anything. Yeah, man, I got a foot in my car. Yeah, I got a 10 and a half in the trunk
Absolutely, absolutely dude. That's wow, man. Yeah, that's interesting and you put that foot in the trunk
You put it in the back seat. What do you do? Yeah, well in that case, I figured it would be pretty pretty norly
So I've actually brought a disposable ice chest and packed it in there and then got it to the funeral
home that they brought her body to. She may have been sent to cremation, but either way,
the funeral home would take care of that body part. Okay.
Enough traveled was with worse. And, you know, in Louisiana, it doesn't snow often.
They had, we had a case years ago where there was an infant death and the autopsy places
in the autopsy places about an hour and a half away from where we live or where we work
and our parish.
So they had a baby that had passed away and they asked, hey, it was snowing really bad,
hey, can you meet us halfway with this child?
And I'm in my personal car, I'm like sure.
So the baby, of course, is in a body bag.
So I'm driving down the highway with a baby in my car.
And how big is that body bag?
It's like a gallon or something.
I'm a big boy.
Well, it's like a duffel bag for a baby.
But again, you get pulled over.
I have an unmarked car.
I'm in street clothes or normally scrubs.
What are you carrying? At least you're not in a mead or something.
Yeah. Yeah. You don't worry.
Well, you get pulled over in a mead and you got a baby in a duffel bag.
Bro, I kind of went over the speed limit just to kind of maybe man,
if I could only get pulled over here, you know, it would be an interesting case.
Oh, every pass.
But no, you know, it's sad for when we lose babies like that.
But the fact of the matter is the baby
needed to go to autopsy.
And we'll do anything we can to have cyst in that regard.
And if it meant drive and through the snow,
30, 45 minutes, we'll do that.
Yeah, that's some of the things that we do to help.
So your responsibility then,
you feel a responsibility to determine how people died, is that it?
Correct.
We figure out why they died.
We put all the pieces of a puzzle together.
Some are cut and dry.
We can look at their medication, their age, do they smoke, drink, how much do they weigh,
are they unhealthy?
You can tell that by their homes, too.
I mean, so I'm a cage and investigator, right?
The first thing I'll look at is their fridge.
I don't even look at the body.
I walk in the house and I open the fridge.
And you know, when there's pizza bones and a spoon
and a jar of beans and maybe some rotten poppies
and a couple of 40 ounce beers,
I know this person wasn't living a healthy lifestyle.
Yeah, I know this person was listed
in a mystical too.
That's right.
That's right.
So I'm thinking heart disease from the get-go.
Okay.
So, you know, again, we look at their home,
the cleanliness, the order of their home.
You can tell how people live.
So a lot of times the body is a reflection
of its environment that it lives in.
Absolutely. Wow.
So I was called to one case where the deputies said, this case is unusual.
It would like you to come out.
And so then I go out and they had noticed some blood dripping on the floor, blood stains.
Out of the body?
Just in no, just on the floor.
Okay.
That's all they noticed.
Right. They saw that and then the body was an adult male on a couch.
Okay.
So I walk into the house and I mean, we're reading everything that minute we get on
scene, even what friends and family are there, how do they look, who's their neighbors,
what area they live in.
So I walk into the house and this was kind of in the country.
And the first thing I see is he had Mickey's
malt liquor, memorabilia everywhere.
So I said, okay, okay, I like this guy style.
You know, he's an old age guy.
He's a cap of cig probably.
Yeah, so I'm looking at that and then I asked the detectives
to show me where the blood stains are.
Well, I go and I look and there was some cobwebs
over the door so I could tell that that home had that that area of the house hadn't been used.
Okay.
Just from the cobwebs and stuff.
Okay.
But when I opened the fridge there was an intact hawks head in the fridge with fur on it.
Ooh.
I mean that's odd, you know, and so then I look in the oven and the guys making cracklings
in an oven.
Now if you've ever made cracklings, you know, you're stirring those in grease.
When you bake in cracklings on a Tuesday night and you save the hogs head to make hogs head
cheese later, you're going to definitely have heart disease.
There's no foul play here, fellas.
And that blood probably came when he was moving the hogs head from the kitchen to the
... from the counter to the refrigerator.
Oh, from the actual haul, you think?
Yeah, yeah, absolutely.
So, you know, again.
And then when you own your last limb for a snack,
and I'm talking about, yeah.
That's crazy.
When you bake in cracklings, bro,
you're gonna have high cholesterol out of minimum.
But, you know, again, the blood stains triggered the law enforcement to call.
And the fridge told me the story.
As well as the way the guy lived,
he smoked cigarettes, he had alcohol everywhere.
The papa was a rolling stone.
That environment told me what was going on with him.
Right, it gave you a lot of clues right there.
Yeah, cracklings, you gotta have the heat's gotta be so high
on cracklings, man, you can't do it in an oven, I don don't think I've never tried it. I don't know, but he was you know
He definitely tried to pull up how to make cracklings. He could pull that I just want to get this recipe my sister would make
I'm out there. They lived off of all in gizolus
So we make them you get a big large black pot right you put it out in your you got to cut that stuff up the fire under it
You cut that fat up and then you put it in grease.
Yeah, and you just constantly stir that grease.
Pouring will pot deep enough that the top of oil
is at least six inches from the rim.
Place over medium high heat when the oil reaches
225 degrees on a deep fat frying thermometer,
add the pork cubes and start stirring to prevent clumpin.
Yeah, so it's high oil.
I guess you can bake them.
If you bake them long enough, but...
God, that's risky though.
Yeah, it's just, it can't taste good, I don't know.
Yeah, I couldn't imagine it.
Because you got to really get them to pop and so I just couldn't imagine them doing it well.
And you do dumb shit when you're drinking.
You know, maybe it was one of those nights.
Like, hey, let's bake some cracklets.
Yeah, who knows?
Let's give it a run, yeah.
Yeah, yeah.
Yeah, I don't know if it did.
No, that felt like I have a wife
or did they seem kind of lonesome?
No, he was single.
He did have a family and children, you know, on scene.
But he lived alone.
Now, say if you pull up on like,
let's go back to that water body, right?
Right.
What happens to a body when it's in water?
Because I think, sometimes a lot of people fantasize,
it's one of the fantasies I'm gonna find a body.
I would see either in the woods by the interstate,
or I'm gonna walk down by a creek bank
and there's gonna be a body right there.
I think that's some of the general fantasy of humans.
What does that body realistically look like
depending on how long it's been in?
Yeah, so, you know, it bloats. You get a lot
of bloating in the water. The whole body puffs up. Normally the tongue protrudes out.
You don't think about that. The gases and the gases and the decomposure, you know, the
body's sink and then they rise when the gases start to fill up the body. And that's when
we find them. A lot of times they'll be snagged in branches
on a bayou or in the river.
But that body's gonna bloat a lot.
And then again, turtles and other animals out in the water
will start pecking at them.
So it looks a little bit more traumatic than it is.
But if we're unsure, we can always send that body
to autopsy to try to determine
exactly what happened. And they'll take them apart. And a lot of times they'll cut into their
heart and realize, well, this guy had a massive heart attack. I say, you know, so there was no foul
play or he's full of drugs and there's no external trauma. So nobody hit him in the back of the head
and threw him in there. Yeah, maybe pull up a little water bloat for us.
Ooh.
Yeah, so that's, you know, you can find
a lot in these days.
That did look like a Simpsons character, huh?
He does.
Sorry to say that, I feel bad, it's a human being.
Oh my gosh.
So we go from looking pretty healthy to not healthy pretty pretty pretty quickly. I mean, that's unbelievable
Yeah, and you know especially in Louisiana. It's so hot and so humid and you'd just be amazed that
People that live with no electricity. Oh, bro. If you leave a baby in New York for 30 minutes, bro
I'd have algae on once. Yeah, yeah, I mean it you know, it's
It's just like that nature really rains the cream down there.
It really does.
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I'm just amazed at how many senior citizens live
with no running water, no electricity in
August when it's 100 degrees outside.
But it's all over Louisiana.
These senior citizens have a hard time paying for their medication, much less an expensive
electricity bill.
And then some people are just really hardcore on drugs.
We had a house one time that in the kitchen, there was a piece of plywood.
When the officers slid the plywood back
That's where they were using the restroom. They were shitting in a hole in the kitchen and then they would cover it up
Mm-hmm with a piece of wood. I mean that's that's pretty hardcore in your home
But you'll see enemies to really you'll see that you know with people that just abuse drugs to the point of
You know they're living in condemned homes or.
What's that been like with the drug use and stuff?
Like do you guys come upon a lot of like ODs and stuff?
What's that, has that changed the way you even approach
the industry?
I mean, how busy has that gotten things?
Yeah, that's, you know, when I first started 18 years ago,
we would have occasional ODs, accidental ODs, but that
has increased by 1,000 since fentanyl has hit the streets.
Fentanyl and crystal meth, the ODs are every day, every day.
It affects every age group you can imagine.
Really? every age group you can imagine. The opioid epidemic came.
And that was started,
the whole opioid thing was started
when hospitals started using surveys
to compare themselves to other hospitals.
It was called the press gainy.
And one of the questions in that survey was,
how did we treat your pain?
So, and the reason behind the survey was,
hospitals all have the same equipment.
You have the same MRI as the hospital,
20 miles down the road.
All your equipment's the same.
But what can you do better than another?
And that's customer service.
So all these patients would get these satisfaction surveys
in the mail, and I worked in the hospitals.
And so we would actually skit things.
So when they got home, they would remember key words and they would rate us or they would
give us a good rating, for instance, do you have, no, did they have enough time for you
in the hospital?
So we were instructed to say, is there anything else I can do for you?
I have time.
So was this a plan as a strategy?
Wow.
Yeah. And so then how did we treat your pain was another one.
And the press gain, it was called?
Yeah.
And it was a, I mean, it's a great program, you know, to teach us people how to really,
people in hospitals, how to really, you know, go the extra mile for patients.
We do things that we don't think about.
We, you know, we close that door before we, you know, do a test on you, so you're not
exposed. But we don't, you don't you, so you're not exposed.
But you don't really know that we're doing that.
So things like, hey, I'm going to close this door for your privacy.
It was a great program, but one of the things was paying control.
So you think of that?
Do you think that that was the motive of the program?
Or do you think that that was just a side effect of the program that they-
That was a side effect.
You don't think that they strategize this program just in order to get people to be able to
give them, for them to notice, okay, for them to get that answer about the pain.
Right, no, no, not at all.
And it was absolutely a side effect, if you will, of that...
Press, gainy, it's cold?
Yeah.
Let's bring it up.
I don't know if that's still a...
They still do surveys of
Christ, but in the 90s that that was one that 98% of all hospitals used. A lot of
hospitals were owned by the the same corporation. So you had five or six
hospitals in your area and they would do side by side comparisons of each
other. And we all wanted to have the highest rating., so your hospital wants to go for the best rating.
We're ranked number five in the nation.
We're ranked number three in the first two in the state.
Exactly.
So this is press Gainee right here and they are, get to know your patients like never before,
see patients from every angle to prioritize and predict their needs.
You scroll down a little, just want to see what it is.
So it's about patient experience tools.
Yes.
So this is a company that helps practitioners, I guess,
know how to best treat their patients.
Is that right?
Correct.
Okay, press game.
So when you go to the hospital, even today, when you get home,
you'll get a survey in the mail.
I see.
And then you know, you fill out that survey and mail it back.
Same as when you call AT&T and they say, would you hold, you know, to complete this customer
service survey?
But so then, you know, how did we treat your pain was one of them.
And so then physicians started ordering more pain medication, not intentionally to hurt
the patient.
This wasn't the goal.
But you'd get a patient with a broken arm
and instead of getting 15 tablets on discharge,
they'd give you 60.
So a lot of the opiate addiction
started from the overutilization
of prescribing pain medication.
A dentist might give you 40,
whereas the 40 hydrocodones or Lorde tabs
or oxycodones, instead of giving you 10,
they would, you know, give you 40 or 60.
So the government came in and with the opioid epidemic
and they tamped that down and put it in regulations.
So we wouldn't hand out so many pain pills.
We, the addiction rose by 100%.
But it took a long time for them to come in and do that.
Yeah, it did.
And so, then. So you guys were experiencing a lot of overdose death.
Not so, yeah, yes. But, you know, the overdoses weren't necessarily from just taking hydro-apat.
Okay. There was always like a polydrug abuse, meaning multiple drugs being used. But those were still rare
at the time. We didn't get as many overdoses as we do now.
You know, I miss crack. The crack days were so much easier than the fentanyl days.
Because why is that? Because it's that much more lethal.
Oh, crack is. Yeah. Fentanyl. Fentanyl is much more, you know, the crack epidemic was a thing.
But then the when the pain epidemic hit,
that's when we really started losing people. So what's the difference between like a crack
death and a fentanyl death? Well, I mean, it's basically going to be a cardiac event.
Fentanyl, you know, you stop breathing. That's a very powerful drug.
Back to the opioid, the docs were given out medication.
People were getting addicted.
And then the government came in and stopped it.
And they just cut everybody off.
And they made it to where physicians could get in a lot of trouble if they overprescribed.
And then I think they came back after that, just recently and said,
hey, we didn't mean not to treat people with pain,
because then you have a lot of people turning to heroin.
You know, when you're taking opiates
and you're on them for, you know, five or six years
and you're addicted, and then one day
you just can't get any, a lot of people turn to heroin.
We really didn't have a great system
to get people in to rehabs.
If you want to commit somebody for drug abuse,
they have to go voluntarily.
And you can imagine that not everyone wants to go.
Another role of the coroner's office,
we have the ability to remove you from your,
we can take you and send you somewhere
or really?
Against your will.
