Dr. G: Medical Examiner - Season 6, Episode 4 - A Deadly Deal - Full Episode | Forensic Files

[TENSE MUSIC] NARRATOR: An unidentified man is found in a hotel room, dead. We don't know why he's here or what he was doing.
Who is this guy? NARRATOR: And each discovery Dr. G makes at autopsy is more baffling than the last.
There's something strange going on. Really, nothing makes sense. NARRATOR: Then tragedy strikes a 23-year-old during what
should be the happiest week of his life. DR. G: To die just a week before he got married is especially sad.
NARRATOR: And now, his devastated fiancee is looking to Dr. G for answers. DR. G: I can't imagine how a fiancee feels.
It's all happened so fast. She wants to know what happened to him. [THEME MUSIC]
NARRATOR: Altered lives, baffling medical mysteries, shocking revelations. These are the everyday cases of Dr. G, Medical Examiner.
After more than a year of planning and construction, the new morgue for Orange and Osceola counties
is nearly complete. And to celebrate, Dr. G is treating the morgue staff to a special dinner.
DR. G: We've decided to have the soft opening for all the employees and their families to look
at this beautiful new morgue and building. We're going to have a dinner inside the morgue, which
has never been used, so it's perfectly clean and fine to have dinner. Thanks for coming!
You haven't eaten in the morgue yet, I don't think ever, have you? Eating in the morgue?
Yeah, we're having dinner in the morgue. Oh, oh no. Did you not know? Gosh I didn't--
I haven't done that for quite awhile. [LAUGHTER] So we can just start going to the buffet.
You know, it is just one big family. So it's fun to see everybody. Oh my, that is too cool.
Does it matter how I cut the cake? I don't usually ask people how to cut these things.
We're going to do our cake in our normal Y. That is unbelievable! [INTERPOSING VOICES]
[BEEP] NARRATOR: But the next morning, it's back to work at the old morgue. DR. G: Kind of a busy day.
We've got four bodies down here today. MAN 1: Did you uh-- I got here early. Oh, excuse me.
The other problem is I didn't have coffee this morning. All right, get ready. I just need to finish documenting a few things.
NARRATOR: It's high noon at the Highland Motel, outside Orlando, Florida. Time for the cleaning crew to make their daily rounds.
After five years on the job, housekeeper Jeanette Moran has seen her share of trouble at this rundown motel.
Housekeeping. [KNOCKING] NARRATOR: So when she opens room six and finds a man sprawled on the floor,
she assumes he's simply another guest who's had too much to drink. He's kind of next to the door, in between the door
and the wall. Sir? NARRATOR: But as she leans in for a closer look, Jeanette gets the shock of her life.
DR. G: Something's terribly wrong. He's obviously dead. NARRATOR: The housekeeper immediately calls 911,
and minutes later police arrive, along with a medical investigator from the morgue.
They find the room undisturbed, with no signs of a struggle. And in a small suitcase on the bed
they discover the dead man's identity. DR. G: His passport was there, and we know his name and his age.
NARRATOR: The victim is Eduardo Garcia Torres, a 57-year-old from Ecuador who arrived in the United
States just 14 hours earlier. He was last seen alive at around 6:00 or 6:30, when he checked into the hotel.
NARRATOR: But there, police hit a brick wall. DR. G: The consulate's office for Ecuador
is trying to locate next to kin for us, but we don't have anybody to talk to about his medical history or social history
or what he's like or what he's doing here. He's a mystery man. NARRATOR: And the biggest mystery of all
is how and why he died. As a first step. Dr. G combs the investigator's report for clues,
but she already has her suspicions. DR. G: You know, for me, 57-year-old man who
dies suddenly in his hotel room, I'm either going to think he had a heart attack
or he had a stroke. NARRATOR: But there's something that concerns are even more.
Based on the circumstances, he'd just come off a flight, I'm worried about a pulmonary embolus.
It's called economy class syndrome. The problem is that they're stuck in that airplane,
and you're not moving your legs, and your blood pools and your veins and clots can form.
NARRATOR: These clots can in turn break free, travel through the bloodstream, and get stuck in the lungs.
DR. G: And if it's a large enough blood clot that doesn't allow any other blood to get through that lung,
that causes a very sudden death. NARRATOR: It's also possible that the culprit is a more unusual illness.
We don't know how he was feeling on the plane, we don't know how he was feeling before he got on the plane.
