Read Online Morgue by Dr. Vincent DiMaio - Free Book Online

trial for attempted murder, prosecutors argued that Cabey was sitting when he was shot and thus hadn’t been a threat. The defense hired my father to examine Cabey’s wounds and the crime scene, and he delivered a controversial opinion: Cabey had been standing when he was shot. The trajectory of the bullet was lateral and flat, not downward, my father said. Cabey couldn’t have received the wound while sitting unless the six-foot-one Goetz had knelt beside him—which he didn’t.
    The jury of seven men and five women, including two African-Americans, was convinced. It acquitted Goetz of murder and assault charges, but convicted him of illegal possession of a weapon. He served just over eight months in prison. Cabey later sued and won a $43 million civil judgment against the bankrupt Goetz (who ran unsuccessfully for New York City mayor in 2005).
    To New Yorkers, Goetz had committed another serious crime: He owned a gun. Only cops and criminals owned guns in New York City, and the city fathers deemed everyone else too dumb to be trusted with firearms.
    In 1978, my father retired at age sixty-five, but his expertise was still sorely needed, and he still had enormous energy. He continued to consult on many death cases around the nation, and he joined me in writing a 1992 textbook called Forensic Pathology , which has become one of the science’s preeminent references and remains in print today.
    On September 11, 2001, Dominick Di Maio was a spry eighty-eight-year-old retiree living on Henry Street in Brooklyn Heights, just across the East River from Manhattan. On ordinary days, he could see the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center soaring over the Financial District, a little more than a mile away. He was a proud lifelong New Yorker, and he’d watched them go up.
    On that day, he watched them come down.
    In more than thirty years as a medical examiner, he’d never witnessed a murder, much less a mass murder, but here it was happening before his eyes.
    He already knew what horrible carnage they’d find. He already knew what horrors man could visit upon his fellow men. He already knew there’d be no mystery about how all those people died.
    But he never spoke a word of it to me.
    That was my father. He never wanted to let death know it had touched him, and he never cried.
    That stuck, too.
    I grew up as strong-willed as he was. After I started medical school and started blazing my own path, we often clashed professionally. Not acrimoniously nor angrily, but vigorously. Our discussions could be epic and maybe a little loud, but I never stopped believing in my father. He set a standard I still aspire to. I still live with his expectations of me.
    We carry our childhoods forward, even if we don’t remember them perfectly or even as they truly were. We collect the stuff that sticks and haul it across the bridge of our teenage years into adulthood. When I check my baggage, I find my father’s energy, his sense of justice, his fascination with mystery, his tendency to work away from the limelight, his ability to corral his emotions. I also find my mother’s austerity, her pragmatism, her love of books and history.
    And her stoicism.
    *   *   *
    When I entered St. John’s College in Queens, New York, in the fall of 1958, I had none of the typical teenager’s angst about where I was going. I’d known my purpose from the start. I was going to be a doctor.
    I didn’t find college that hard or stressful. I began as a chemistry major, then switched to biology, but the hardest part of my undergrad years was the traffic between my house and the campus.
    Most people don’t know that some medical schools will admit students after their third undergraduate year if they’ve successfully finished their necessary premed classes. So during my junior year at St. John’s, I applied to two New York medical schools. One turned me away, saying it only took