Yeah, and that's the other arm of the coroner's office.
Oh, I didn't know that at all, but but so you get, but how do you get those calls because you think the corner or death
investigators are just getting called about death. So who's calling you? Yeah, law enforcement, they know that oh, they say,
Hey, this guy over here, we need, we think he should be 5150 or something. Yeah, he needs to be on a hospital.
Okay.
We need to get him to an ER and into a psych hospital.
Can you guys help us with that?
Right.
So, yeah, so that we fill out paperwork, the coroner actually signs off on the paperwork
and then the police can go and remove you against your will and bring you to an ER.
But we send all these patients 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 heroin and smoking crack and drinking and she gets to the ER and they say, well, yeah, you have
a problem, but drugs are your choice, so therefore I'm going to discharge you. And the reasoning behind
that 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 doctors know, I can't force this person to go to rehab. You know that if you want to quit it has to be your decision.
So a lot of those patients are let go and then unfortunately we'll get a coroner call on an OD
from one of those exact patients that we sent to the ER. So you see a lot of repeated fenders,
hypothetically it's repeated fenders when these people show back up or repeatedly have harmed themselves with drugs.
And then a lot of second, third times it's death.
Absolutely.
I mean, the most patients, I say most patients,
a lot of patients have a psychiatric diagnosis.
So when there's a dual diagnosis,
you can put them in a rehab in a psych facility.
But even that is a five to six day stay
and then they're discharged. And then they to six days stay and then their discharge.
And then they have to get home and take their medication that was prescribed, which they
don't.
Then they end up coming back through their coroner's office and going back to the EOR.
Some of these guys own drugs.
It was one that really, really, that was really hard to deal with recently, was a veteran.
I know his family. They had played some audio recordings
of this guy just crying at night, saying he needed help, but then he would turn to
meth and get high and then refuse, refuse help. I mean, this guy had had kills under his
belt, you know, and we don't want to label people well. He's just a hard process on some. Yeah
We lose we lose people, you know, yeah, and it's tough waiting for somebody to get well enough or have enough of a break through their own
Vision or perspective to see that they need help. That's the hardest thing to try and you can't really influence anybody
You know, I mean you can but it's just
Nobody wants to hear that people don't want to hear often you know? I mean, you can, but it's just, nobody wants to hear that.
People don't want to hear often, you need help.
They just don't accept it, you know?
Or they're trying.
Or they're trying to drug up sometimes.
Yeah, and you do interventions and stuff,
and sometimes people don't want that.
I tell families, you know, because we have them where,
you know, the families will send them,
they'll go to a psych unit, then they'll get out, and they'll die.
Either by suicide or drug overdose.
And a lot of times I'll tell families,
look, you have to try.
You have to try.
You can't force your child to go to drug rehab.
A lot of people are nervous about sending people
because the sheriffs show up and they put you in a court
and they bring you to the ear.
And a lot of families just are scared to do it.
Then I always tell them,
we don't know the outcome of this,
but you have to try.
You have to get them in front of somebody professional.
And if they get out and they keep doing the same thing
over and over, then in the day you know you tried.
Yeah.
Yeah, man, that's such a battle.
It's heartbreaking to see the effects of all that,
of all like the opioid epidemic and just the all the fentanyl deaths
But are you noticing less of those are you noticing no so fentanyl deaths are every day
Every day and it's you know I go out throughout the state
Well throughout the parish and I've been giving lectures and I'd love to do more on fentanyl
It's a hundred times stronger than morphine.
I forget the exact numbers on that,
but it's extremely potent.
Overall drug overdose desk rose from 2019 to 2021
with more than 100, 6000 drug overdose desk reported
in 2021.
And that was during the pandemic.
Descindling synthetic opioids other than methadone,
primarily fentanyl,
continued to rise.
So imagine a football stadium
that holds 100,000 fans.
Okay.
Tiger stadium maybe almost.
Pretty much.
Almost.
So that's how many people were losing a year.
Next time you watch a football game in a big stadium,
just imagine that many bodies.
Yeah.
And that's the ones we know about.
There's so many unknowns that we don't catch, but we're losing that many Americans to
it.
And it's young kids.
Oh, it's unbelievable.
They have pill presses now.
So I can take an oxycodone, a real one, and I can take a fake one and put it in front
of a pharmacist that has 40,
50 years experience.
And he can't tell me which one is real and which one is fake.
And they do the same thing with Xanax, Adderall.
So all these things kids take.
Everybody has a crazy aunt and they've heard the word Xanax before.
So you have a high school kid.
Maybe the girls have in boy troubles.
Maybe she's on her period, and a friend says,
hey, take a half a Xanax, it'll help you relax.
And that one tablet is fatal.
Yeah, you know, and that happens.
Because it's a pressed pill, you're saying.
It's a pressed pill.
Right.
And so pressed pills is where they basically replicate it,
but they use fentanyl up in there.
Correct.
Because it is more powerful, it's cheaper to replicate
than making the actual product. Correct, to replicate than making the actual product.
Correct. You can't get the actual product. So they make it look identical to the real thing.
And people don't know if you're buying, especially if you're some kid, you don't know.
No, you don't. And what I was told was you can bring back, you can smuggle across the border
a coffee bag of fentanyl versus 20 pounds of of meth and you're going to have a higher profit
margin on that little bag of coffee which contains fentanyl then you would on all that meth.
So the quartels are sending in loads and loads of fentanyl and it's snowballed into heroin.
You know, so we see when we were younger, you know, movie stores did heroin. Yeah.
You know, we didn't see much of that coming up. But now I was like,
I'd have money to do it.
Right.
Now it's everywhere.
Yeah.
You know, some of the people,
you just, you'd be amazed at how many good looking,
young kids do heroin.
But actually it's not heroin.
You know, there's one form of heroin called China White,
which is a snortable form.
Yeah.
People brag about that a lot in the recovery meeting.
Yeah. You know what I'm using that. Yeah, you can sn that a lot in the recovery meeting. Yeah, using that.
Yeah, you can snort it.
You don't have to shoot it.
So what they're doing is they're selling it,
but it's fentanyl.
Fentanyl comes in a microgram dose.
So when you get a milligram dose,
I mean, that's just a fatal dose.
So we're seeing it every day.
And when you roll up on a case like that, right?
Where are those cases at?
What does that look like? What does that body look like as you roll up on a case like that, right, where are those cases at? What does that look like?
What does that body look like as you come up on it? Yeah. So they're normally in a natural position on
the couch or in bed. But we know, you know, this person has had repeated run-ins with the law. A
lot of times we'll we'll see the evidence. You know, they have a belt. You know, they've been shooting up.
They have their belt.
They have their syringes.
And again, nobody touches the body until we get there.
And we can, and I can talk to the family
and get it out of them.
Fentanyl is the worst that we've ever seen.
And now they're mixing it with other drugs,
like xylazine, which is a vet drug.
You hear it referred to as trink.
This has created these massive ulcers on people,
but they're even having to make fentanyl stronger.
When someone dies on fentanyl,
the users in the area, you think they'd be scared of it.
Like, I don't wanna get that batch, but they want it.
They wanna know where that person got that batch
so they can get a better buzz from it.
Oh, dude, one time I was with my dad,
and he would take us to the park
and he would sleep in his car while we would play it,
or whatever, and he gave us like a case of kit cat bars
or whatever, and we're breaking them
and throwing them out to this squirrel, right?
And the squirrel ate a bunch of it and died, right?
And because I guess they can't have chocolate or whatever.
But in the distance, dude, you saw like 30 other squirrels
hopping over.
Yeah.
And by the end of the day, bro, we'd, oh.
I have to remember that when we squirrel hunt.
We'd, oh yeah, bro.
You get a KitKat.
I don't know if it works with that new white chocolate one,
but I know like the original one.
The old school one.
Bro, I mean, you could look in the distance to the park
and you just saw them all just hopping over,
you know, don't tell somebody from Louisiana that Kit Kass are going to sky rock. And that's what we do.
We squirrel hunt. You know, do you shoot anything if it's in a friggin tree? There's a parish.
If a rope swing gets a little wild, somebody will gond it down. There's a parish in Louisiana and
up until literally a few years ago, the school board opening day squirrel season,
school board closed down. So everyone should go in the school board, opening day, squirrel season, school board closed down.
So everyone should go in the woods on that opening day.
I mean, can you imagine that?
The whole town is absent on opening squirrel season.
Yeah.
Everybody, all the men and kids are in the woods
and all the women are in the bars.
That's a party, you know.
That's a party, dude.
All the squirrels, but yeah.
So the fentanyl deaths has been high.
That's been really, really crazy.
It's out of control.
Yeah.
It's out of control.
Odese used to be, you know, death is seasonal.
We have different deaths in different parts of the year.
We know what to expect.
Oh, really?
Yeah.
So, you know, winter time, you're going to get your, you know, a lot of naturals because
the weather's changing.
Oh, yeah.
You're going to get hunting accidents, you know, Cajun's falling out of tree stands.
Right.
Breaking their neck, you know, they, you know, everything
imaginable in the woods.
You got, you got Cajun's with guns in the woods.
So, then you get into the springtime.
Weather starts getting nice in Louisiana.
We don't have many, many months of nice weather.
So then here comes the motorcycles.
So we start getting motorcycle deaths.
Not a organ donor right there.
Lots in the springtime.
A buddy of mine's office is full of motorcycle helmets.
And I asked him when,
why do you have motorcycle?
I mean, literally around his whole office
and he'd run all types of clinic.
And he said, I just keep the helmets on all the ones we do.
Yeah, so that's a little bit of a collector's item.
He's got going with it.
Yeah, so those all had living people in them that don't look like it.
Absolutely.
Motorcycles are dangerous, and I'd love to own one, but in Louisiana, we have so many
roads that pop out on major highways, and you're doing 60 miles, 70 miles an hour on a motorcycle
and a car pulls out, you're done.
Right, yeah.
You know, but we see that in the springtime, summertime, we see drownings.
So every season brings its own type of nature. Yeah. Yeah. Manors of death. Manors of death.
You know, the holidays are expected, unexpected. Really? You get, for us, you get the most brutal,
you know, tear jerking sad cases, especially around Christmas and New Year's, whether it's...
Like, tick me through something.
Yeah, so a family dies, or children, a lot of children.
So a family that...
Mom and Dad have three or four kids.
Three or four kids are killed two days before Christmas and a car accident.
I mean, how do you deal with that?
As a parent, it's hard enough to lose one, much less all.
But again, that's the holidays.
We get these heart-wrenching cases.
I always tell people to expect the unexpected
and during the holiday time.
You really have to be careful.
And Louisiana, we drink 24, 7, all day.
Oh, yeah.
You know, it's just, it's just what we do in Louisiana.
And so driving, a lot of people want to Christmas parties and events, pull out
for drinking and driving.
There's, you know, there's preventable deaths.
And oftentimes I'll tell friends and family that, you know, if you have to go
somewhere and it's a two lane highway versus a four lane, even though it might
take 15 minutes longer
to get to your destination,
take that bigger highway,
where you're not one on one with traffic.
Because I guess that's 70% of the cars you're passing
or drivers under the influence.
And that's all you're long.
I mean, you realize how close you come to other cars
when you're on a back road,
you know, trying to get somewhere.
Well, especially in Louisiana, bro.
Yeah, there's no lights that roads are dark.
And also, I remember you back in the day, man,
if when you got out of work, you got a freaking beer.
Yeah, you would have,
you'd see people all the time,
driving home at the stop,
going across the causeway or something
in a wave-action, they show you their beer, right?
It was part of, it's part of the culture.
I don't know about anywhere else, but in Louisiana,
we have places where you can pull up,
drive in windows, and get margaritas. That's just common.
Oh, you could stick your head in a strange, just fucking house window, and they'll put a shot of
branding in your throat. That's right. That's right. You know, if you need it.
So, yeah, that's just Louisiana, bro. It's just part of it, you know, I think.
So, that makes road safety that much more dangerous.
Take me on a like a,, has there been a case,
like take me on a kind of a heart wrenching case,
you know, and I don't know,
I feel horrible even saying that,
like, but take me on one that really took your heart
out of your body, man.
Well, first I wanna give my condolences
to the police officers that have been shot,
lately, where I'm from, the parish that I live in,
neighbors of or the parish is next to us. We own Vermillion, where I'm from, the parish that I live in, neighbors of or
the parishes next to us.
We are on Vermilion, where you guys?
It's St. Landry.
Okay.
So, Lafayette parish, Evangelan parish, just in the last week, they've had three or four
instances where officers have been shot and killed.
So, it's really sad.
Those are always tough.
Police officers are good guys. We were all scared of them when we were younger.
But, you know, when you get to know these guys and they're all great people and it's hard
to see I had an officer that was shot years ago and it was such a surreal thing to zip
up an officer in a uniform.
He had the black stripe across his badge.
I guess that was around 2015
when they started doing those black stripes
on their badges and it was such a surreal event to do.
But back to those heart-wrenching cases,
for me, it would be friends, family of friends.
You had to roll up on somebody and then it's somebody you know.
Yeah, that's the thing is when I'm getting to a core accident, you know, in my hometown,
I start seeing cores that I recognize and as I'm walking up to that, to the wreck, you
know, I might see a Nissan Ultima or something.
Oh, yeah.
For a minute, your heart drops like, oh, is that so and so.
My best friend lost his wife unexpectedly.
And so they had moved in from Tennessee
and he had lost his wife unexpectedly.
And that was really hard.
They had three young children at the time
and it was hard dealing with that case.
13-year-old girl taught me more that night than, I mean, still to this day when it was right around Christmas. And I can remember having to take them to the ER to show them their mother.
And it was tough. She said, Mr. Toby, all I want for Christmas is my mom. And we put so much effort into Christmas and presents and holidays.