Maybe it's something infectious from Ecuador. We have to worry about that. NARRATOR: But then a puzzling detail in the report
catches her eye. Investigators had documented a powdered residue along the edges of the bathroom sink.
DR. G: This could be associated with some cocaine use, so what was that all about?
Was he doing drugs? NARRATOR: The police will test the residue, and Dr. G will have to collect Eduardo's blood
samples for a full drug screen. Meanwhile, she must also consider a more sinister scenario.
DR. G: As usual, I'm always worried about foul play. Was somebody there doing something
with him, prior to him dying? You're just never going to know until you do the autopsy.
OK, let's see. Does it seem warm in here today to you guys? MAN 2: Yeah, it is. Good, it's not me.
DR. G (VOICEOVER): So this fellow, you know, he's not a very big guy. He looks about his stated age of 57 years.
Not really a lot remarkable about him. NARRATOR: But Dr. G knows that looks can be deceiving.
Considering the mysterious residue found in his room, her first step is to search for evidence of drug abuse.
DR. G (VOICEOVER): I'm going to look for intravenous scars or needle marks, even inside his nose for his septum,
to see if there's any perforation. Chronic cocaine sniffers can get holes in the septum
from the chronic effects of the cocaine on the mucosa. All right, let's see. NARRATOR: But a thorough inspection reveals no damage
to Eduardo's nasal cavity or any other indication of illegal substances. I'm not so sure about the drugs.
DR. G (VOICEOVER): I certainly don't see any signs of IV drug marks. He's not wasted and thin like a chronic crack user,
doesn't really fit that profile. Hm. NARRATOR: With no telltale evidence on the body,
Dr. G will need to rely on toxicology tests to reveal if drugs had anything to do with Eduardo's death.
In the meantime, she has her eye out for another suspect: assault. DR. G (VOICEOVER): We're going to look for external trauma.
We don't immediately see any gunshot wounds to him, but I'll look for external signs of trauma on the neck or blows
to the head. All of those things. Yeah, let's see his back before we clean him. NARRATOR: But her search for external injuries
also comes up empty. DR. G (VOICEOVER): He's got a little contusion on his elbow
and not a lot else. But really no trauma, just a little-- OK. NARRATOR: As a next step, Dr. G examines the inside
of Eduardo's mouth, and there she spots a subtle clue that opens a host of possibilities.
This is worrisome. He's got some foamy fluid in his mouth. This foamy flood is pulmonary edema, fluid
that builds up in your lung. I can see that when something is going on in their brain
like a stroke or a ruptured aneurysm, I see that when your heart's dilating and causing fluid to build up in your lungs.
NARRATOR: But pulmonary edema can also indicate a drug overdose or head trauma. DR. G (VOICEOVER): All of those things can cause fluid to form.
So the end of the external-- you know, he came in as a mystery man, and he's still a mystery man.
NARRATOR: To crack this case, Dr. G must now dig deep inside Eduardo's body. DR. G: All right.
NARRATOR: She begins at the head, where a fatal injury or disease might be lurking inside.
I think that might be where the money is. So we reflect the scalp, and looking for bruises,
there are none. I look at the bone, there's no fractures. So then we remove the calverium, we look at the brain.
[SAW BUZZING] DR. G (VOICEOVER): But there is no evidence of bleeding on top of the brain, there's no evidence
of bleeding from an aneurysm or a out pocketing of the vessels of the brain. There is no evidence of anything wrong with this brain.
DR. G: All right, give me a little rinse, see if we can get some of that hair out of there.
DR. G (VOICEOVER): So we've ruled out a lot of different things. NARRATOR: But something took Eduardo's life
in that motel room. The question is what? DR. G (VOICEOVER): We got to dig a little deeper here.
What's going on? I've really got to put the pieces of the puzzle together. [THEME MUSIC]
DR. G: We got everything? NARRATOR: Dr. G is on the hunt for what killed Eduardo Torres,
a 57-year-old who was found dead in a motel just hours after arriving from Ecuador.
From the scene, all we find is passport and a suitcase. We don't know what's he doing here, why is he here?
Who is this guy? NARRATOR: Dr. G opens Eduardo's torso with a Y incision, then immediately takes blood and fluid
samples for a drug screen. DR. G (VOICEOVER): There is some question of whether he's got cocaine on his bathroom counter.
