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.Some cases seemed to be obvious self-defense.One city police officer was being dragged by a stolen car when he opened fire, killing the vehicle’s driver and two occupants.Other cases, like the death of unarmed Jonny Gammage, were less clear-cut.In recent months, however, Wecht has recommended that the district attorney’s office file homicide charges against police officers in three separate cases involving shootings after police chases.The year before, Wecht helped resurrect a 1995 case against a Pittsburgh Housing Authority police officer, recommending the officer be charged with criminal homicide.A city police officer began chasing a motorist who was going the wrong way on a one-way street.Other police joined the chase, which ended in the Armstrong Tunnels, a few blocks from the coroner’s office.There, several police officers opened fire.Officer John Charmo fired thirteen of the fourteen bullets that hit and killed the man.He later claimed that the dead man had spun his car around inside the tunnels and driven at the police officers.After a coroner’s inquest, no charges were filed against the officers.But last year, Wecht launched a second investigation into the case, saying that wheel markings on the pavement inside the tunnels contradicted Charmo’s claim that he was in danger.“The car did not turn,” Wecht said during a press conference.Around the same time, Wecht recommended that another city police officer, who shot a man after a chase, be charged with homicide.After that case, Wecht tried to reform the way local police handle car chases, recommending that they buy tire-deflation devices to be carried in the trunk of every patrol car and have the police accident-investigation unit help investigate car-chase deaths in conjunction with homicide detectives.But it happened again anyway.The previous fall, a suburban police officer shot a man after another police chase.The man died a week later, and Wecht recommended that the district attorney file homicide charges against the officer.A couple months ago, a county homicide detective who investigated the case wrote a letter to the local Fraternal Order of Police saying the coroner’s inquest was “farcical,” “unreasonable,” and “obviously biased.” He said Wecht misstated another officer’s testimony concerning the danger facingTHE COURTROOM 103police at the shooting scene.Wecht, of course, fired back with his own letter, writing that the officer had “deliberately contaminated” the case.Despite Wecht’s recommendation of homicide, the district attorney has not yet filed charges against the police officer.Wecht knows his stances in these cases, especially the Gammage matter, have created some resentment among police.Police don’t like their decisions to be questioned, he says, especially rank-and-file officers.But the chiefs tend to understand Wecht’s duties better, he says, and even the lower officers have become resigned to the fact that when someone dies, it’s not the police who run the show, but the coroner’s office.Eleven days earlier, it happened once again: another police-related death, though this time it involved no gunplay or car chase.A thirty-one-year-old man went berserk on a street in Uptown, throwing himself against cars.Police officers tried to subdue the man, then sprayed him with pepper spray.They handcuffed him and put him in the back of a police van, where he banged his head against the wall on the way to the hospital.A doctor listened to the arrested man’s heart and lungs, which seemed normal.The man refused mental health treatment, and the police officers took him to jail.He continued to bang his head on the van’s walls.At the jail, when they opened the doors, the man was lying face-up on the floor, dead.Police pulled the body out of the van and laid it on a cot in the jail garage, where medics cut off his sweatpants and injected epinephrine to stimulate his heart, with no luck.Mike Chichwak was on duty when the city police homicide commander called the coroner’s office at 8:22 p.m.He and another deputy coroner drove the few short blocks to the jail, a big, blocky, red-brick structure on the banks of the Monongahela near the edge of Downtown.Mike noted the dead man’s forehead and eyes were bruised and abraded.He took down the police officers’ stories—as white cops in the post-Gammage era, they were petrified about their involvement with a dead black man.The next morning, Dr.Bennet Omalu performed the autopsy.He recorded the abrasions on the head, but when the autopsy techs popped the skull,104 THE COURTROOMhe found no fractures or hemorrhage.The autopsy proved little except that the man did not die from head trauma, exonerating the police officers from any possible charge that they may have beaten him to death.A couple hours later, almost two dozen people—coroner’s staffers, reporters, family members, and homicide detectives—gathered in the coroner’s office courtroom for a press conference on the autopsy findings.When Wecht strode into the courtroom, one homicide detective turned quietly to another.“Let the show begin,” he muttered under his breath.Wecht took his place at a table bristling with microphones, folded his hands in front of his face and began summarizing the case in a low-key tone.The cause of death was undetermined, pending further tests.The dead man had prescriptions for blood-pressure medication and an antidepressant.Mixed with alcohol or drugs, those medications could have proven fatal.Pepper spray has killed people before, Wecht said, but if the dead man had been hypersensi-tive to the irritant, he probably would have reacted immediately.As he spoke, Wecht’s words grew faster.His eyebrows lifted to emphasize particular points and his head bobbed.He gripped his chair’s wooden arm-rests.Wecht spoke freely about what he knew and what he didn’t know, reading unrehearsed snippets straight from a hospital report at one point.Let the show begin—this is what the detective had meant.And the reporters loved it, even as they glanced knowingly at each other—vintage Wecht, a press conference where information gushed like water from a fire hydrant, rather than being doled out in the usual calculated doses.Before the reporters’ eyes, Wecht transformed from longtime member of the local establishment to the relentlessly curious and outspoken forensic pathologist he is.Wecht was especially intrigued by the fact that the dead man had been taken to the same hospital earlier in the day, before he went berserk on the street.And in the hospital records, a nurse had listed cocaine as one of the drugs in the dead man’s system.In combination with other drugs, cocaine could have killed him.Perhaps cocaine had heightened his sensitivity to pepper spray.Any number of possibilities existed, Wecht said, waving a hand.THE COURTROOM 105“We have to find out from the nurse where she got that information,” he said, his face looking tanner than ever in the glow of the TV lights.“I cannot tell you at this time.I do not know.We’ll have to learn more about it.But blood was drawn.Well, we’ll find out.It’s very interesting.”Tonight, when Tiffani reaches the third floor, the coroner’s office courtroom is silent and empty.The arraignment of Pickles will be a much quieter affair than any inquest or press conference [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]