And here I have this 13-year-old girl.
It really puts things in the perspective for you.
And still to this day, I do my job because I was able to save my best friend's life by
being able to remove him when he was depressed.
Suicide is real. And he ended up getting help.
And I had to help him get help, but I feel if I wouldn't have reacted after that event
that he may not be with us anymore.
So that's what keeps me going in this case.
So there's some personal involvement there in certain situations.
Your ability to, you guys are like, I will if there's drug you see or I can help send this person
or help commandeer them in a direction,
maybe that could help them if they're willing to go.
If there's like, if I'm associated with someone who's passed
and I'm associated with a friend,
I can lead them into therapy or keep tabs on them
or I've seen enough instances where you statistically know, hey, but there's probably a 50% chance you're gonna stay alive
after you've lost this person in your life. You you really need to keep tabs on
yourself. Forget some help. Absolutely. Absolutely. That's funny. I didn't know the
corner. You know, I didn't know some of the access points that they had in
some of like the direction signs
that the corner's office can point people in. You don't think about that. You just think about somebody rolling up and making a call. You know, Satan's line judge, you roll up and you just
the referee and call them in to have a new call amount. Only the coroner can arrest the sheriff.
have any you call them out. You know, only the coroner can arrest the sheriff.
And that's from the early on, you know, 1900s,
if not earlier.
So when a sheriff, these sheriff needs to be arrested,
only the coroner can go out and do it, which is interesting.
Yeah, there's all kinds of things that we do.
There's also sexual violence.
And when rapes are involved, that goes to the coroner's office.
And they do, you know, we normally send people to get raped kids done, but domestic violence and things
like that also fall under the corner umbrella.
We do a lot of things.
And is it straight rapes or gay rapes?
Like, do they all happen?
It would be, well, I guess they all happen, but I don't know how to answer that one. When
a woman is assaulted and it could be a woman or man. Absolutely. Wow. Absolutely. We'll
refer them, you know, to a to an EOR where there's the appropriate staff to do that. Yeah.
Yeah. We're rural. We're a rural corner's office. You know,. Now, how can they trump, how can somebody trick you?
How do they trick the corner?
Say if somebody, say there's a police officer or something, right?
Say or somebody in a town wants to trick the corner,
the body is deceased.
Oh, okay.
And they want to, and maybe they did it, right?
Or there's some espionage going on.
Sure.
How do they trick, how do they get it past the corner?
Because I've heard that if you can trick the corner, sometimes you could get away with
murder.
That would be a true statement, but it's hard to trick the corner.
Right.
I don't know that.
Well, if someone does, we have a case, for instance, where the wife shot the man and he was laying there deceased. He was
a former. There was a shovel on the ground. And you know, farmers don't put their tools
up dirty. They're going to clean that shovel before they put it up. So there's a muddy
shovel laying on the side of a deceased man. And the wife said it was self-defense.
So when we walked up to the shovel, we just picked it up and dropped it from two or three
feet and all the dirt fell off.
So you mean to tell me, you shot him twice, we could see that he grabbed his wounds.
And so did he lay that shovel down nice and gently after you pumped a few in him? Yeah.
You know, or did you stage that there?
So, things like that, you know, that always don't make sense.
You have to really think about some of those things.
But we have ways we can tell.
Let's say you strangled someone or used a pillow.
You know, there's no way you want, you know, that's one that's often thought about.
When we're doing our assessment, we can see a thing called patekii.
So it's basically retinal hemorrhaging.
So when we look into the eyes, we'll see little red dots.
And we know that that person was strangled or suffocated.
So let's just say, I kill somebody and then I hang them.
Well, I can tell if they were breathing
when they were hung versus not.
And that's all based on that retinal hemorrhaging.
Really?
Yeah.
So we have a lot of,
another thing is a levity, the liver mortis.
So if you die laying on your back,
after a few hours,
your body will appear red on the surface
that's laying on the ground because blood
when it stops flowing drops.
Okay.
So if I walk into a house and you're laying on your stomach, but your back is red, well,
somebody moved that body for sure.
You know, so we can tell when people try to, you know, and a lot of times it's they rolled
them over to do CPR, you know, most of the, it's innocent, but there's ways to tell.
So that's when the forensics come into play.
We looked for deception when we're talking to people,
we get stories from family members,
and even social media, you'd be surprised
that since the evolution of social media,
how much that helps us.
Yeah, I saw in that, they had that case in South Carolina,
that Murdoch case or something.
You saw that or not where the man allegedly killed.
I think he was convicted of shooting his wife and son,
but they had some social media of the kids
where it was just been a few minutes earlier,
and they could hear the dad's voice in the background,
so they determined that they had been in the same space
at the same time or something.
Cell phones, you know, Facebook, you know, I have, I've had a case where the guy posted,
I'm sweating like a whore in church and then he's found deceased and he's holding his
chest.
Well, that tells me he had a heart attack after I examined him in rule out foul play, you
know, maybe, maybe an adult say, I mean, I say, I mean, people like to say, you know,
how bad they feel on social media.
My legs killing me today.
Well, we can tell that they threw a blood clot.
So when somebody throws a blood clot, they have this cyanotic or bluish color from the
nipple line up.
And that tells us, okay, they threw a blood clot.
We throw a blood clot.
Well, so basically a piece of fat gets clogged up
in your pulmonary and cardiovascular system
and you die.
I mean, there's, it can happen to any one of us
at any second of the day.
Oh, God.
I mean, you throw a blood clot, it's called
a pulmonary embolism.
And what should you do right when it happens?
What do you do if you want to live?
You start CPR, but sometimes you can't save them. I mean, most of the time,
it's really hard. Now, there are tests that can determine if you're likely to have one,
so they start you on blood thinners. Okay. You know, very common that people are on blood thinners,
people with heart disease. They'll, we can manage that with blood thinners, but you can't stop them
all depending on the size of the clot.
It's called the DVT, deep vein thrombosis.
And majority of people in Louisiana,
what happens is the veins in the legs, narrow.
Oh, yeah, I've seen so.
And that's from anything from nicotine
to poor, you know, high cholesterol.
Bad shrimp.
Oh, yeah, bad shrimp.
Too much buddha and cracklings.
You know, all your arteries and veins get clogged up
and there's not much room for air there.
So a piece of fat breaks off and you're out, lights out.
You know, we've had people in the ER.
I mean, 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 save them.
But, you know, we'll look at social media
and the person might say, you know, hey, I just
recently had a surgery on my leg or my knee's been throbbing or my legs are throbbing or
my calf is swollen.
There's people post all kinds of things.
Yeah.
So that can help us paint that picture as to what may have happened in the death.
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I had a corner. So yeah, I guess there's a lot more to the corner than I thought. You know,
there's a lot of avenues going on over there. It's a lot of investigation. Yeah. And to very basic
stuff like home appearance, body appearance, you know, weight,
where they compliant with their medicine.
Did they see their doctor?
Did they go to the doctor often?
There's so many things that we can tell about
a just someone that's deceased.
Now, what about like a suicide?
Like say there's like a hanging or something, you know,
what's that kind of, what does a body look like?
I feel so morbid asking about some of this.
Yeah, well, how much would you be surprised
what bodies look like from certain events?
That's what I think I'm,
because in my mind, I think you,
I envision walking up on a body and it's still like,
oh yeah, that's Jerry, you know,
but would you even know a lot of times who the person is?
Absolutely.
You can tell who they are.
Things that change in their eyes,
we call that fixed and dilated.
Okay.
Their eyes are open and staring into space.
Their pupils have dilated.
So, you know, their face kind of has a different appearance
or we can tell by their eyes that they're not with us.
That's actually what he's looking at there is the retinal hemorrhaging.
Wow.
So, if you try to smug, if you try to suffocate someone, or when they hang, they'll have
those retinal hemorrhages from the veins in your eyes.
Yeah, and you know, you can't breathe.
So, it causes those hemorrhages to form.
But bodies look like bodies, you can tell, you know, it's, suicides are tough, you know,
there's, they're supposed to leave the body hanging or in its natural state until we get
there.
We need to look at the ligature morose, which is actually the rope where they made the
knot, where is it at, and then of course, it bruises the body. So when you have a perfectly
symmetrical line on their neck, you can tell if somebody maybe grabbed the wire and choked
them and used force to do that, because it's an even line. When it's not even, and the
ligature morgue is consistent with how they were hanging, then we can tell, and there's, you know,
either there should be particular eyes.
So we know that this person died by hanging.
One of the, you know, and we use humor.
It's, it sounds bad,
but we use humor to get through some of these cases.
No, we had a police officer interview
and he said the same thing, he goes,
sometimes you'll see cops standing around laughing
and they have to do it.
You have to, because what you're dealing with is really hard to see. So, you know, we're not, you
don't pick on the, you know, you don't make jokes about the deceased per se, but, you know, you joke
with the officers and you try to lighten the mood some. Everybody can relax a little bit more.
And one thing for hangings is you always put the rookie on the front of the body. So when you have to cut a body down, you know, you can't just cut them and let them drop.
You want to protect their body.
So you put the rookie cop in the front.
And so when you cut that rope, that last little bit of air comes out of their mouth.
And so that's the worst place to be standing is when you're actually removing someone from a rope because they exhale
Oh, that's a nice puff. It's that last. Yeah, it's an apartment on the front exactly and it's right and it's rough
So oh yeah, it's a long one brother. So when you say hey, you know
Put John on the front everybody that has experience knows. That's not where you want to be
I'm who catches him. You got to catch them well, you know
Everybody kind of helps.
Whoever is around.
I thought it was like the bouquet at a wedding or something.
Yeah.
Sometimes it is.
We rely on the fire department and those guys do a great job.
We have bodies that are house fires or more so motor vehicle accidents where the body's
been burned beyond recognition
and they're stuck to the seat,
we can always call out the fire department.
And those guys come and cut bodies out of course,
and they'll help us put them in the body bags,
same as decomposure.
You get bodies that have been in a home
with no electricity for three or four days or weeks,
and the body is basically liquefied.
Really?
I mean, it's...
Yeah, that's like a skeleton with like a puddle near or what is it like?
Yeah, it's, you know, it's like really sunburned and bloated and seeping fluid.
And the worst smell you could imagine, I mean, everybody says, when you smell death, you'll
know it if you smell it again.
But you know, scraping those bodies up is tough.
You know, and sometimes you, you know,
it's a large person, you gotta get the fire department out.
Recently, I had one that was up a staircase
that I kind of like the one you have here that spins up.
And the person was 300 pounds.
So we had to call in some extra muscle
to get that subject down. So fire department
really comes out and helps us. And how big is a body bag if it's a body? Big deal. Make
big bags. Yeah, they make small, medium, large, and extra large for those people.
You ever needed to, you ever needed to double bag somebody? Yeah, it depends on the body
bag itself. We can do things to, you know, when it's really messy,
suicides, gunshots to the head, we can wrap the heads and bags
before we put them in the body bags and things like that.
And that body bag in some ways is a very, very sacred thing,
not sacred, that's the wrong choice of words,
but that's where all the evidence is.
So if you're working a homicide, when you put that body
in that body bag and seal it, only we can do that.
And once it's sealed, it's not allowed to be broken until it gets to the autopsy facility.
Because you'll have evidence on that body. Even the sheets they were laying in and all that can go into a body bag.
And we've had cases where the funeral homes, for whatever reason, wanted my new body bag.
So they would take the person out of the body bag
and put them in an old one that's patched up with duct tape
and sent them the autopsy.
And you can't do that.
Just to save the money, did they want it to keep the bag?
That's a nice bag.
I'm gonna keep that one and throw them in this one.
You can't do that.
That's really important evidence.
Oh, yeah.
But, you know, body bags are an important thing that we use.
Sometimes it's just to get the body out where there's a lot of people around, so we'll
put them in a body bag and on the side of the road we'll have them put into body bags.
But they're also used in the collection of evidence.
So when you open a body bag up and get everything in there, and an officer walks through the
body bag, it's like, man, you just walk through my evidence.
Are you shocked sometimes by the ineptitudes,
sometimes of all of certain newbies
or just whatever on forces?
Yeah, and you know, you learn to deal with it,
not people just don't know, they don't know what they don't know.
Agreed, man.
But I've had, you know, I've had,
so when I see an officer struggling in a home
and the smell is really bad,
if I see you struggling, I'm gonna slow down
because I can deal with it.
I've trained myself to where the smells and things don't bother me,
but I'll watch that officer kinda eyes are getting watery,
their face is red, they don't like where they're at
and I'll kinda slow my investigation down like,
what's his date of birth?
Oh, let me go dig for that.
So just as a way to kind of help him.
What, no, I put him through it.
I put him through it.
You know, I'll slow down when I see him struggling.
You're gonna make him put him on the grill a little.
Yeah, that's right.
That's right.
Boy, do you know where his last address was?
And they go like, oh my God.
Oh, I just want to get out of here.
You know, but I've had officers throw up on bodies really right on top of the body
Yeah, and we're sending that to autopsy, you know
So it's like you just put all your DNA on there
Baptism at Arbise baby right there. Yeah, yeah, we'll speak in the Orbeez
We can talk about that one later, but what happened? There was a death at Arbise. Yeah, and Lafayette
Oh, of course. They found a lady in the cooler did that. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah Wow. Yeah, we got the meat, huh? Yeah. I mean, poor thing though.
She was, she was, she was stuck in there. And she got stuck on accident? Yeah, I think the lock
malfunctioned and they found her the next day. But that was in a small town. Oh, there's a dead body
in Orbeez. I mean, even my brain went to, oh man, did somebody put her in a freezer?
I'm not thinking, I'm not thinking,
walk in cooler, I'm thinking, small cooler.