So even though he's 57-years-old, I remove blood for toxicology, I remove eye fluid for toxicology, and of course bile and urine
for toxicology testing. NARRATOR: While her assistant, Tom Hemphill, prepares the samples to send out for analysis,
Dr. G begins a careful examination of Eduardo's chest and abdominal cavities, looking for any signs
of a fatal assault. DR. G (VOICEOVER): And I don't see rib fractures, I don't see blood accumulation, I don't see any kind of trauma
in any of his organs. There was no indication of foul play. NARRATOR: With trauma ruled out, she
begins an organ by organ search for indications of natural disease. OK, let's start.
NARRATOR: And her first stop is the lungs. DR. G (VOICEOVER): I really think that he's got a pulmonary embolus from that long trip,
and dies right when he starts his vacation. So I remove the lungs. I pick those up, and I cut them right
where all the vessels and the bronchi go into the lungs, and I can immediately see if he has a big pulmonary embolus.
And he doesn't. I've ruled out the pulmonary embolus. NARRATOR: But she does see more pulmonary edema,
the same frothy fluid that was in his mouth. This fluid could indicate a drug overdose.
But Dr. G knows it could also signal that something was wrong with Eduardo's heart.
DR. G (VOICEOVER): I see that when your heart's giving out, and dilating, and causing fluid to build up in your lungs.
So my bets were that this was probably-- he's 57-years-old, this is probably going to be a sudden cardiac death.
OK, let's see. Do you have-- you know, I'm going to take a lot of tissue. I'm just going to grab a bunch of--
NARRATOR: But after a thorough examination of Eduardo's heart, she's stymied again.
DR. G (VOICEOVER): His heart looks pretty good. It's about 390 grams. Normal weight, the normal size.
It wasn't dilated. He has some mild coronary atherosclerosis, some plaque build up in those arteries that supply blood
to the heart muscle, but there's maybe about 30% in one coronary artery, maybe maximum 20 in another.
The coronaries didn't have enough atherosclerosis to cause a problem, so he's-- really, surprisingly-- his heart looks good.
NARRATOR: At this point, drugs are rising to the very top of Dr. G's suspect list.
DR. G (VOICEOVER): There is that possibility. If that truly is cocaine that is on his bathroom counter,
you know, maybe he used cocaine. NARRATOR: Cocaine can cause sudden death by triggering an erratic heartbeat or a fatal spike
in blood pressure. Very small amounts of cocaine can kill you. It's very what we call idiosyncratic.
You can use the same amount every weekend, and then this weekend, using the same amount, it could kill you.
So with the casual user it's not that they've overdosed on cocaine. It's that cocaine caused a physiologic reaction
in their body that caused them to die. You don't know what level of cocaine can kill you,
and honestly, most of the deaths with cocaine, it's a relatively low level of cocaine that ends up killing.
NARRATOR: But just then, Dr. G receives some baffling new information from the Orlando
police department. Can you get it? Oh, I'll get it, I'll get it, I'll get it. [INAUDIBLE]
No, for Pete's sake. Morgue, Dr. G. POLICE (ON PHONE): Hi, Dr. G. NARRATOR: The detectives have preliminary findings
on the mysterious residue in Eduardo's room-- and it tested negative for narcotics.
All right. All right, bye-bye. NARRATOR: Suddenly a drug induced death is looking very unlikely.
But if drugs didn't kill him, what did? DR. G (VOICEOVER): I really don't know what's going on.
Considering he's just gotten off the plane from Ecuador, and he's dead, maybe he's sick.
Maybe he's got an infectious disease that we know nothing about. NARRATOR: To investigate this possibility,
she collects multiple samples from his heart, lungs, and brain to examine later with her microscope.
With her list of suspects dwindling, Dr. G turns to Eduardo's abdominal cavity, looking for anything that could shed light on the 57-year-old's
sudden death. Maybe there's something strange going in his kidneys, or his pancreas.
Those are really rare, but you never know what you're going to find. NARRATOR: She begins by removing and inspecting
Eduardo's liver, which appears to be perfectly healthy. My next step then is to remove the bowels,
and then his G.I. tract-- and that's where we have a surprise. Oh my god. DR. G (VOICEOVER): I really couldn't
believe what I was seeing. NARRATOR: Dr. G has just made a stunning discovery in 57-year-old Eduardo Torres's stomach.
My, my, my. Look at that. DR. G (VOICEOVER): When I snipped the stomach to remove his stomach contents, to see what his last meal was,
I was shocked. Wow. DR. G (VOICEOVER): Out came 36 little round packets of what looked like cocaine.
