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Today I witnessed an inquest where the cause of death was so lazy the woman basically said it was made up. No one cares, because the guy was a drug addict, as she repeatedly said during her speech. His family did not assist. He died of mysterious causes, found partly decomposed in his flat with a syringe next to his body but no substances either on the syringe or in his body, apart from cannabis. So, of course, the toxicologist made up some nonsense about cannabis-induced cardiac arrhythmia.
“This case has caused me great difficulties. When you have a suicide, you normally have an intent and an act. Here, we had the intent, but there was no act.”
He apparently left a note saying he was going to god, and his time on earth was up. He was of Arabic descent, but had changed his name to TJ Fuller when he was 16, he was “embarrassed by his name”.
He had started getting different opinions about everything in the past six months, neglecting his friends and was not getting on with people.
The note mentioned “Mr Fuller, the end.” “Ready to die.”
She would not read all of it – out of courtesy.
The case presented great difficulties… a headache, for a clearly unimportant bloke, the way she talked about him, it was callous. It is obvious that if you deal with death on a daily basis, and literally a daily basis, as a coroner, that you will not be particularly moved by anybody’s death. So I don’t take it as an offence against this poor sod that she didn’t give the shadow of a damn.
The real offence lies with the police, the toxicologist, the investigators, and family. The guy was so insignificant that they slapped the laziest possible label on his “partially decomposed” body and got on with it. (Funny how unknowingly accurate I was in my story of Willy Wurton, huh?)
Clearly, had it been a less drug-addicted, more wealthy man, more people may have perked up at the mysterious circumstances around his death. Here, they were more than eager to consider it drug-related – even if it provably was not. They just did not want to take the extra time. The eyeroll as she described the great difficulties of this case was telling enough.
Thing is, I probably wouldn’t care for the guy either. It is, however, more proof of the shamlike nature of the system itself. The phony bureaucracy which slows everything down and covers it in a veil of acceptability. The truth is we don’t care about all deaths, not everybody is equal, and all the functionaries know it, journalists know it, god knows drug addicts and lower classes know it. I just wish that callousness were not sugar coated in time-wasting exercises for the sake of… of what? Keeping the system going, I suppose. Sigh. Otherwise we might descend into savagery, or would we?
Thought: if an “expert” or doc is “discredited”, what does that mean? By whom?
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