Here we got it right here, new Iberia,
Arby's manager who died in the freezer.
The family's attorney inspected the orbs this week
and is now telling all, as part of his inspection,
attorney Paul Skrabanek locked himself in the orbs freezer
to get a sense for what she went
through in her last moments.
The thermometer read between negative 20 and 30 degrees.
As soon as the open door, I got to feel that I didn't want to be in there with the door
shut.
Here's your clothes, you go stiff.
He was in the freezer for four to five hours.
Is that what it says?
Go back.
Skrbannick says, oh, the woman was in there for four to five hours. Is that what it says go back? Skirmann says, oh, the woman was in there for four to five hours. Employees, that was, uh, that their, it's a underminer standing from
talking to one of the employees that there was, that was there with her son when he found
her that she completely frozen while.
I put the army. Do you think that's a nice way to go, kind of?
No, not at all. I mean, look, you know, you ever get cold?
I can't imagine, you know, what that poor lady had to deal with.
Yeah.
In that circumstance.
And her son is just, yeah.
It's tough.
What does that body look like?
Did you roll up on it?
No, that wasn't another parish, but, you, but I'm sure she was cold and stiff with,
but pretty normal. What position do people die in a lot? Is there a lot of you? I've
always fathomed that I would be holding my crotch. I know that may sound crazy, but I think
it's like a protective mechanism, you know, like, I think I would be like, yeah, just holding your figs and yeah,
or like, maybe, I don't know where my head would be,
but you'd rather die with your mouth closed or open.
What is like a cooler, not cooler, but like, what's like?
Yeah, I mean, we find bodies and all,
a lot of people collapse, fall, face, forward,
a lot of people in bed.
I think mouth open, probably. Yeah, like, you know forward. A lot of people in bed. I think mouth open probably.
Yeah.
Like, you know, then you're almost like,
yeah, opera singing.
Yeah, something we're like,
hey bro, you know.
We find them, we find bodies in them.
Or a lot of guys holding their jumps.
Yeah, some, not, not all, but.
So it happens sometime?
Yeah, absolutely, absolutely.
Yeah, I always wonder,
is there a position that's best? Say I'm gonna die, right?
Right.
And the last thing that I can do is be helpful to the people
are gonna find my body and to the corner's office.
What's the best way for me to die to make it easier on
whoever's gonna make it easier on you guys and the staff?
Well, I guess dying a bed, you know? whoever's gonna... The best... To make it easy on you guys and the staff.
Well, I guess dying a bed, you know?
Okay, that's the easiest way.
That's the best way.
It's clean, you have covers over you.
It's easier for the family.
Yeah.
Families oftentimes wanna see their loved one.
We have to clean them up to a degree.
Sometimes they can't see them, you know,
because it's such a morbid picture.
But, you know, dying in bed is very
common on your back. One time I had a guy, a guy die standing up, and I'll never forget
that. They called me out to an apartment complex somewhere. And so as I'm walking into the
scene with one of the sheriffs, a friend of mine, they're like, 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 do you mean he's standing?
Well, the guy died standing up.
And for a minute, I thought they were messing with me.
I'm like, y'all, y'all gotta be messing with me.
So I even like tapped him on the leg before.
Yes.
You know, he had just the way he had fallen.
He was standing up at a sink in his head,
just kind of landed on the, he just standing up at a sink in his head, just
kind of landed on the, he just kind of wedged himself in and his legs were locked and that's
how we found him.
That was so odd, you know.
That's interesting.
Yet if he really just kind of locked in there, he's just getting his steps and I guess,
I don't know if he was brushing his teeth or what that was, but I didn't believe him.
I'm like, he can't be him.
And they were like, I'm telling you,
we stand it up.
I'm saying, well, that's one for the books.
Yeah, because what are the odds at?
It's like when you watch those videos
or those people trying to throw a bottle in the air
and make it land, you know?
Right.
Right.
I've only had one die standing up in 18 years.
Oh, wow.
So it's a rarity.
That's very rare, in my opinion.
Now, and how tough is it like you,
like if there's, do you guys ever deal with animal
and a male you're death?
Yeah, so.
Do you guys just corner deal with that too or no?
Yeah, we deal with all deaths.
So, now, don't get me wrong.
We've had people call us because they have a dead dog,
or they got bit by a dog and it's like,
oh, you calling the corner's office,
I go to the ear, call your neighbor and call them an asshole.
You know, that's what's happening.
But no, animals, so if you die in a home
that's locked with animals, those animals will eat you.
No, really fast, especially a cat.
Dogs will hold out until they have nothing left to eat
but a cat will remove your head in 24 hours.
And I'm not talking literally hair on the floor, no head, and nibbling into
their chest.
It even cats that were loved by their owners, or is it just cat?
No, you think we're had something with the owner, and they're going to say this is my
town.
Yeah, no, they're absolutely feeding on you.
You know, I don't care how much you love that cat and that cat loves you, he's gonna eat you.
And sometimes we get to cases where you can tell
that the cat or dog had been nibbling.
You know, it might be on the face or the cheek
or so, the toes.
But then sometimes it's unbelievable.
I mean, it was one of my first cases.
And I just never imagined that they could do that much damage.
Smaller dogs.
Now a lab won't, a labs for some reason don't eat their owners, you know, unless they're
locked in for months, I guess they would.
But I find it more weeny dogs, small dogs, and cats, cats, cats don't, they don't wait.
You know, it's like a kunas around a barbecue pit, a cajun, I should say, around a barbecue pit.
They smell that odor and they start nibbling.
So yeah, yeah.
We'll start snacking early.
They don't want to appetize them.
Next time you petting your cat,
just know that when you die, he's gonna eat you.
He's gonna pet you back with his teeth.
Absolutely.
What, and how soon after we talking 30 minutes after?
Yeah, probably an hour or two, I guess.
They started nudist about cat.
They started nibbling, and I love my cat.
You know, we have cats and dogs.
How could you still love your cat knowing how they gonna do?
Yeah, I don't care if they eat me after I'm dead, you know.
That's cold as hell, bro.
Well, think about that, man, my buddy dies,
but I've been friends forever, right?
He's way in there, dude. And I fucking about that, man, my buddy dies, but I've been friends forever, right?
He's laying there, dude.
And I fucking carved a little bit of them off.
Yeah, that's pretty intense, bro.
I make a fucking sandwich or something
out of my boy fucking Randall.
Yeah, well, they laid down after an hour.
They do it, they do it, you know.
I'm kind of new to cats, we just got one
to keep the mice down, but yeah.
Oh, keep the mice down, he got. They won't keep the mice down.
He got a long, he's playing the long game, though dude.
That's when they lay on your wrist,
they check in your blood pressure dog.
That's what that cat's doing.
Yeah, they're waiting for you.
They lick in their lips.
As is the weenie dog.
But weenie dogs will do it too?
Yeah, small dogs.
I find that small dogs.
Well, they'll jump up on the lap of their owner
and I guess start nibbling. They'll eat the weenie, we eat the weenie, or'll jump up on the lap of their owner and, you know, I guess start nibbling.
It will eat the wing, we eat the wiener to jump to or not.
I've never seen one, but absolutely.
Absolutely.
Most of the time, I kind of feel like they're nudging you to see if you're still alive,
maybe licking you at first, and then when you don't respond, and they just start, you know, they just go after it.
It's pretty intense.
And what about like a tarte, if say the body's in the wild,
it's in the water, something did eight,
the junk, they ate the junk off of the body
or not the way they were.
Well, usually the body's covered,
so it's gonna be, it's gonna be arms.
Oh, okay, so it has clothes on.
Yeah, you're gonna have pants on.
And how big was your waist kit if you get bloated?
Say, I'm like a 34, 35 inch waist, how big would yeah, you can go to a 43. You know, in the bloating stage, the bodies,
uh, my buddy Thomas, I think he's like a 43 or so. They they they you do swell and get a lot of
a demon. And then it starts to almost liquefy. We've had cases where we've had we have to move the
body or pull that body out. And I've grabbed the leg of somebody and when I pulled everything came off all the skin
and pull the whole leg off.
Yeah.
You know, it didn't detach the leg, but always going to get pulling.
No, I don't think it would have pulled the leg off, but all the skin just, just, you
know, that does happen.
But the body so frail at that point, you know.
What is the, do you think you have some infatuation with death?
Why are you able to handle this sort of thing?
I couldn't handle some of the images that we pulled up, right?
But really, you know, like what, what makes you think you're able to digest that visually
and emotionally and everything, and how does it digest for you?
Yeah, you know, I started healthcare really young in life,
high school.
All my friends were taking shop and I decided to take
a nursing aid class.
I figured I'd be able to bathe the girls.
Well, that didn't work out so well.
Body shop, homie, you know what I'm talking about.
I should have took shop.
But it would work.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
But I always had a fascination with healthcare
and then I went into other things,
and at one point,
cardiopulmonary respiratory therapy,
so we manage life support systems.
So, okay, so then you're getting close to death.
So, yeah, right there.
RT deals with trauma.
You know, we're there,
they're airway in that regard.
So, we're involved in every traumatic death.
RT, when you say that.
Respiratory therapists are always in the ER, working for major codes and core accidents, So we're involved in every traumatic death RT when you say the respiratory therapists
Okay, are always in the EOR working for major codes and core accidents and things like that
So you were around a lot of that. So yeah, I mean we've managed the life support system sometimes we have to pull the plug or turn the machine
All and that's what you say you'd have to actually pull the plug. Yeah, well you turn them. You just turn the power off
But yeah
You think you'd at least pull the plug like at least it's like that them, you just turn the power off, but yeah. You think
you'd at least pull the plug like at least it's like that.
I guess what you do, I mean, you have to take the machine out, but you know, terminating
life support on somebody. By the time you're at that stage, they've done brain tests to
see if there's any brain activity. And these people don't want to live on a machine.
You know, it's not like they're alive and talking to you at that stage.
But again, we see a lot of trauma.
And I've always had this, I've always wanted to see,
I wonder what paramedics and police see.
You know, I wonder what people look like
when they don't make it to the ear.
I can remember having a, my brother was in
the Iraq War the first one a long time ago and he brought back some pictures and he had
some pictures of extremities and things and I was just fascinated to see that. I don't
know why I was born that way. I just, but I was really fascinated to see some of that.
And then I'll a card, huh? Yeah, and so then later in healthcare and seeing trauma,
we don't, you know, for someone that's not in healthcare,
yeah, it's hard to see and imagine,
but I don't, you know, I don't necessarily see my eyes
or I'm looking at science and anatomy.
You know, that's just a femur or that's just a brain.
This is parts of the anatomy that, you know,
we've, that we've, that we've studied and seen before.
It's not like I'm seeing you.
I'm not seeing you.
I'm seeing, I'm just in general brain and knees and whatever.
Yeah, I mean, people say how can you be a coroner because you see bad stuff.
Well, an orthopedic surgeon will take your arm off and they're dealing with blood and you know,
all kinds of things and they remove your arm and then put it back on. You know, so it's the same thing
kind of, it's just what we see. Do you ever feel like, so you determine the time of death?
Yes. Wow. And how do you know if you get it right or whatever, like doesn't it buzzer go off
or something? Like how do you, that's actually tricky, you know,
to the exact time of death.
Okay.
There are things that can be done.
You can do a liver temperature.
You can, you know, the stage of decomposure.
If there are maggots and bugs on the body,
that can give you a window of how long they've been down,
you know, flies lay eggs and then, you can even take the maggots and send them to a lab and they can
tell you what their age is, and that can help you determine time and death.
But that's a bit extreme.
We can, there's other ways, you know, one was the last time you spoke to Johnny, you know,
one was the last time anybody saw him,
what were his complaints when you saw him? When was his last Facebook post?
When was his last phone call?
So you can kind of get a window into that time of death,
even Rigamortus, you know, it comes on and then it lets go
and there's certain time amounts on that.
So we can figure out, you know, an approximate time of death,
you know, unless you're working in the ER
and they stop breathing
or the paramedics are there because maybe they're sluggish
but they're not completely deceased.
That's an exact time, but other than that,
it's a guess based on evidence.
Okay.
When they call us, we issue a time of death.
It's when they contact us.
So we get called on Johnny by a nurse
in the EOR or a police officer and I immediately look at my watch and say, okay, time of death
is 10, 15. That's not the exact time they died, but that's when they notified us.
Okay. Close enough. Yeah. And if you get it right, do you get, you don't get like a notification
on your phone? Like nobody, no. There's no reward or anything for getting it right.
No. No. No. No. No. No. Now it does help the attorneys and when there's no reward or anything for getting it right. No, no, no, no, no, it does help the attorneys and
When there's lawsuits happening or you know, they need to get as close to the time of death as they can for homicides
Because then it puts people in different places, you know, wherever you attend 50, you know
So it's you that you know, that's why sometimes it's really important to know as close as you can get to that actual
time of death.
And is there like a toe, you guys do actually always hear about toe tags, right?
People put a toe tag on a body, is that true?
So we don't put it on the toe, but labeling that body is very important.
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 send you with nothing.
And then they, I always type a report on my death. Everything I see, I have to type and put
into a report. So when that pathologist is reading that report, I'm painting a picture for him.
And that helps him in his, in his autopsy. In fact, I brought you one. I brought you a,
your own personal toe tag here. Now hang that on the wall.
Gosh, this is a,
I'm gonna hang it on you toe if you want,
but I don't know if I should say,
I don't know if my mom would be happy
if I accept this right now.
Oh, to be determined, thank you.
To be determined, yeah, yeah.
But you also put that under sex.
Yeah, well, I have you, I think I have you in Nola.
That's good, yep, that's where I was born at.
So, I could see myself dying over there, bro.