It was white powdery material that had been put at the tip of a surgical glove, then tied with either surgical suture material
or possibly with fishing line, and then that was wrapped in kind of a hard cellophane.
And then that was put in another surgical glove and tied at the end. They were smaller than a golf ball.
He had 36 of these packets, but that's not all. When I look in his small intestine,
he had another 15 packets, and then I look in his bowels and he has 73 packets. So he clearly is a mule.
He's a body packer. NARRATOR: According to Special Agent Trouville of the Drug Enforcement Administration, body packing
is a common way of smuggling narcotics like heroin and cocaine into the US. MARK TROUVILLE: We see thousands of these cases.
Body packing has been going on as long as drugs have been illegal. A body packer is a specific type of drug mule,
and that's a person who is hired to go ahead and ingest these drugs and bring them across the border
into the United States. And then once they get into the United States, they will then take a laxative to pass them back out.
NARRATOR: But clearly, Eduardo never got the chance to pass the drugs and deliver them to his employer.
Let's see what we have here. NARRATOR: And as Dr. G begin sifting through the packets
of cocaine, she find a key piece of evidence that tells her exactly why. DR. G (VOICEOVER): We clearly have a smoking gun
and everything makes sense. I think he just had some really bad luck. NARRATOR: It's sundown in Ecuador,
and Eduardo Torres is packing his suitcase for a short trip to Florida, but that's not all he's packing.
DR. G (VOICEOVER): He's poor. He needs money for whatever reason. He wants to make money, he's given
the opportunity to be a mule. A body packer. NARRATOR: One by one, Eduardo crams dozens of packets
full of drugs down his throat. MARK TROUVILLE: They're given an anesthetic for the throat
and some sort of lubricant, and they will just slowly start swallowing the pellets until they
have them all in there. I would choke on those things! I don't know how they swallow those.
They're good size. NARRATOR: When he's done ingesting the package, he heads for the airport as planned.
DR. G (VOICEOVER): He's given the ticket, and he's given where to go. He gets on the plane, he's probably feeling fine.
NARRATOR: But then, deep inside Eduardo's body, something goes terribly wrong. At some point in the trip, most likely
once he gets to the hotel, one of those cocaine packets bursts. That floods the cocaine into his system.
NARRATOR: Unleashed, the drug quickly saturates his blood. DR. G (VOICEOVER): When the tox comes back,
he has got a whopping 43 milligrams per liter of cocaine in his blood. We would see less than one milligram with most deaths.
Nobody could survive with the amount of cocaine he had in the system. NARRATOR: Not long after the drugs enter
Eduardo's bloodstream, a system wide toxic reaction begins to take place. His blood pressure skyrockets.
His lungs fill with fluid that travels up his airways and creates foam in his mouth.
And as he staggers to the door, trying to seek help, his heart beats faster until it finally gives out.
It just stops. Your heart stands still. And cocaine has that property to do that.
And unfortunately, he dies. NARRATOR: Dr. G rules the death an accident caused by cocaine intoxication.
DR. G (VOICEOVER): We don't usually say overdose with cocaine, but this guy was an overdose.
NARRATOR: It's an ironic end, considering Eduardo himself most likely didn't touch the drug.
They never could prove that that residue had anything to do with cocaine, and a lot of the body packers
don't use the drug. They body pack for the money. Drug trafficking is a problem here in this country
and the DEA was formed years ago in direct response to the drug threat that faces the United States.
Here in Florida, we have a great deal of work, obviously, Florida being the cultural gateway
into South America. And so we spent a great deal of our time, as we call it, looking south and dealing with drug trafficking
organizations from South America that import drugs into the United States. DR. G (VOICEOVER): You know, if you're
one of those 35 million people that have ever used cocaine in the United States, somehow you've contributed to his death
or people like him. People are willing to risk their life on this illegal drug so people can use it in the United States.
NARRATOR: Dr. G reports her findings to the police and Eduardo's body is quietly laid to rest.
DR. G (VOICEOVER): The sad part is that we never found his next of kin. No one ever claimed the body.
He was buried as an indigent, unknown next of kin. OK, I think that's all she wrote on that one.
NARRATOR: But in Dr. G's next case, the sudden death of a 23-year-old just one week
before his wedding leaves his entire family grasping for answers. They have no idea why this young man died.
They deserve an answer. Well, this is a sad case. This is a 23-year-old man that's in town for his bachelor party.
