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Authors: Michael Matthews
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experiences without any kind of lead-in could risk officers becoming closed and would certainly make it harder to get the best out of our meeting. For this reason I would often start a conversation with a light-hearted subject to get the conversation going. Death, I found, was a great subject to get the antidotes and hilarity flowing and conversations would more often than not, start like this: ‘So, got any good death stories?’
As odd – and perhaps awful – as it sounds, police officers, for the most part (but not always), find talking about their experiences to do with dead bodies an easy subject to open up about. No matter where a cop works, death will always be part of the job – natural deaths, vehicle accidents, homicides, suicides, bones in the woods, decomposed, maggot infested bodies – and usually a cop will always have a story (or many) to tell about death. So for this reason it was always a great way to break the ice.
Officers would almost relish trying to shock me with their stories about the rotten body found in the attic or remembering the very first time that their department sent them on a death call. For many officers, it would be the first time in their lives that they saw a dead person and that’s something you don’t forget, particularly if the brains are dripping off the ceiling and the people around you are expecting you to act like it’s the most normal thing in the world.
For most people, there is nothing normal about seeing a dead body, so the very fact that death is an almost daily part of a police officer’s life – part of their actual ‘job’ – makes it perhaps understandable that they want to tell you about it, if only to help them comprehend it themselves, talking about it and sharing the experience being a way of coping. Certainly, there is something peculiar about listening to a person recalling a truly horrific scene of death, whilst they rock back in laughter; but when something like that becomes ‘ordinary’ and ‘routine’, it can do strange things to a person. Not all officers were laughing though – some found it distressing or were sombre – they just had their own ways of dealing with it.
The work is kind of surreal. I thought that death was the one thing that would bother me when I came onto the department. I didn’t know how I would deal with dead people. I’d only seen one dead person before in my life; it was in a coffin at a viewing. And then after you get on the job, you see a dead person, you do yourthing and then go to lunch. You don’t even think twice about it.
****
My first dead body on the job was a guy in the Bronx. This guy, he was dead for so long that his body had turned completely black and was five times its normal size. It was the middle of summer, it was hot and this guy was completely bloated and he looked like an aborigine. He had straight white hair, but if you looked at him you would have thought that he was a black guy. I mean, the pictures in the house clearly indicated that he was a white guy but he had been dead for so long. God it was horrible.
It was fucking hot and I just had to sit on him until the fucking ME’s [Medical Examiner’s] office arrived, put him in a bag and popped him. Literally popped him. They put him in a body bag but they couldn’t move him the way he was … they fucking had to let the gas out. They fucking popped him with a poker to let the gas out so that he didn’t explode. It was really, really hot and that’s what happens. It’s like when a watermelon gets over ripe and this stuff inside starts to boil because it’s really freaking hot and this gas builds up and they explode and their seeds go flying all over the place.
Same thing happens to human bodies if the conditions are right. The gas just keeps building and building and the skin keeps stretching and stretching and then there could be a big explosion or there could be a little explosion.
****
I’ve seen dead bodies before. In fact
As odd – and perhaps awful – as it sounds, police officers, for the most part (but not always), find talking about their experiences to do with dead bodies an easy subject to open up about. No matter where a cop works, death will always be part of the job – natural deaths, vehicle accidents, homicides, suicides, bones in the woods, decomposed, maggot infested bodies – and usually a cop will always have a story (or many) to tell about death. So for this reason it was always a great way to break the ice.
Officers would almost relish trying to shock me with their stories about the rotten body found in the attic or remembering the very first time that their department sent them on a death call. For many officers, it would be the first time in their lives that they saw a dead person and that’s something you don’t forget, particularly if the brains are dripping off the ceiling and the people around you are expecting you to act like it’s the most normal thing in the world.
For most people, there is nothing normal about seeing a dead body, so the very fact that death is an almost daily part of a police officer’s life – part of their actual ‘job’ – makes it perhaps understandable that they want to tell you about it, if only to help them comprehend it themselves, talking about it and sharing the experience being a way of coping. Certainly, there is something peculiar about listening to a person recalling a truly horrific scene of death, whilst they rock back in laughter; but when something like that becomes ‘ordinary’ and ‘routine’, it can do strange things to a person. Not all officers were laughing though – some found it distressing or were sombre – they just had their own ways of dealing with it.
The work is kind of surreal. I thought that death was the one thing that would bother me when I came onto the department. I didn’t know how I would deal with dead people. I’d only seen one dead person before in my life; it was in a coffin at a viewing. And then after you get on the job, you see a dead person, you do yourthing and then go to lunch. You don’t even think twice about it.
****
My first dead body on the job was a guy in the Bronx. This guy, he was dead for so long that his body had turned completely black and was five times its normal size. It was the middle of summer, it was hot and this guy was completely bloated and he looked like an aborigine. He had straight white hair, but if you looked at him you would have thought that he was a black guy. I mean, the pictures in the house clearly indicated that he was a white guy but he had been dead for so long. God it was horrible.
It was fucking hot and I just had to sit on him until the fucking ME’s [Medical Examiner’s] office arrived, put him in a bag and popped him. Literally popped him. They put him in a body bag but they couldn’t move him the way he was … they fucking had to let the gas out. They fucking popped him with a poker to let the gas out so that he didn’t explode. It was really, really hot and that’s what happens. It’s like when a watermelon gets over ripe and this stuff inside starts to boil because it’s really freaking hot and this gas builds up and they explode and their seeds go flying all over the place.
Same thing happens to human bodies if the conditions are right. The gas just keeps building and building and the skin keeps stretching and stretching and then there could be a big explosion or there could be a little explosion.
****
I’ve seen dead bodies before. In fact
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