That's a great conversation piece, you know. Yeah, it is actually, that's where I was born at. So, I could see myself dying over there, bro. That's a great conversation, piece, you know.
Yeah, it is, actually, that's not a bad, dude,
I thank you.
Yeah, sweet of you, bro.
Do you, speaking of New Orleans,
during Hurricane Katrina, did they bring in a lot of corners
to help out what happens when there's a natural disaster?
Like that.
Yeah, we can, you know, did you get called in?
I didn't go to New Orleans.
Actually, I volunteered for Lafayette
because there was a lot of not coroner,
but healthcare in general.
Oh, I see.
So there's still, yeah, there's a lot of other recurrent deaths
and even in the outlier areas.
Yeah.
I'm just thinking of Katrina,
Katrina, because it was one of the more known hurricanes.
I think what else was there?
Ida, I'm trying to think what else was there
by you guys?
Hurricanes, yeah.
Ida, there was some in Texas.
If there's a big natural disaster,
is it like all hand, we need all corners
to this part of the country?
Does that ever happen?
Well, we do have protocols.
If a plane falls out the sky and there's 100 people,
we do have protocols.
We can reserve a cooler truck.
We can call Walmart and say,
hey, one of your big freezer trucks,
can we borrow one?
There's a whole team of people
that were prepared for that, mass shootings and whatnot.
It's important to identify who each person is
so we can contact their families.
And, you know, yeah, we had a, you know,
I've worked with the NTSB on an airplane.
We had a little, it wasn't a lot of bodies, but-
And what is NTSB?
So that's the, that's the, when a plane goes down,
it's the federal agency that investigates plane accidents.
Okay.
And that one was unique because we had a little small
cessin' of that fell out the sky.
And, you know, those guys come in and do their own autopsy.
And it's amazing from just wing damage of the plane.
They can tell you exactly where that plane was going
and what direction to try to figure out what went wrong with that plane. Have you rolled up on a plane
crash before? So I was called to one. Yeah. And what was that? That had to be from your own
perspective, probably interesting, because that's not a common thing. Yeah, it was interesting to
say the least. It was two guys and it was actually a tough experience because somebody was flying
over in another plane and had taken a picture of that and posted it and they took it down.
So when something happens in a small town, everyone starts talking, hey, I heard there was
an airplane accident or a motorcycle accident where everybody thinks of their loved ones.
And in this case, family was reaching out to the
deceased. And it's hard to watch that phone ring and just stare at it and know that, you know,
this person, you know, is trying to get a hold of their loved one. That can be tough
to see. And, you know, you just know that that mother of fathers trying to get a hold of their son.
So that probably happens often then.
You're at a crash site and there's a ringing phone.
Right.
Or any site.
You know, or you're doing spreads fast.
I think Johnny O'Dee within Johnny's phone just starts blowing up.
People are trying to call him.
I mean, I lost my best friend and we didn't have phones back then, but trying to contact
him. So that's very common that phones will just ring and ring.
And you don't want to make that notification over the phone.
You don't know.
You want to send an officer out there
or sometimes we'll go with them,
but you will.
Yeah, we don't have to,
but I've done several ride-alongs.
It's not an easy thing to do.
You know, when we go out to a scene,
we're often forgot,
and we're the last responder, right?
When we go out and your loved one is deceased,
whether it's sudden or natural,
families are in a different mindset.
They, you know, rarely remember us, you know,
from that case, and I always give people my personal cell.
It's like, look, you're gonna have questions later.
I'll, you know, call me.
I'm gonna, you know, I'll sit with your family
until you exactly won't went on.
Have you ever had someone try to call you?
And like, just like lost and like trying to like,
get you to bring their loved one back to Lyla
like if you ever had any.
No, but I've had them, I've had people look, you know,
maybe you didn't look at this one right or not believe
the cause of death.
And I can't share all that information.
You know, I can't share everything that I see and find with the public.
So I'm 100% right, but some people, maybe it's a suicide and they don't believe that this
person would have done that.
And they're, you know, did you investigate it for a homicide?
And it's like, well, believe you me, that's the first thing I do.
So we do get those calls from time to time.
The hardest part, we were talking about suicides earlier, the blood and guts don't bother
me. But for me anyway, when I read a suicide note, that's what sticks with me. I can remember everyone I've read.
For some reason, it's personal at that point.
Not, hey, I'll be in the barn, confine me in the barn.
You know, maybe a child emails their suicide report,
a note to their family.
And can you imagine?
And, and or just a long letter.
It makes it more personal,
and that sticks with me longer than anything else.
What are those entailed a lot of times if you're looking through them notes? What are they
putting in there? Well, don't blame yourself. Kind of thing. I'll always be an angel on your
shoulder and just your real personal things. I didn't do this because of you. For some reason, that sticks in my brain
more than the actual scene.
Yeah, it's just hard to deal with sometimes.
That changes the mood, if you will.
Has there been a death that was really just blue your mind
and how tough it was to deal with?
That's something that maybe it attached to something
you had personally in your life or an experience and don't you learn about yourself.
Yeah, that's the, you know, those are when you'd ask me about personal ones. I guess when I see,
you know, I have children and maybe like not that long ago, I had a 22-year-old lose his dad
and to watch that 22-year-old walk up to his father and then you're you know I could
imagine my children come and to see me and you know those hurt same as with babies and you
know all those things are hard to see that they really take a toll on us and you know there
is no out for us we have to deal with it best we can. They're not always easy.
My escape is music.
I listen to music on the way there,
and I'll listen to music on the way back,
and it's on the way home,
and it's two different types of music,
depending on what I've seen,
but we all need that escape.
What were you put on, like some greens, clear water,
or what kind of tunes you talk about,
or just something like a Mozart, or what are we?
Yeah, I mean, my music tastes or all over the map, but you know, heading out to scenes,
I'm jamming to some Alice in Chains or some Metallica and I'm just getting into a-
Oh, yeah, yeah.
I'd like to-
Yeah, I'm rocking, but you know, when I'm leaving, I'll go mellow. I'll go from maybe some counting crows to sometimes even black gospel music.
I mean, my brain just goes to, you know, depends on the case and what I see.
But yeah, music's going to escape for me.
You know, it gets me out of that.
You know, I don't do this full time.
We all have other jobs.
We're very, or we're paid off of the budgets
and we don't have much.
I mean, I literally, when I go out and draw blood
on the weekends or I vitro fluid, when I get home,
I throw it in my fridge at home in the butter,
in the butter dish.
My kids know, hey, dad, I'm a little boy,
hey, my dad has dead people's blood in there.
Yeah.
We work around our jobs.
Oh, damn, that's Satan's condiment right there, boy.
Damn, that's in the last.
So, I mean, we really on our own.
Yeah, my kids are desensitized.
You know, they back in the early Windows 98
when you could set your screensaver to just roll through
your pictures on your computers.
Every once in a while, one would get away from me.
And it would just be this, this glory picture. a screensaver to just roll through your pictures on your computers every once in a while, one would get away from me.
And it would just be this,
really?
This glory picture and I'd have to take it down,
but, you know, I've, you know, yeah,
my kids are just desensitized to say the least,
but they hear me telling stories
about what I'm working with.
And so they know how dangerous drugs or they know,
one thing, you know, I wanted to talk about preventable deaths
and deaths that we see too often.
Yeah, that's a great question.
Like if you were a parent, if you were an artistic human being,
you mentioned earlier, like the holidays is kind of a time
where you need to be a little bit more cognizant
because things happen then, you know.
Things happen fast.
Yeah, not to take a two lane highway if you can,
a four lane. It's so funny, after living in a bigger city and you get back to a smaller place, two
lane roads like highways seem so dangerous.
You're like, it's crazy to think that both of us are going to pass each other safely with
all the common accoutrements they have.
People have in cell phones, whistles, you know, perversion, toys or whatever.
And some of it, two people are going to go by each other at 70 miles an hour, say, yeah,
those people, those people are on fentanyl and heroin, coke and mushrooms and you name
it.
And they're five inches from you or your children or your family, you know, it's,
you really see things.
So for me, ATVs and four-wheelers scare me.
Yeah. I've had even seasoned
farmers will die on 4-Willers. And it's kind of a thing. Kids love to ride
4-Willers, and they're just so dangerous. If they flip on you, you're gonna break
they're gonna break your neck. There's a great possibility of that. The same
with you here of Polaris Rangers and other UTVs, a 4-Will golf court like
4-Wall Drive Things, people don wheel golf court like four wheel drive things.
People don't consider the flip ratios on those things.
And I've had several cases where three or four children
die on them.
You may go to tractor supply and get a cheaper $8,000
for four by four that you can four wheels.
And people think, well, that's safer.
But the flip ratios are terrible on those cheaper ones.
Yeah.
And they flip when kids are just riding them in the yard.
You know, so that's my big thing is full-writers.
I'm scared to death.
I've always had been to let my kids ride them just because of what I see.
Yeah.
Well, I think look, you're the guy who knows.
You're the guy who's standing at the finish line and seeing who's
Who's finishing early? Yeah, and what the causes of those finishes are yeah, and if you say that it's motorcycles
If you say that it's four wheelers then that's what it is, you know that that's some of the risk of things
Yeah, don't ride a horse if you don't know how to ride horses
Morty girls a big deal a bunch of people in Louisiana. Everybody gets drunk and rides horses.
I mean, horse throws you off.
You hit your head, you're done.
You're drunk on a trailer.
You fall off that trailer, it runs over, you're gone.
I mean, we see Morty girls in interesting time.
I literally throw a pillow in the back of my cork
because I might be on the road all night.
We see a lot of motor vehicle accidents.
Drunk driving, drunk driving. Hold my beer and watch this kind of deaths, you know, where
I've had guys trying to jump other cores and, you know, I doleys wrapped in trees 15 feet
above the cement that were reduced to the size of a very small core.
Yeah.
I mean, Sophia. Yeah, so, you know,
Mardi Gras is an interesting time to say the least.
A lot of accidents.
You know, obviously you get brought on all kinds of calls
and having a certain level of humor,
like trying to keep things humorous if you can,
right, you know?
Or the ways you do that at crime scenes,
are there crimes where you just been like,
you guys can't help but laugh at the,
just the fact that it even happened.
The circumstances surrounding,
well, one I had, it wasn't really a corner score,
but I was called out to death by a city police officer.
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 know what I drive.
You know, I can't go to a friend's house and have a cup of coffee without my phone ring.
And hate it. So and so I'm like, no, I'm just hanging out, you know, still alive and well.
But I got cold one time and the guy was still alive.
They were doing CPR and he had a heartbeat.
So I walked, as I'm walking up to the house, I see the families, I see their posture change like,
oh shit, the corner's here, it's not good.
And, you know, so I walk in and the paramedic says,
we got a heart rate and I'm like, he's not dead yet.
Who called me?
So I immediately walk out and I wave at the family.
And that guy's still alive today and you can imagine them say and you was so sick
The corner came
You know
Those are you know
We see crazy things one lady was told to put jelly. She had a really bad infection. She was putting jelly
Between her legs, okay, said, put some jelly on it.
Well, she was rubbing it. But would you mean like smuckers or something? Well, that's what she
was using. Okay. Normally, it would be more of a KY jelly or something for that. And they,
her legs were purple. And it was like, what's going on here? And her neighbor said, you know,
well, she was putting jelly on it. And it's like, wait, what? You were using the smuck? That's the
wrong kind of jelly. But, you know, we've seen wedding rings around penises. It's know, what, she was putting jelly on it. And it's like, wait, what? You were using smoke, that's the wrong kind of jelly.
But, you know, we've seen wedding rings around penises.
It's like, man, how'd you even get that on there?
Yeah, just wow, that must have been,
that's a big promise.
Yeah, yeah, huge.
You know, we see bizarre things like that
that people do, auto-erotic deaths,
or actually very dangerous.
We actually get a, not a lot, but enough of them.
And that's where people are pleasuring themselves
and also hang themselves.
Yeah, they're starving their body of oxygen.
You know what I mean?
Doing that, you need a spotter.
Because it's so common for people to die when they're doing that.
Well, shit, if you got a spotter, you don't even need to do it.
Well, it depends.
But yeah, I guess you have people's in a different stuff and people are artistic.
People, you know, bad things can happen in that regard.
Just bizarre, bizarre things.
Now, back to that, we were talking about animals.
I had a call from police and they weren't sure, they didn't see a gun, but it appeared
that someone had, there was foul play based on the face of the deceit and that was just rodents
that had gotten into the rat.
So it looked suspicious of a homicide.
So there's enough rats get in there.
That's right.
So we can get out there and say no, no, this is,
we'll still send a autopsy to be sure in some cases, but don't make a cheese out of anything, huh?
That's right.
That's right.
That's right.
Um, I'm fascinated by that cat that took somebody's head off.
They'll take somebody's head off, huh?
Yeah, completely, completely.
Where do they hide it somewhere?
No, they eat it.
Oh, my God.
Now, I mean, they, they eat bone.
There's no skull left.
It's gone. It's a weird one to ground next to a body, if you can imagine.
And down into the chest, I could see their left, main stem from their lung.
It's just amazing how fast a cat can eat you.
So, you know, have a dog door, have a cat door, not a bad investment.
Let them leave, huh?
You know, they can get in and out the house as needed. Yeah,
we had a lady that had a cat. She had a panther living in her house and she didn't even know this old
lady. And it killed someone. A panther? Yeah. Like a real panther? Yeah. She didn't know she thought
it was like a rescue cat or whatever. And it killed someone at a surprise party. Wow. Imagine that.
at a surprise party. Wow, imagine that.
Dogs, I've had dog accidents.
I love pit bulls, they're gorgeous.