He was going to be married next week. He unfortunately dies and is reported to our morgue.
NARRATOR: It's a beautiful June evening in Orlando, Florida, and 23-year-old Reed Baley is on top of the world.
He was to marry his college sweetheart in one week. He'd just come in town from Tampa
with his fraternity brothers, and I guess they were going to have one last fling.
They were hitting the bars of downtown Orlando, and they're just having a good time.
NARRATOR: But at about 12:30 AM, Reed tells his friends he feels sick and wants to go back to the hotel room.
He's on and off not feeling well. Hard to say why, maybe because he's drinking too heavily.
So they come back to the room and then soon after that I guess he gets a second wind,
he starts feeling a little better, so he starts drinking again. We know there was just a lot of revelry.
He'd had at least 8 to 10 drinks prior even going back to the room, and then they're doing shots.
Yeah! FRATERNITY BROTHERS: Yeah! DR. G (VOICEOVER): So he's drinking quite a lot.
Not surprisingly, he kind of passes out in bed. The next thing we know is that one of his friends
wakes up in the morning, notices his friend had just vomited, and he's not breathing.
He immediately calls 911. MAN 3: Something is wrong. You got to come and help, you got to come now!
NARRATOR: Paramedics race to the scene, but Reed is already in cardiac arrest. DR. G (VOICEOVER): They shock him,
and his pulse somewhat comes back. PARAMEDIC: --grab the elevator for me. DR. G (VOICEOVER): They rush him to the hospital.
He makes it up to the ICU. They ended up shocking him three times. They used a lot of medication to try to keep his blood
pressure up, but they couldn't keep his heart in a normal rhythm. Then he dies. NARRATOR: When the ER doctor notifies
Reed's parents and his fiancee, Monica, they can hardly believe their ears. DR. G (VOICEOVER): The family's floored.
They have no clue what happened. He just died so quickly, the hospital really couldn't give them any answers.
I can't imagine how the fiancee feels. I mean, she's thinking about her wedding and her life
with this individual, and that's all taken away. [SAW BUZZING] All right. NARRATOR: Dr. G begins with a thorough review of Reed's case
file, and by all accounts he was the picture of health at the time of his death.
DR. G (VOICEOVER): You know, he's only 23-years-old. He doesn't have extensive medical history.
That's a shame. DR. G (VOICEOVER): At this point all we know is he's drinking heavily and he'd been
complaining of abdominal pain. Let's see. DR. G (VOICEOVER): Highest on my list is alcohol poisoning,
because a couple of those cases come from my mortgage each year. Usually young people, and they're
usually drinking very fast. If you drink fast enough, it raises your blood alcohol
to the point where it causes enough central nervous system depression that it will cause you to go into a coma
and eventually stop breathing. Oh, brother. NARRATOR: Assuming he was extremely intoxicated,
another possibility is that Reed choked to death on his own vomit. He vomits on himself, in bed, and then he's not breathing.
And it may just be that he aspirated on his own vomitus. Also, acute binge drinking can affect
your pancreas, no question. So the fact that he's complaining of abdominal pain,
I would worry about an acute pancreatitis, which is an inflammation of your pancreas
and a sudden death from that. Thanks. NARRATOR: Dr. G must also consider that alcohol wasn't the only substance in play
the night of Reed's death. DR. G (VOICEOVER): We wonder, if he's drinking that much
were they also using drugs? They'll admit to the alcohol, but they may not admit to the drugs.
Taking drugs with the alcohol would have a synergistic effect, and together would
suppress his respiratory center and kill him. NARRATOR: And the laundry list of alcohol related suspects
continues. DR. G (VOICEOVER): These are a bunch of drunk guys, stumbling around downtown Orlando.
They're going from bar to bar, they're falling down type drunk. Anything could have happened.
He could even have hit his head. So we'll look for evidence of trauma, but it might just be something totally unrelated to anything
we're thinking. So we'll look for anything that could point to any kind of natural disease.
Anything from an aneurysm to a hypertensive bleed. We just don't know. NARRATOR: At this point, only one thing is certain:
Reed's family and fiancee are looking to Dr. G for some sense of closure. You know, it's all happened so fast.
They deserve an answer. DR. G: Let's see. NARRATOR: Dr. G is preparing to autopsy
the body of 23-year-old Reed Baley, who died tragically the morning after his bachelor party.
