Week 8 Day 5

I had the pager for about a week when it went off the first time. The vibration sent me into a mild panic, but I had been expecting it for hours. It was my first day of as a crime scene volunteer, and after weeks of training with the police, fire, and coroner departments, I had to put all the information to use for the first time.

When I answered the page, I was told to respond to a car accident at a residence in Van Nuys. That was all the information the dispatcher had and he said he’d try to get someone else out there to meet me.

The accident happened in carport behind a big brick wall that prevented anyone from seeing anything. The cop standing guard let me through and pointed me to the officer in charge. Making my way towards him, I passed a van smashed into a wall, a broken post, and a dead woman lying on the concrete with her eyes open in a small pool of blood coming from her head. A thin white sheet shielded her from view of the family on the other side of the sliding glass door.

The driver was a disabled man who was getting used to the new controls on his new van and hit the gas in drive instead of reverse as the woman, his niece, was walking in front of the van. Upon impact, the woman was thrown head first into a brick wall and ricocheted back out as the van was crashing into a post, knocking it forward into the woman on the rebound, who then ricocheted back into the brick wall and falling onto the concrete. Though no one was sure which of the four lethal impacts killed the woman, everyone silently hoped it was the first.

The family inside spoke no English, and all the knowledge I had was useless. My job was to sit with the and provide support, letting them know what was going to happen from then on, answer any questions, and get someone they knew there to hand them off to. The whole process should take about three hours, or until the coroner removes the body. I was the only one there for an hour until someone came who spoke Spanish and could take over. With the family being taken care of, I could go out into the back and get information like the coroner’s eta and start to think about crime scene cleanup.

Standing talking to one of the officers, he looked down and pointed at my feet.
“Uh oh,” he said. I was standing in blood, not a lot, but enough that I couldn’t go back in the house. Far more disturbing to the situation was the something pink sticking out from underneath my shoe.

The impact and final landing of the woman left a splat pattern mostly contained to the immediate area around her, but particles had landed across the small yard, and I was standing in one of the particles.

Vans old skool shoes have a diamond pattern on the bottom with very small nooks, and now part of this dead woman’s brain was occupying a couple of them.

The officer grabbed a stick and told me to lift my shoe up, which I did, and he picked as much of the brain matter out of my shoe as possible in under three seconds. “I’m sure it’ll be fine. That’s why we wear these. See?” And he lifted his shoe to show that there were no brains on his shoes. “Wow,” I said. I had never been in that kind of situation before and didn’t know the appropriate response. Wow seemed just as good as anything else.

An hour later I was leaving the house and the family had other people there who knew to keep them eating and drinking and sleeping. The dead woman was on her way to the coroner’s office to be processed and released to a funeral home that was set to get her the next day or so.

The officer that picked the brain out of my shoe grabbed a shovel and covered the drying blood with dirt, saying that should take care of it. I doubted it, but that wasn’t my job and we were warned about doing anything outside of our job.

Standing around with the cops next to a dead woman watching her family grieving inside was very strange. Mostly, I was surprised by my ability to be completely detached from the situation. An unsympathetic ear with a task list.

The program manager called me after submitting my paperwork to talk about my first call and I told him it was pretty uneventful. He asked if any feelings came up.

“No, not really.”
“None?”
“Um… It was kind of cold.”
“OK…”

He seemed to be waiting for something, so I threw him a bone.

“Well, now that you mention it… It was kind of sad, but I felt prepared, so it wasn’t so bad.”

Then he launched into some story about his first case as a social worker or something as I finished getting ready to go to the movies with a friend.

“Yeah,” I’d interject mournfully, as if I was listening and feeling something.

When he finished his story, he said to call if anything came up or I needed a referral to a counselor. I thought he was overreacting, but I said I would and hung up.

My friend was honking outside and I grabbed my shoes and was putting them on when I remembered something. With one shoe on, I walked outside and started banging the shoe on the step outside.

“What are you doing?” my friend yelled.
“There’s some brain in here. I can’t get it out.”
“Do it later. We’re late.”

Tying my shoe in the car with my friend, I wondered why the program manager would ask me if I needed a referral to a counselor.

B