Dobarons, beautiful animals,
but I've seen people that they've just reacted
and grabbed their neck and killed them.
Animals can be great and they can be dangerous.
What about some unique animal deaths?
You ever rolled up because of the Louisiana
number, I'm saying anything.
People, some people, you know.
You know, other than having a good pet,
having a pit bull as a pet and it biting the owner
and getting them in the right spot, you know,
that the alligator's, no?
No, alligator's not yet.
Now bodies that have been chewed on by turtles
and possums and other animals
when they're dumped into the water,
that's hard, you know, that's tough.
But again, that's, you know,
not a whole lot of animal deaths.
Now riding horses and not knowing how to ride.
Like I mentioned, horses can really mess you up.
You know, if you don't know what you're doing,
it's a big animal.
Oh yeah. At Marty Girl, once I saw two horses making love
when the cops were still in their back.
Oh, wow.
Yeah.
Well, we see that.
And that's, you know, somebody joins the Martigar
ride with a horse that hasn't been fixed, the stud.
No climb the back.
Oh, yeah.
Yeah.
And, you know, that's, oh, that's harrowing as a kid seeing your stepdad, you know,
getting overtaken by some animal.
Yeah, well, yeah, that's a thing.
Other crazy cases are anal insertions.
It's like what people, and what are people doing it for?
If a pleasure.
Oh, okay.
You know, we would see that a lot in the ear, but I had a case where the guy obviously
didn't want to go to the ear.
And so he had had a hammer and it was using the backside of a hammer to put in his butt
up.
Right.
Right.
And that can perforate your colon and then you get really septic.
Yeah.
So, you know, things like that, um, damn.
I was, you know, um, another interesting case would be, would be huffing where people use keyboard cleaner
to get high.
And those deaths occur in parking lots of stores.
Most frequently you're going to find a huffer in the parking lot at Wal-Mart.
Oh, because they get out and get out and get out.
And that's why I had one guy actually have veteran.
And that's how he would stop his nightmares.
It was the only thing that worked.
And so law enforcement's on scene
and they're like, we can't find any drugs,
but there's air cans everywhere.
You know, and that's dangerous.
The worst is when you think you're doing like,
often like one of those things
and you actually get one of those horns.
Yeah, I can imagine.
That's a wake up call.
No, that's the Lord John is, hey, look,
well, time to stop. Yeah, I'm a rescue you real quick, daddy. You
know, that's the worst, man. The, the synthetic drugs that you see. So
good next time you're in a gas station, just look around. You
know, they sell cratum, they sell, oh, yeah, what's that?
sorts of stuff. My nephew was a Zaza. So Zaza is a girl or something? Look up gas station
dope or whatever gas station heroin. Yeah. He was on. So there's Cratum and you know,
there's the worst one that I'm seeing now is, well, that's still for sale is T and F teen. It's T and F teen, right.
That's Zaza.
So what that is, it's an antidepressant.
It's actually a tricyclet antidepressant
that tags to the MU receptor, which is your opioid receptor.
So supposedly, if you take one,
it gives you that opioid feeling,
but you're taking an antidepressant on and off
and in large amounts.
And that's very dangerous.
Yeah.
And once so, I mean, you can take commonly prescribed lexapro for a week or two, and when
you try to stop, you start having these, you start detoxing on this medication.
So people that get on that stuff can't come off.
It's actually when I was reading on it, it's worse than heroin, the withdrawals from that stuff. And speaking to gas station owners, they said people come in here
every day. They scrounge up 30 bucks to buy a bottle of this stuff and they do it every day,
every day. And kids can buy this kind of stuff. They can go to a gas station and buy some bullshit,
you know, that you don't really know what it is. When the synthetic bath salts and the synthetic marijuana came around, at first it was a synthetic
marijuana and we didn't really get any, there wasn't anything bad happening, but then
they outlawed it and then it came back and that's when it got really bad.
That's when people, and I'd never seen this, but people were chewing other people's faces off,
and it completely changes their psychopathology.
They just go crazy on it.
And these companies, they keep making them illegal,
but they keep adding a different chemical to it
so they can sell it again.
And this was really, we would, you know,
we'd bad batches.
There's never a good batch, but we could tell know, we bad batches. There's never a good batch,
but we could tell when there were bad batches because of the psych units. We would get a
lot of people that needed help being committed to side batches of these fake, like we eat
over those fake, yeah, fake marijuana or bath salts. And we get calls where, you know, Jimmy's
in his underwear holding a crawfish talking to God in the middle of a street.
And he was on that stuff.
I had one guy that was doing 60 miles an hour and jumped out his truck while driving.
And that's what he was on.
You hear a red rover with somebody probably?
Yeah.
I don't know.
I don't know what the voices in his head were telling him, but he bailed on that truck.
Yeah.
It's dark.
The things that can happen, man. And so, um, is there moments
where like, so say if you are, because you're kind of like, you determine if people are dead
or not. Right. Yeah. Well, yeah, they're dead. I mean, yeah, if you've ever had somebody
and they're not dead. Yeah, that's well. And that one regor where they still had a heartbeat.
But okay. But yeah, no, it's never, uh, or they did. I mean, even the law enforcement people can tell,
you know, when someone's not breathing.
You never should have been like,
this guy ain't dead.
No, okay.
No, not yet, not yet.
If you ever, like, put somebody in a body bag
and you low-key had like some like,
you didn't like that person and you were like,
not like you were personally like,
I'm glad they're dead, but there was a little party,
like a, because we all have kind of twisted're dead, but there was a little party.
Cause we all have kind of twisted parts of our souls.
That felt a little bit of joy, you think?
No, no.
I, I've never had that happen.
Even the biggest enemies, you know, I don't,
you know, they died, their family's gonna be upset.
It's, you know, yeah, but I hear you.
I guess the right person hasn't died yet. Right. Maybe one day's, yeah, you know, yeah, but I hear you. I guess the right person hasn't died yet.
Right. Maybe one day, but yeah, because I'm going to, I think of myself as a loving person,
but I can't, you know, we all have, we're all very complex individuals and, and uncomplex.
And so I think it, I'm just one and a part of me if I ever put, you know, did the,
or put, you know, did the, just put that zip up on somebody if I'd be like, yep, you know, got him, you know,
or something like that.
Not yet, not yet.
We try to be as compassionate as we can
and you know, there's family and children involved
and it's tough.
Do you get invited to a lot of the services and stuff?
Do you have to go to that thing
or are you guys required to go to the funeral?
No, not really.
Only for friends, really friends, and maybe there's a few cases
that were just really hard where the family was struggling,
and I'll go in there and give them a hug.
You know, COVID was a thing, and COVID was really rough.
Really?
My opinion on COVID, from what I dealt with, when it started, you know,
we, like I said, death is seasonal. And March, April, May, it eases up. That's our slow
time. We don't get as many deaths. Now, you know, Odies and suicides and homicides are 24-7 now.
I mean, that happens every day.
But the end of spring, early summer
is when we don't get as many calls
and I can remember training somebody
and she would say, when am I gonna get something good?
When am I gonna get something good?
And I can't say, just be patient, just be patient.
You know, it's like fast-fishing.
You might have just some normal everyday stuff
and then boom, you get a big one.
Yeah, a lot of these work fast food too.
And I remember everybody wants to do the fries
or something like the first day you're there.
Right, you know, it's like, dude, you can't just do that.
COVID came and, you know, we had heard rumors
that there was this virus.
And we'd went, my wife and I went to Colorado
and we were aware, but it wasn't out the box yet.
And then shortly after we got home,
we just started getting phone calls and phone calls
and phone calls.
I mean, I still have PTSD from talking on the phone.
You know, in healthcare, we didn't know what was going on.
People were dying left and right.
I'm talking, I would have one hospital on the phone,
and I'd have to say, can you please hold,
and I would answer the other one.
I'd have three calls coming in every hour,
and that stayed constant for three or four months,
just the amount of deaths we had.
Now Louisiana, we have a lot of unhealthy people, in general.
And when COVID was the same, same thing every time, it was before the nurse would tell
me, I'm like, well, wait, let me guess.
The patient came into the ear, wasn't breathing.
You'll put them on a C-PAP, you'll ventilate it in a while.
They failed that.
You'll put them on a ventilator and the family withdrew care.
Am I right?
And they were like, yep, you got it.
It was the same manner of death every time.
And it was rampant.
We didn't stop.
Now, some people say, I don't believe COVID
and you're pronouncing these people
and blaming it on COVID.
Sure, they had diabetes, they were obese,
they had all kinds of problems.
But the volume of deaths that took off at that time
was unbelievable.
And it was a lot of my, it made it awkward for my,
a lot of people I know, my friends,
I've lost friends to that, friends parents.
You know, it was just, it made it awkward.
I'd go hang out with my buddy and he knows,
you know, he knew that I pronounced his father
and there was a lot of that going on during COVID.
People ever get mad at you for pronouncing their family disease?
No, no, no, but it just kind of makes it all blaming on you.
No, but it does.
It made it awkward.
And so when you look back at that time, right?
Cause there's tons of things being said about COVID, right?
Especially, you know, things like, um, uh, it's not real, right?
So you would dispute that totally.
Absolutely.
There's no doubt something came along.
Yeah, I've been up for four days answering the phone.
I mean, I went through, I saved them.
I went through five subject notebooks in a month.
You know, it was overwhelming.
Did you think that the, like the manner of like treatment,
because then there was a lot of rumors,
like, oh people put people on ventilators,
they shouldn't have that's what killed them.
Do you think that there could have been some,
and we don't know, I don't know a lot of this stuff.
You may have more insight than I do.
Do you think that as the medical professor
was figuring out how to best handle people
that they, that could have
contributed to more deaths. I think we found better ways to treat them and make them manageable.
You know steroids were the first thing that popped into all of our heads because they couldn't
breathe. We need to shrink that soft tissue and give them steroids. Later they said, you know,
lay in prone or on your stomach made it easier to breathe, ventilators coming from respiratory therapy,
when the lungs get stiff,
you have to go to a pressure ventilation.
And it's actually called ORDS, ARDS.
And it's a acute respiratory failure in adults,
where their lungs actually become stiff.
So when we're ventilating someone,
we're using a volume-based air to open and close
their lungs. But when they had COVID, their lungs would stiffen up. And the only way to truly
ventilate them to get their CO2 down was to jack up that vent on pressure support, on a pressure
ventilation that is. So you're sending in a pretty high PSI, you mean? Yeah.
Yeah, we were ventilating them with air pressure instead of just that volume flow-based.
And we had to.
That was the only way you could get there long to open and close, and then eventually they
wouldn't, they would stiffen up.
So when people were saying COVID's not real, and you know, it was, you know, I knew the
treatment and I knew what was going on and we've never had a stretch
where everybody needed pressure ventilation, right, it was like what is going on with this.
And that's what happened with everybody.
We just couldn't ventilate them.
Sure diabetes played a factor, sure congestive heart failure played a factor.
You know, we didn't get many young healthy people that died of COVID.
But the rate and the amount
was overwhelming.
So I knew it was real and it was scary.
You gotta understand that, again, I told you,
I had a can of off in a badge as gear,
well, the police departments and even us.
We didn't have much PPE at the time.
So I would be on scene and, you know, pronouncing someone with COVID and I'm looking around and the cops had homemade
masks, you know, I'm talking Tampa, I mean, Maxi pads and panty stretch over
there is to block their airways. Some guys wearing yeah like a Halloween costume.
Yeah and you know I can remember 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 that moment and you open a duffel bag
and there's $80,000, it's just human nature to do,
wow, you stare at it a minute, not that you would take it.
It's just interesting.
But you deserve 10% of it.
Yeah.
I was saying you got it, you won't go but yeah.
That's my tip.
That's the tip, bro.
But so one time, you know, this guy was, he came in, he worked in an offshore or something.
And you know, when we're trying to figure out why this 50-year-old guy or 40-year-old guy
is dead, opened his bag and, you know, sometimes we'll find drugs and other things.
But in his bag, he had some true three M masks.
And I can remember that, and we were all just salivating
over it like, wow, you know, he'd probably taken them
from offshore, but we didn't even have that protective gear.
And just to see him with a case of those,
it would be like, man, I would love a box of those right
about now.
We were scary, you know, because we didn't know what COVID was
and what it could cause, and family and children
and getting home.
I'd sit outside every night and watch TV
and stay away from my family
because we were so exposed to that, you know.
Vaccinations, that's a whole nother story,
but I took one because I was just seeing too many deaths.
Yeah, I can imagine from your perspective,
that had to be crazy.
Yeah, because you're like, here's this new thing
we don't know what's going on.
A lot of people are saying that it doesn't exist.
A lot of people are saying that it's,
you know, that it's man-made.
A lot of people are saying these things that like
whatever methods we're using to treat people
or what's killing them, you know.
Yeah. They were people on social media, friends of ours,
that were going out of their way to tell people
that it was all a bunch of bullshit,
then, you know, don't wear a mask and don't do this.
And here I'm sitting with compositions
in every part of the house with deaths
and I'm thinking, why are you going out your way
to tell people this isn't real
or it's a political hoax or what, you know,
just, it was tough.
Yeah, certainly, come follow me around and let me show you
how real this is.
You know, it was, it was, people had their own opinions
about it, so I never got involved into the, you know,
who said, right here, yeah, I just, well, I think at first,
I didn't know if it was real, I don't know.
I've always been super untrustworthy of Yeah, I just, well, I think at first I didn't know if it was real. I don't know.
I've always been super untrustworthy of a lot of stuff.
But also I never got, different people's experiences are different too.
Some people never got sick.
So they never had any, you know, and then they never knew anybody that got sick.
So then to some people it's like, what is even going on?
You know, and that's their reality, you know?
And you can't blame them.