DR. G: A lot of possibilities. Not sure what this is going to be, and we're just going to have to see.
Do we have height and weight? DR. G (VOICEOVER): So the external, we document everything we see.
We document all of the efforts of resuscitation, all of his intravenous lines. DR. G: He's obviously got a lot of medical intervention
here to try to keep him alive. DR. G (VOICEOVER): He has got IVs all over, he's got no bleeding around the IVs,
he's got the resuscitation pads on, the EKG pads, the endotracheal tube, the gastric tube.
NARRATOR: And not surprisingly, Reed's body is bloated with edema, or excess fluid from the IVs.
But that's not all. Oh, look at that. DR. G (VOICEOVER): There's bloody fluid in his mouth.
Problem is when you put those tubes down, sometimes they can cause bleeding in and of themselves.
NARRATOR: But this could also be evidence of trauma that occurred during Reed's night of partying.
Dr. G checks for abrasions and injuries to Reed's head and neck. DR. G: He has absolutely no trauma in his neck.
DR. G (VOICEOVER): The external exam of the head really didn't give us much except there's
no evidence of trauma. He's got contusions to his chest, some burn abrasions to his chest,
all from the resuscitation, trying to shock him. When I'm looking externally at his abdomen,
I was trying to feel the abdomen. His abdomen was soft. It wasn't as if a lot of blood is accumulated
or maybe an infection. So even after death, he had a soft abdomen to palpation, and that's what we would normally see.
So I really don't see any acute trauma besides what was done from the resuscitation.
But you never know until you get inside. All right, drop that in my hand. Thanks.
DR. G (VOICEOVER): It's kind of like a can without a label. We don't know what's in there.
DR. G: Why don't we just do his head? Make sure he doesn't have any head trauma.
We do the scalp incision, we reflect it. NARRATOR: Then, morgue technician Tom Hemphill uses the oscillating
saw to expose the brain. DR. G (VOICEOVER): There's no evidence of trauma to the inside of the scalp.
The bone, the calvarium, or the brain itself. And there's no bruises anywhere. He doesn't look like he hit his head.
DR. G (VOICEOVER): Really, no abnormalities. It's not that much. A little edematous, a little softened, but nothing
that would have caused his death. Even when we cut it, he's got the lateral ventricles that
hold cerebrospinal fluid are kind of compressed, and that's just from the edema from the resuscitation,
from his not having adequate blood flow to the brain. We certainly can rule out trauma to the head
or any kind of bleed into the brain, any type of natural disease in the brain. So at this point, we don't know what's really going on,
and we're not going to know until we get to the body. Want to do that now? Yeah, I'm ready to go with him.
DR. G: Alrighty. NARRATOR: Dr. G starts by cutting from Reed's shoulders to pelvis in a standard Y incision.
OK, this is going to be interesting. DR. G (VOICEOVER): The first thing I see is a lot of edema fluid.
Oh my gosh. DR. G (VOICEOVER): It just kind of oozes out of the tissue underneath the skin.
Eugh, lovely. What we're seeing is all the ravages of being on a ventilator, not having a blood pressure.
NARRATOR: Clearing away the fluid, she continues to look for any signs of trauma.
We look for rib fractures, because he could have fallen on the side of a table, punctured his lungs.
Let's see what we have here. DR. G (VOICEOVER): I don't see any evidence of trauma.
Eh, there's nothing there. The bottom line, it may just be alcohol. And see if we can get [INAUDIBLE]..
NARRATOR: Next, Dr. G takes blood and fluid samples to test for alcohol and drugs.
DR. G: OK, so we have blood. And that might be important, because toxicology may be the answer here.
NARRATOR: But the results won't arrive for several weeks. In the meantime, she turns her attention to the lungs,
and right away she finds a clue that could support her theory of alcohol or drug overdose.
Do you see these? God. When I look at his lungs, they're very heavy, they're very congested.
All that goes along with resuscitation, but it could be that way before the resuscitation.
If it was a drug overdose, alcohol poisoning, that's what we see, those very heavy,
congested lungs. DR. G: I think there's something going on in that lung. DR. G (VOICEOVER): Did he just vomit and obstruct his airway
so he couldn't breathe? It is not the type of way I would want to die. We don't usually see people dying that way.
Oftentimes, it's just a terminal event but it can happen. Let's see here. Well--
NARRATOR: But after a careful inspection, it appears that Reed's airway is clear.
He doesn't have any clear obstruction of the main stem bronchi. He really doesn't have any aspiration in the lungs.
