Page 19 - Daniel Spitz News Today

Appropriately. >> she may have some heart disease. she could have an enlarged heart. certainly thats common in people who are obese. >> excessive body weight puts additional strain on the heart. which over time can cause it to become enlarged. this is known as cardio megaly. once the heart is enlarged its ability to pump blood efficiently may become impaired often leading to heart failure or in some cases sudden death from a cardiac arrhythmia or irregular heart beat. dr. spitz will now determin...

Back of your head you get the contusions opposite. thats what these are. these are all contusions. >> right. >> enough to kill you, right? >> yep. he had a very specific bruise pattern of the brain, which is contusions which means you have a bruise on the brain at the site of the impact and you have bruising on the brain opposite the site of the impact because of how the brain moves within the skull when there is a head impact. >> having solved charles kruegers cause of death mystery, dr. spitz ...

Sunday is a day of rest for most people in macomb county, michigan. but the dead dont discriminate week days from weekends. by 8:00 a.m., all the key players begin arriving at the macomb county medical examiners office. >> this is a 24/7 operation -- holidays, weekends, it doesnt really matter. sometimes the days that other people arent working are our busy days. >> the medical examiner dr. daniel spitz is about to perform an autopsy on charles krueger jr., the man found naked with his head cras...

Fit with his own actions, his own fall down the stairway or could it implicate somebody else? let us see whats in his head. >> now christina moves on to face two of her skillful and hard-to-stomach operation, opening the head so dr. spitz can examine the brain. >> i will take the bone saw and saw around the skull, pick off the skull cap, expose the brain and remove the brain. i have a shield because i do the saw work and sometimes bone and blood will start spattering up and id like to save my ey...

Dr. spitz says theres no way to know with any degree of certainty. the east pointe police investigation failed to turn up evidence of foul play and found no additional information on the van seen outside mr. kruegers home the night he died and there was no followup on the sexual assault samples taken at the autopsy. >> so, basically closed. kind of a cold status. unless somebody comes forward and says, i knew him. i saw him the day before. he mentioned this. or i saw him with this person. which ...

So its kind of an unusual situation. >> sunday may be a day of rest for many, but for macomb county michigan medical examiner dr. daniel spitz, the work never stops. >> took what kind of blood so far? >> three and one. >> christina heisler, one of dr. spitzs two assistants, prepares both of todays cases simultaneously. the first is jill moore, a 44-year-old mother who went to the hospital complaining of head pain after a recent dental cleaning and died in the e.r. >> keep in mind i did have my o...

>> i should be there probably in about five, six minutes if we dont get stopped by the police here. >> bills boss, macomb county medical examiner dr. daniel spitz, sends investigators to most residential death scenes to work with police and make sure no detail is missed. >> arriving at destination on left. >> they go to scenes. they collect information. theyre knowledgeable about wounds and injuries. they have a different set of tools than the police do when it comes to being an investigator for...

>> from what i understand he had a couple friends come over. >> okay. well go take a look. see what we got. >> did they remove the rope from his neck? >> by 7:00 a.m. investigator bill robinette has been briefed by officers on the scene and begun an external exam on the man identified as 19-year-old ryan sudowsky. >> okay. you can roll him over. bring him my way, i guess. >> when bills done with the exam, he calls dr. spitz. >> the police are asking if youd be doing this this morning or tomorrow...

Are frequent, pedestrian accidents, kids on bikes, drownings. i realize all these things happen. i see them regularly. >> okay, addison, youre in there. >> michigan winters are long and cold. on sunny days like this dr. spitz and his family try to get out on the water as often as they can. but this family outing is about to take a strange turn. in a chilling coincidence just ten miles away in the very same body of water, dr. spitzs next patient has just met his final fate. >> we were dispatched ...

>> dr. spitz begins with 35-year-old jehad who drowned at the beach saturday afternoon. toxicology samples have been drawn. theyll be sent to the lab for analysis. >> the question would, be it looks like he drowned so why bother to do this? you never want to assume that a body recovered from water is a drowning death. because you will miss cases of homicide where the body has been disposed in the water as a means of concealing the death. you will also miss cases where somebody had a natural even...