Right, yeah, that's what I'm saying.
You can't blame some people,
you can't blame their reality.
I think some, because that's their truth,
they how could they know anything else?
Right.
But then I think there was a lot of uncertainty
and also just people not trusting the news anymore.
There used to be a time where you trusted the news, right?
Absolutely. You felt like it was genuine,
at least had some semblance of the best interest
for humanity, and that was eroding right then.
So I think at that point, when both those things
happen at the same time, a lot of conspiracy theories
or sometimes what can later be seen as truthful,
a lot of stuff that was conspiracy then,
now people are saying it was correct.
So it's just, a lot of that's kind of absolutely.
There were alternate ways to treat yourself.
Joe Rogan was right about some of the medications and therapy's he encouraged, as well as talking
about obese versus healthy people.
All that was spot on.
But it was tough to witness and see
and pronounce a lot of friends.
And I knew it was real.
Right, especially right where you are.
I mean, you stand right there at the finish line, dude.
You know. Absolutely.
Do you ever feel like you were like,
when people died,
is it feel like they're going somewhere else?
Do you feel like, do you think like,
all right, this person's going to heaven
or this person's going to hell or do you ever have any little thoughts like that or?
Yeah, I have opinions, you know, on some people that I might know, but me too, I'll say nothing
but me too. Yeah. No, you know, you know, they're in a better place. I often think, you know, God's going to be hard to lose my father or my wife.
And then I witnessed my father-in-law die of cancer.
And he was struggling there at the end and to know that he was no longer struggling.
And when he finally passed, there was a piece.
So I think you can accept that in some regards later in life.
Because you see the really bad deaths and you see people that struggle and sometimes it's,
I'm glad they were, God took them away from this pain and suffering.
So yeah.
Yeah, do you feel like, do you ever feel like people are going, like,
do you get any insight, I guess, into just being around death so much, right? Because a lot 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, you know, but you get to be around it. Kind of. Do you ever feel like
that people are like, do you ever get any insight
if people are leaving to a better place or if they're like, do you feel anything like that?
Do you think you get any more insight than just the regular person sitting around wondering
what the afterlife is like or anything?
No. But in those instances, I'm so overwhelmed with evidence and looking at things that I'm not really,
again, when I see someone that was suffering or maybe they're 80 pounds and they were
once 200 pounds, I'm somewhat relieved that they're gone, but as far as the afterlife,
I know in my faith that they're going to a better place. So, but I have, you know, back to your question,
I guess I've joked and said,
well, this guy's going straight to hell.
You know, I bitch.
Sometimes you gotta.
But yeah, he's going straight down.
But again, that's just personal joking and stuff like that.
Yeah.
You know, so crystal meth came and that drug is is really rough when people it turns people into monsters really really does these people, I mean they just turn
into demons they do things that most normal people wouldn't do. But it's interesting when I have
someone that abuses meth and I go
into their home because these people are up all night fidgeting.
They can't sit still.
They do electrical.
Yeah, they do electrical.
Sometimes they want to, I've had people take electrical wires and try to create things
and they shock themselves.
But what's interesting sometimes is the things they make, like drone deflectors.
I went into a house once and they had all these weird things hanging and I actually went
home and built one just as a memorabilia, but they'll take a electrical cord or rope and
then they'll sew or wrap a barbecue spatula on the end of it.
It makes no sense, but they would put them in all the corners of their houses and I'd
ask families families like,
hey, what's that? What's going on with all this?
A dream catcher at an Arby's house.
Yeah, and it's like, hey, that's what he said deflected the drones.
So it's kind of cool, like, oh man, you know, the paranoia would set in and it's interesting,
you know, it's sad and it's terrible and all of the above, but it was interesting to see some of that.
It is some of the creativity.
There's a lot of creativity and myth.
You can tell when you go into a house, when there's calculators taking a part and just
things that, you know, or disassembled everywhere, you know that, okay, this person was on some
type of infatimine.
You ever had to go, you ever found somebody hiding somewhere real neat,
like are somebody died during a hide and go seek or something?
Yeah, well, there was a guy under a house once,
and no clothes on.
I wouldn't like that part.
Yeah, neck it under a house, eating popsicles.
Oh yeah, yeah.
I mean, that's different.
Yeah, it's a different way to do it.
PCP, you know, that makes you a bit crazy.
But, you know, truck drivers, we get truck driver deaths.
A lot, they're from out of state.
Why, why do you get truck driver deaths a lot?
Well, not a lot, but we get them.
We have truck stops and a lot of times they'll pull over
and look truck drivers aren't healthy.
I mean, they're big guys because they drive all day long.
And sometimes I'll get called out and I'll be in somebody's truck.
I've never been in a truck driver's truck before
until I started doing this.
And I'm looking at how they live.
And they notify their parents by their family by phone.
And so maybe the wife's flying in
to get his personal belongings and the truck's full of condoms.
And it's like, oh man, I don't want this wife
coming into his truck.
So, you know, hey, can we throw this stuff out?
You know, I'm out of life.
Get there.
Yeah, give him a little.
I don't want the family's last thoughts to, yeah.
You know, so there are different cases
and different positions that we're in for sure.
It's just, it's an interesting job and, you know,
I'm very sympathetic and compassionate when I'm,
you know, we all get faster as we work.
We get faster at things we do, you know.
We learn how to do them faster.
And every once in a while, I have to stop and remind myself to slow down and to make eye contact with that
family and to be really compassionate, you know. Yeah. Yeah, that's the nature of everything
I think. Once you get in the flow of something too much, you know, yeah, you do it too fast.
Yeah. And you don't stop to, you know, maybe spend that extra time with them to reassure them that they're family-staking
care of. Things like that.
Yeah, I mean, it's easy to even joke up from being removed from it. It's easy sometimes
to try and make a levity of some of the situation. Are there things that you guys have done
like in the moment or things ever happen?
You try to keep some levity in the situation because yeah, the only opposite to such a
dark moment is some levity, you know.
Yeah.
Well, tease the officers, joke around with the officers on scene, not so much the person
playing there, but you try to pick up their spirits, you know, in all sorts of ways, you know,
sometimes you can ask them to hold something and they think they're actually doing something
that needs to be done and they're just holding a needle. And you know, an hour later,
they're still standing there holding that needle. So I can let that go now, you know.
But yeah, we, you know, you have to have a bit of humor. Otherwise, it'll eat you up. You know,
what's sad is for folks like us, we're underfunded. We use our own cores, the things we do.
Wow. We don't have protective gear. So when I go out, we recently just got some, but when I go out to say a homicide, which is, we're seeing so many of those now, African American kids
are dying by gun violence and Caucasian kids are dying from drug overdoses, and it's
overwhelming. But when we get called out to a homicide, a shooting, you know, and in
one of the cities close to us, they're rated the number one
dangerous place to live in Louisiana for the homicide and within my parish. And so it might be
three o'clock in the morning, and I go out to a shooting, and I'm walking up to that scene. Well,
by the time I get there, again, last responder, right? So I get there. By the time I get there,
everybody in the neighborhood and family and friends are all on scene.
So I'm parking three blocks, four blocks deep and having to walk through our crowd of people that I don't know that are upset.
Angry, high, you name it. And I have to go to find that body in the police office. There's a nick can get hairy, you know, and I'm in scrubs, you know, I'm not, I'm not dressed in a bulletproof vest or anything. I've been on scene where
shots were fired. It was a block away. But, you know, when you're in scrubs and shots are
fired, you know, it's pretty tough. Yeah. Yeah. Because somebody's already dead. Yeah.
And I would have started saying that. Hey, you know, yeah, well, there, there was a case
in North Louisiana where the guy had, uh, well, there was a case in North Louisiana
where the guy had was shot and the paramedics were working
on him.
A friend of mine was actually on this scene.
And so they're working on him and a guy walks up
and says, hey, man, is he gonna make it?
And the paramedic said, yeah, I think he's gonna pull
through and the guy shoots him right there.
Boom, boom, boom, puts three more rounds in him.
You know, so scene control can be tough when there's two officers and 300 people.
Just recently, and again, my condolences go out to this officer who was just killed in
another parish next door to us.
Great guy, really good guy. And there wasn't many people
there for scene control. And one of my friends was showed up as a marshal. And the whole crowd was
telling them about time when he all died, you know, and just saying things that, you know,
you all need to die. And you have guns, but we have bigger guns. When you buy yourself,
you know, at 10 o'clock at night, with 300 people cussing at you. I mean, that're a bigger guns. When you buy yourself, you know, at 10 o'clock at night
with 300 people cussing at you.
I mean, that's hard.
And that's hard for those officers.
Yeah, they don't get paid enough to know,
and they don't.
They don't really, they really don't.
Nobody would.
And a lot of these young officers
haven't been through healthcare.
And they see things that I see.
We see them more frequently.
But still, those young officers that are 22, 23,
they're looking at things that they've never seen before.
And you mean victims and stuff like that, to do it.
Just, well, every death that I see, you know,
decomposed bodies, you name it, children and babies.
And it's tough for those guys.
And I have a, partners in a company where we do psychological evaluations for law enforcement. Oh, that's wonderful
Yeah, so we have a team of psychologists that review they take them through different tests and instruments and
Determine if they're suitable for law enforcement and right now the only people that are that are applying for law enforcement or high risk
And that's what makes it tough for And right now the only people that are applying for law enforcement are high risk.
And that's what makes it tough for city police.
You got a person who was shoplifting two months ago.
So they're not getting a good batch of officers right now.
And cops in general have been put down the whole defund the police.
Oh yeah, all that stuff's ridiculous.
So it's, yeah. And you have's ridiculous. So it's it's yeah
And you have people moving out of cities. There's just so much vibe. There's so much crime in a lot of cities
You know, I was just in Memphis the other day and it's beautiful great city, right?
It's really dangerous, you know, there's a lot of like
There's a lot of shootings a lot of black crime too, you know, unfortunately like like when I was growing up, two of my best friends, my black friends got killed
by other young black men, you know?
I think it's just a bummer, some of that happens
because it makes it scary to live in certain places.
Very, you know?
And then it's like, if you wanna move away from places
like that, people say, oh, well, it's like white flight
or you're, or it's a racial issue,
but it's like, it's just fear.
It's like, you just wanna be safe. It's, you know, it's a racial issue, but it's just fear. It's like you just want to be safe.
It's, you know, it's, I don't know.
And this looked as all types of violence, but it's sad to see a lot of that.
A lot of these kids are 14 and 15 years old and they trade in video games.
And hey, I'll buy that game from you.
Okay, I'll meet you.
And then hand in the video game, I'll shoot them.
So they're not, it's not all drug related deaths.
Some of it's over, you know, you called me out on Facebook
and they kill them.
I mean, I don't understand that.
They're not scared to go to jail or prison.
And they do, when they're 18, they get let go to some degree.
But it's just, it just an overwhelming amount of young healthy
kids dying on both sides.
I mean, again, the drug abuse is rampant, and the homicides are rampant.
So you're noticing more in white community, it's drug overdose.
Absolutely.
And in black community, it's more gun violence.
Absolutely.
Yeah.
It's, man, it's scary to see, you know, the disregard for life, you know,
and the accidental ODs. And I can't stress enough that, you know, the synthetic drugs that are
being sold in stores are dangerous, you know, it throws these kids in decisures. But they're being
sold in stores. Absolutely. You can go, oh, you mean like at the gas station, like that gas,
gas,
gas,
gas,
gas,
gas,
gas,
gas,
gas, gas,
gas,
gas,
gas,
gas,
gas,
gas,
gas, gas, gas, gas, gas, gas, gas, gas, gas, gas, gas, gas, gas, gas, gas, gas, gas, gas, gas, gas, gas,
gas, gas, gas, gas, gas, gas, gas, gas, gas, gas, gas, gas, gas, gas, gas, gas, gas, gas, gas, gas, gas, gas, gas, gas, gas, gas, gas, gas, gas, gas, gas, gas, gas, gas, gas, gas, gas, gas, gas, gas, gas, gas, gas, gas, gas, gas, gas, gas, gas, gas, gas, gas, gas, gas, gas, gas, gas, gas, gas, gas, gas, gas, gas, gas, gas, gas, gas, gas, gas, gas, gas, gas, gas, gas, gas, gas, gas, gas, gas, gas, gas, gas, gas, gas, gas, gas, gas, gas, gas, gas, gas, gas, gas, gas, gas, gas, gas, gas, gas, gas, gas, gas, gas, gas, gas, gas, gas, gas, gas, gas, gas, gas, gas, gas, gas, gas, gas, gas, gas, gas, gas, gas, gas, gas, gas, gas, gas, gas, gas, gas, gas, gas, gas, gas, gas, gas, gas, gas, gas, gas, gas, gas, gas, gas, gas, gas, gas, gas, gas, gas, gas, That's what kills them is that they'll have a major seizure when they take this stuff. Can't believe we allow that stuff to be sold in?
Yeah, they say watch Alabama for some reason.
Everything starts in Alabama with that kind of stuff.
And then Alabama outlaws it.
But as soon as they outlaw it, something else is coming back.
So it's scary raising kids, you know, even on social media, you know, you can get on Instagram
or any of the platforms and order drugs.
Yeah.
And, you know, while we're sitting here, I can order a pound of cocaine and have it shipped
to my house and it'll be here in three days, you know, and kids have access to that.
Going home with y'all, and I'm saying,
yeah, what do you want?
No, I don't.
But you know, you're right, though,
if there's VPNs, people can, you can get like drugs.
The scary, the postal service is the biggest distributor
of illegal narcotics in the US, you know?
It's scary raising kids with gun violence
and, you know, just all these different things
that can.
Yeah.
It almost seems like it's just becoming like another country that I think, and it seemed
like when I was growing up, you know, when I was a child.