That wasn't his cause of death. NARRATOR: Next on Dr. G's list, the heart. DR. G (VOICEOVER): When I look at his heart,
his heart's about 325 grams. That's great. Normal size. It's so nice to see a normal sized heart,
but the heart didn't look right. The coronary arteries are a little abnormal, because for a 23-year-old I'm finding a little bit of plaque.
I'm also finding it in the aorta, which is very unusual for somebody so young. Not enough to kill him, but he'd would have
had problems in middle age. Heart looks really funky. DR. G (VOICEOVER): It's got discoloration, it's softened.
The right ventricle's dilated. I'm going to go back over here. DR. G (VOICEOVER): All that could be from resuscitation,
because his blood pressure hasn't been very high for about three hours. He's also on a lot of pressers, a lot of medications to try
to bring his blood pressure up. Those have effects on the myocardium. We see changes in the heart when people
are on prolonged medications to try to keep their blood pressure up. I'm not going to know the cause of the softening of his heart
until I look under the microscope. I suspect it's due to resuscitation, though. NARRATOR: Dr. G preserve samples of Reed's heart tissue
for microscopic examination, and then turns her attention to the abdominal cavity.
He'd been complaining that he had abdominal pain. You know, there's 100 reasons for abdominal pain,
some of which can kill you, particularly with his history of drinking. So I'm very interested in what the organs of
his abdominal cavity look like. NARRATOR: First up is the liver. This liver doesn't look that bad.
DR. G (VOICEOVER): We could see some fatty liver changes with that type of binge drinking of alcohol,
but his liver actually looked pretty good. It was brown, it had a sharp edge. NARRATOR: But the surprisingly healthy state of the liver
doesn't help Dr. G rule alcohol poisoning in or out. The alcohol poisoning-- we wouldn't see
anything in the liver. People always think liver, alcohol. The chronic effects from alcohol, where his liver would
look real bad, like cirrhosis, we're not going to see that at 23. We start seeing that in the 30s.
He's on his way if he keeps this up, but not today. NARRATOR: Next, Dr. G inspects Reed's pancreas for alcohol
induced pancreatitis. And right away, things do not look good. DR. G (VOICEOVER): This pancreas was not normal.
He's got a lot of edema around it, a lot of what we blood tinged kind of look to it.
That could be from resuscitation, low blood pressure, but I'm worried maybe he does have a pancreatitis.
Now, pancreatitis is when you get an inflammation of your pancreas. We see young people dying suddenly that way,
particularly exacerbated by a bout of heavy drinking. I don't know, I'm not sure what's going on with him.
DR. G (VOICEOVER): I have some questions about his pancreas, but I really will need to look at that under the microscope.
NARRATOR: But before she does, there's one more system left to check. DR. G (VOICEOVER): We still don't
have a clear cause of death, so we've got to keep looking. DR. G: I need to still look at his esophagus and his stomach.
DR. G (VOICEOVER): First of all, we look at his esophagus. There's a little bit of erosion there.
NARRATOR: Dr. G follows the trail of irritation down into Reed's stomach. And then I see trouble.
What's going on-- oh, wait a minute, we may have a-- NARRATOR: Dr. G has finally made her first
unmistakable discovery in the autopsy of 23-year-old Reed Baley. DR. G: Look at that.
DR. G (VOICEOVER): He's got a bloody fluid in that stomach of his. So why does he got all of this fluid in his belly?
DR. G (VOICEOVER): He clearly has gastritis, which is an inflammation of the lining of the stomach.
That could be ultimately what killed him. I've had people who drink quite heavily that get gastritis
and actually erode off some of the mucosa and die from bleeding from that gastritis.
Let'se see what we can do here. DR. G (VOICEOVER): So we ladle that out and measure it.
There's not much here. DR. G (VOICEOVER): He lost just about 50 ccs of blood in his stomach, but we look at the rest of the GI track
and there's no blood in the rest of the lumen, no blood in the rest of the small intestine.
This could be the cause of his abdominal pain, but it certainly didn't bleed enough to kill him.
NARRATOR: Unfortunately, at the end of the autopsy Dr. G still doesn't know what took Reed's life just one
week before his wedding day. Nothing jumped out at me during the internal examination.
Nothing was clear cut. I'm still worried about the alcohol poisoning and drug use.
