There is probably no more heartbreaking human tragedy than for a parent to lose a child. I have no idea what that feels like, and I hope and pray that I never do. With more than thirty years in the profession, I still cannot help becoming teary-eyed at the sight of any parent, wild with grief, standing over the casket of a recently deceased child, young or old.
The young couple that walked through the funeral home front door that morning had the familiar look on both of their faces: reddened and tear-stained eyes, eyes that were swollen and puffy from lack of sleep and a lot of intense sobbing. In contrast, I was very excited and full of joy and happiness that day, as my first child was to be born at any time. Baby Anna was holding out on us, a few days past due, so my wife and I were anxious, and I was playing the proud expectant father routine to the hilt—anyone I saw, whether I knew them or not—was going to hear that my baby daughter was about to be born, and it felt good to receive the congratulatory handshakes and pats on the back.
However, the couple I was about to meet with had lived every parent’s nightmare. Their nineteen-year-old son had been brutally murdered—a story I had heard about just the evening before on television news. Two hoodlums had forced their son’s car off the road, pulled him and his girlfriend out of the car in a remote area, and made them walk to an abandoned farmhouse. The nineteen-year-old was repeatedly stabbed, and his body was stuffed into a dry well. The two hoodlums forced the girlfriend to participate in the stabbing as well, probably to convince her that by going to the police, she would implicate herself. She was threatened with the same fate should she report the incident to authorities, but she did anyway.
The mother and father told me very little about the manner of their son’s death—perhaps it was too painful to recount. We made the funeral arrangements, which included an all-night visitation and funeral service the next day at a large Pentecostal church. We were to take the casket to the church at 4 p.m. and it would stay there until the funeral the next morning. After completing the funeral arrangements, I made the trip to the coroner’s office to retrieve the body.
The coroner’s personnel were amazed at the manner of this young man’s death; they gave me all the gory details the moment I arrived. The chalkboard in the autopsy room reported the grisly findings: the number eighty-eight was scrawled next to the words stab wounds. Why stab someone eighty-eight times? The coroner called it a frenzy killing: high on alcohol or drugs, the two perpetrators probably wildly stabbed the victim out of extreme anger or in an attempt to silence the screams of their victim. I had dealt with stabbing victims before, but never with such a number of thrusts. The seasoned coroner’s office personnel had never experienced such a number of stab wounds either. The majority of the wounds were introduced into the back of the victim, perhaps because he had assumed a fetal position to ward off a frontal assault. The coroner explained that three or four of the wounds could have been the fatal blow, and the rest were likely postmortem (after death) wounds. My thought then was that I hoped the police would apprehend the two suspects right away.
I brought the body back to the funeral home and placed it on the embalming table. A full autopsy had been performed, so the internal organs were in a plastic bag in the victim’s thoracic-abdominal cavity. I removed the bag, opened it, and poured two sixteen-ounce bottles of high-index formaldehyde-based chemical onto the organs to preserve them. I retied the bag and began to inspect the empty thoracic-abdominal cavity of the young stabbing victim who lay before me.
Observing the interior of a deceased human being devoid of life-sustaining organs is awe inspiring, as in “Look at what God has devised for us.” There are bony ribs to protect our organs from accidental falls and a massive spinal column that assists us in standing upright. In this case, though, further observation revealed the magnitude of multiple stab wounds. One-inch slices, some vertical and some horizontal, peppered the interior of the young man’s back. Knife thrusts had chipped many of his ribs.
After arterially embalming the young man, the interior of the body was dried, and I had to do something to address the huge number of stab wounds in the back, which would cause liquids to leak onto his clothing without treatment. Instead of sewing each wound from the outside, I decided to cover the entire interior of the body with a four-inch coating of plaster of Paris. After the plaster dried, I laid a sheet of thick plastic over the plaster, returned the bag of organs back inside the body, and sewed the thoracic-abdominal cavity together. The next day, the young man was dressed and placed into his casket and delivered to the church for the all-night visitation.
On arriving at the church, I was surprised at the number of police officers present. I was informed that the killers were still at large, and that many times a murderer will return to the scene of the crime or even attend the funeral of the victim. As it turned out in this case, the girlfriend of the deceased man had known the two killers and had given the police the necessary information, but the two assailants were hiding. This case turned out to be one of mistaken identity—the victim was not the killers’ intended target. Instead, the victim’s cousin had reported the two killers to the police for a minor theft, and the killers had vowed revenge on him. However, they took out their revenge on the victim, not his cousin. The two killers, who were brothers, were eventually apprehended and imprisoned. Perhaps poetic justice prevailed for the victim’s family—one murderous brother was stabbed to death in prison and the other committed suicide in the same prison.
With all of these terrible things happening, I still had my own reasons to be happy. I left the all-night visitation and went to the hospital to check on the birth of my daughter. We had quite the all-night vigil as well, and Anna was delivered by Caesarian section at dawn. My sister was and is a labor and delivery nurse at the hospital, and she presented my daughter to me covered with muck. I thought there was something wrong, but she just had not been cleaned up yet. After a thorough cleaning, my wife and I marveled at the beautiful, healthy Anna, who had no hair on her head, which turned out to be a trend with all three of our children. I could easily distinguish my babies in the hospital nursery from any others because of the lack of hair on their heads.
I left the hospital, retrieved the hearse, and went to the Pentecostal church to conduct the funeral ceremony for the young murder victim. Such is the life of the funeral director—welcoming a new life and my own child into the world and thirty minutes later depositing the body of someone else’s child into a grave.
When my son Michael was six years old, a family a few streets over from us was in the process of moving to another house in town. The father of the household owned several handguns and stored them in his basement in square milk crates. The family had a seven-year-old boy, and he and his nine-year-old cousin were assisting in the move by carrying small items into waiting pickup trucks. The two little guys came across the container of guns, and like most inquisitive little boys, each armed himself for a make-believe shoot-out. The nine-year-old shot his cousin in the forehead, just above the left eye, with a .38 caliber police special that should not have been loaded. The incident caused lifelong resentment among family members, and I’m sure the boy who lived will never forget the accident.