Drugs didn't kill you back then.
No.
Nobody shot you.
It's different, you know.
But there are still, you know, there's still positive things that I can help people with.
One area I did want to mention is babies.
My God child just had a baby.
I like babies.
Yeah.
I see, you know, we work babies.
We have a, not a large amount, but babies die, newborn babies.
Some of the things you can do is, you know, when we raise our children, they all slept in
the bed with us. We put them right there in bed with us and luckily we never lost a kid.
But if you have a baby, I've never pronounced the baby in a baby bed or a
pack and play one of those little small cribs. You know, what happens is
parents will put babies in
in the middle of a king-sized bed because they're so small they can't even roll yet and they put babies in the middle of a king size bed because they're so small
they can't even roll yet and they put them in that bed and they'll basically suffocate.
We all used to say it was SIDS but it's truly positional asphyxia.
So that airways like a straw and if that's straw, kinks.
But as long as you're using baby products, you know, like a baby bed. I've never pronounced the baby.
Unless, and unless, of course, they were using
like an adult blanket in a baby bed.
So there's things you can do in that regard, you know,
to, that's things I can teach people.
So not have your baby in bed with you.
Don't put your baby in bed with you.
Don't put them on the couch sleeping while you wash dishes.
They roll off.
They'll roll off, they'll get wedged,
or the pillow is so soft that they can't adjust their head
neck.
So there's things I can teach people that,
how preventable deaths, and babies is one of them,
something that I can share with new parents.
Yeah, it's super important.
Yeah, so there's bad shit can happen
when you do everything right, you know,
so you just gotta be careful and every day is a gift, you know?
Do you think it was a reason you got into that line of work,
then, do you think there was like something that,
like you had this, like, you know, this dark side
that led you into it?
It seemed like you came a little bit more
through like the medical profession
or through the insurance, like just,
was it the, what were you guys selling you said?
Or what products were you working with
before you got into?
Well, I was in respiratory, you know.
So I've always had a, I've always leaned towards healthcare.
I've always worked in the trauma area of healthcare.
So you've learned something fascinating
about it a little bit?
Yeah, I've always just had it.
I was just born to do this kind of stuff.
You know, I don't do the coroner's office for money.
It's not a, you know, I saved my best friend's life
and I look back on that and, you know and it was a blessing to have that ability.
I mean, being able to just be there and be a part.
If you hadn't been there, who knows?
Yeah, that's a real gift.
But yeah, I don't know what shifted me into it.
It's kind of like I was always set up to do this kind of stuff.
And you can handle it. Absolutely.
And to your retard police officer, he was like,
man, those guys can eat.
Yeah, we can eat.
You know, that doesn't bother me.
I can eat a meatball sub or a boot and cracklings
in an autopsy break room.
You know, when you hungry, you hungry.
I guess, bro.
I'm a damn boy.
I don't know.
I wouldn't have a French dip though.
That seems a bit much.
Yeah.
If it's pretty good. I like French dip. I would do that at home I think.
Yeah. Now we don't eat standing over a body. You got to stand off to the side.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Just a little break room.
You'll hear it. You'll hear it.
If Fluss down in Southeast Louisiana, or if you down in Southwest,
a lot of the bodies down there could be caused
by Dustin Poirier too, dude.
If you down in Southwest Louisiana, bro.
If you got a good ass whooping.
I'm not saying he's a serial killer,
but I definitely know.
Right, right.
I bet if you, you know, fighting,
I had, we had a young guy died, he was punched once.
Uh-oh.
And it was a hard enough hit and he collapsed and hit the
semen. And that's really unfortunate. But again, it doesn't take much. You know, life's
pretty fragile. Does it seem like that? It really is. It really is. Every day is a gift, man.
Some of the things we get frustrated with with our family and friends are not worth the
frustration because they may not be here tomorrow,
or you won't be here tomorrow.
And I learned that.
Yeah, have you learned that?
Has that had a big effect on you?
That's really fascinating.
Yeah, you're like, this is not a big deal.
Yeah, it's really not.
You could be pumping gas and a tire flies off a core
and takes you out.
You know, I've had, you know, single trees fall on cores, you know, just the most bizarre
things. But when God's ready for you, He's going to take you. God. And so yeah, it makes you
aware of your surroundings, but you can help people. You can, you know, back to their preventable deaths.
You can tell people what not to do. And you know, it helps you through life.
tell people what not to do. And it helps you through life.
Do you ever worry about your own ego?
Like I would be like, oh, I'm like, you know,
like I have some special gift or something, is that ever?
No, man, I'm real laid back.
What you see 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 of roll with the flow, I'm not special, you
know, I don't get speeding tickets, that's plus.
That's fair.
It's nice knowing the police.
Yeah.
I keep a blood vile with, I don't even know what I have in it, maybe coffee.
I keep it in my glove box in all our cars.
So if I'm going to Houston and I get pulled over ever since Ebola, man, cops don't like
body fluids. Oh, yeah.
So if I get pulled over, you know, I'll whip out that biohazard bag with some coffee in it.
And I'm, hey, I'm transporting this to whichever direction I'm going, you know, I'm bringing
this to Methodist high, oh, as body fluid, you can go, you know, they don't even want to shake
my hand on seeing, oh, man, you know, they give me a little fist bump or an elbow, you know,
sometimes my hands on scene. Oh, man, you know, they give me a little fist bump or elbow. Yeah, sometimes
my hands are dirty and intentionally I'll say, Hey, can I borrow your ink pen? And they
like, no, bro, you know, kind of hold your flashlight. You know, I need to look at this and they
like, no, bro. So, you know, do your hands get dirty on the scene? Yeah, I mean, but I'm
wearing gloves, right? So there was a case, a case, I have to put my hands in it,
the worst of the worst, worst of the worst,
and there was a pedestrian to something I didn't talk about.
Man, pedestrians are dying.
And what is pedestrians?
People walking.
Oh, God.
And so you had mentioned going out and maybe having a beer
or two, well, you go out and have a couple of drinks,
one drink at a dinner meeting, then you eat dessert
and have a cup of coffee, and you're driving back meeting, then you eat dessert and have a cup of coffee,
and you're driving back on that dork-to-lane road
at 11 o'clock at night, there's gonna be pedestrian,
there's gonna be somebody walking in black clothes
on the street and you're gonna run over them.
I mean, it happens, and as soon as you do that,
they're drawing you blood, but pedestrians
are dropping like flies.
And we're so distracted, right?
Because people on their phones.
Yeah, I mean, look, I text and drive.
I'll be the first one to admit it.
And sometimes I'm driving.
I hear that rough sound when you venture off the road.
And I'm like, oh, oh, you know, oh yeah, that's the fucking Lord's braille right there.
That's right.
And look, man, that could have been some like standing right there.
Yeah, it happened.
It used to be walk with traffic.
Now I tell people man, walk against traffic.
So you can see who's coming.
Because everybody's distracted.
Oh, that's such a great point.
Yeah, that's totally changed.
Absolutely.
Walk towards traffic so you know, yeah.
You have to be the one who's alert now.
They're not alert.
Unfortunately, people are walking towards traffic, looking at their phones. So even they swear about, you know, yeah, you have to be the one who's alert now. They're not alert. Unfortunately, people are walking towards traffic,
looking at their phones.
So even they swear about bike riding, man.
We were raised on bikes, you know?
Oh, the team Murray Mafia, you know?
And we don't let our kids, when they were younger,
I don't let them ride bikes in town anymore,
because people aren't paying attention.
Adults on bikes getting mowed over, you know, it's adults on bikes is weird also I think.
You don't need to be wearing them tight pants anyway in that helmet, but if you decide to do that,
do it in a track because man, we've had friends that have gotten hit on highways and they're not dead,
but you know, they've taken really bad accidents.
So yeah, I forgot where I was going prior to that,
but we do see a lot of pedestrians.
Now, I think you're just talking about preventative things,
with that work, things to look out for.
You just wanna cover everything too.
I know that you wanted to,
just be able to share a lot of information
is to like, I think we've learned a lot about
all the different areas, your job kind of encompasses,
you know, the different types of things
that you can see that come in.
You know, the different responsibilities
of the corner's office that we didn't know about.
And then as your affiliation to it, you know,
that you're not some kind of dark order or anything.
Yeah.
That you are just having. I don are just have any atoms family tats.
Yeah.
You know, you know, you're just a man that can handle it.
I'm a little different, you know, I'm definitely not right, but, you know, we have a, we,
so we have a Willie Nelson mannequin in my house.
He's a full-size mannequin.
Yeah.
People always like, man, what's that?
You know, my kids even, when they were, they were scared of them. But I had a crazy aunt who had mannequins as company.
And she was living in New York and coming to Knifnott, my if I'm not mistaken. And when we moved her back,
she had all these mannequins. And I was a young kid. And every time we would go to her retirement home,
they were in different positions, we're in different clothes. And that was her company. She was
really had some psychic issues. Yeah. So when we had kids kids I'm like, you know what? I need to carry that family tradition. We need
a mannequin in here. So we had one, we took it to on Arkansas vacation with us and the camp next
to us just wasn't quite sure about us. Yeah, because I pointed face in their cabin, right?
And then I found at Willie Nelson mannequin in a place that guy sold the Timmy and it's just a lot of fun.
It's pretty cool. It's weird. Yeah, it's cool. We took him to New Orleans in a wheelchair and
pushed him around, but most people didn't even notice him, you know. Yeah. But I would set him
somewhere and just watch people walk by and say, excuse me, you know. So yeah, we're different people.
We, you know, but well, yeah, if you play in a man, if you're taking mannequins running wheel tears,
I think that that is a, I understand.
I think it all makes perfect sense now.
But yeah, I think you gotta have some fun.
Louisiana's always been like that.
Absolutely.
People always have fun.
My mother love Willie Nelson.
I'm trying to think we grew up near a prosthetic place.
They was making process over at this joint
and they throw a lot of mouth,
the ones that didn't come out good.
So we're always beating the shit out of each other
with fucking legs.
Yeah, just ambidextrous legs and all kind of shit.
That's awesome.
Yeah, it wasn't really legit, you know?
Right.
So kind of adjust your perspective on things.
Absolutely.
You know, Louisiana's always had a decent, you know,
I think it's not a place where there's a lot going on,
but you know, there's not a lot of big businesses.
I don't think there's any Fortune 500 companies
in Louisiana except maybe ENTERGY.
And I feel like they probably, I think that they moved out,
but so it's a lot, it's just about people
when having fun.
Yeah, that's Louisiana, have a good time.
Yeah, it really is, man.
And I think you gotta make the best time you can
no matter what you're doing.
And you guys are in you guys police officers,
it's just a position where time you can, no matter what you're doing. And you guys are in you guys police officers, it's just a position where,
you know, it's not very rewarding
and you catch a lot of people on their worst day.
Absolutely, the worst days.
Nobody calls like, hey, corner,
we're having a great time of it.
Right, right.
Like I said, I can't go have a cup of coffee
with a friend without them thinking that, you know,
they did a new show in the background, you know. Yeah, dude, you're almost like friend without them thinking that, you know, they did. They had news showing up on.
You know, yeah, you're almost like that plank, like that, like a, like a, like a roulette ball,
you know, you just drive around an neighborhood and then you stop wherever you want.
Especially during COVID, you know, I just, I just, I just stayed home.
I mean, it was like Monty Python, you know, bring out your dad, you know, but I'm not dead yet. Yeah. That's what it was.
That, you know, it, uh, yeah. You know, it's an interesting, it's an interesting field for sure.
Well, look, man, I just, yeah, well, I appreciate you coming in, man. I appreciate you spending time
and, yeah, it's really nice of you, dude. This has been cool to learn about. You know, I think we
like to just learn from different occupations and stuff.
And so now I know a lot more about what a corner does.
Yeah, it's always interesting
and somebody has to do it.
And, you know, we try to get the job done as compassionately
and as we can, you know.
So, really appreciate you're having me on.
Yeah, man, you're the guy that does it, man.
Toby Savois. That's right, thank you, bro. Louisiana. I appreciate you. Yeah, dude. I love to come down there, bro and catch a body
I'll do right alongs or not now we can yeah, you have to throw on some scrubs or a lab jacket
But yeah, we'll bring you I'll do that. Yeah, be cool, man. Yeah, I would love to come down
We could get discovery to do a you know know, a rural, rural corner's office.
Yeah. Watch me check the fridge and call out groceries. You
like that, bro. Yeah, that'd be a cool game. So you call out
the groceries, then we guess who's dead or whatever. Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah. Why? Yeah. Exactly. Well, it'd all pretty much be
heart disease. But yeah. Yeah. Yeah. The number one killer,
man. That's right.
Things we live on.
Yeah.
Toby, I appreciate you so much for your time.
Thank you guys for coming out.
It's been a great opportunity to come out here and talk.
And I hope this podcast even saves a few lives.
People may hear what not to do, you know,
or be more aware of their surroundings.
And that's pretty righteous.
I was thinking about that, especially during the holidays,
especially about times when you're like,
well, is it worth it to take this road
for a couple of minutes faster to get home?
What's the really the safest possibility
for myself or my family?
Because yeah, there's a lot of dangerous turns out there
these days and it's up to the individual really
in the end, you know, to try and put their selves
in a best situation.
Especially when our country are laws and stuff like that,
I don't even gonna do that anymore for us.
Right.
Absolutely.
Toby Savoy, thank you so much, brother.
Thank you, man. I appreciate it. You bet.
Now I'm just floating on the breeze,
and I feel I'm falling like these leaves I must be.
Cornerstone.
Oh, but when I reach that ground
I'll share this piece of mine
I found I can't see it
In my bones
But it's gonna take