DR. G: We're not going to know so we look at the tox. NARRATOR: But in addition to the toxicology samples taken
in the morgue, Dr. G also needs to test the blood drawn when Reed was in the hospital.
That will give us a truer picture of what he was affected by at the time he arrested.
Because the blood I'm drawing at autopsy is three hours post arrest, so we'll get his blood
from the moment he came into the hospital, anything the hospital have, and that's what we'll test first.
NARRATOR: To track down these samples she enlists Chief Medical Investigator Steve Hansen.
DR. G: I can't go out there like this. Tell Steve to come in here. Hi, it's Kelly.
Dr. G's requesting your presence in the morgue, please. Hm? I would run out the back door, fast.
[LAUGH] DR. G: I hate to bother you, Steve. He's taking his time. If you notice, he's taking his time.
What? DR. G: This kid's gonna have more on him from the hospital. So could you call them and see what's going?
Tell them we need the blood. I'll jump right on it. My hands are bloody, I didn't want to talk on the phone.
This time. DR. G: No, just see what we can do. Yes, doctor. So definitely this case is pending
until every possible tox is done. It may mean four, six, eight weeks, it just depends how backlogged they are in tox.
NARRATOR: It will be a difficult wait for Dr. G, but for Reed's parents and grief stricken fiancee Monica,
it will be grueling. DR. G (VOICEOVER): At this point I do speak to the family, and just say we don't know yet.
Hopefully we'll get them the answer. NARRATOR: Four long weeks later, Reed's toxicology report
finally arrives at the district 9 morgue. So his toxicology comes back, and what we really tested
was the blood we got from the hospital. That was going to be important because that gave us
more of a window of what he was exposed to at the time he arrested. I really couldn't believe what I was seeing.
Most people who die from alcohol poisoning are going to have at least a 0.3, usually a 0.4.
That first draw from the hospital, when he hit the ER, gave us a blood alcohol the only 0.11.
NARRATOR: Despite the fact that Reed and his friends were partying hard for several hours,
it now appears that he himself did not consume an inordinate amount of alcohol. DR. G (VOICEOVER): Even if I extrapolate that out to when he
stopped drinking, his blood alcohol, we know, had to be under 0.3. His alcohol level just isn't high enough to have killed him,
and he has no drugs on the tox screen. I really just don't know what killed this poor guy.
I'm hoping the micros are going to have the answer. So when I get the micros back, the first thing I look at
is his pancreas. There was really no evidence of inflammation or hemorrhage, so no cause of death was evident on those micros.
NARRATOR: But Dr. G still has another slide left to examine: the tissue sample from Reed's heart.
DR. G (VOICEOVER): I'm not confident the heart slides are going to have the answer, because I really felt
the heart just showed some resuscitative changes, but I was really surprised when I looked under the microscope.
He was a walking time bomb. NARRATOR: In one week, Reed Baley is marrying his college
sweetheart, and in honor of the occasion his friends take the bachelor out for one last night on the town.
DR. G (VOICEOVER): He goes to Orlando to celebrate with his buddies. He was drinking, he was having a good time.
I really felt that drinking is going to play a role. But as it turns out, what ultimately
caused his death began at least a month prior to his bachelor party. He got a virus that he probably didn't even
realize he had that attacked his heart, which caused a rip roaring myocarditis. Myocarditis is inflammation of the heart muscle.
And this inflammation causes the heart muscle to die and be replaced by scar tissue.
Now, in most of these cases, the virus goes away and you don't even know you had it.
Nobody really knows why, but in some people the virus will attack the heart muscle cell
and that starts up this inflammatory process where his heart muscle is slowly dying.
NARRATOR: On the night of his bachelor party, Reed's ailing heart is on the brink of disaster.
DR. G (VOICEOVER): His heart's inflamed, he's got a lot of dying cells, and it's
hard for the electrical component of the heart to work correctly to get through that inflammation,
and his heart starts to quiver. They tried to shock his heart, but his heart's so diseased it just kept going back out of a normal rhythm.
And he died from an arrhythmia brought on by his myocarditis, his inflammation of his heart, brought
on by a viral infection. I don't really know why that arrhythmia occurred this night, this time.
It could have occurred at any time. You know, I say that your choices, genetics,
and luck determine your fate. A lot of the problems we see with the heart are due to our choices, our lifestyle, our smoking,
our lack of exercise. This is not one of them. This was really bad luck. NARRATOR: This revelation does bring
some relief, however small, to Reed's fiancee, Monica. I think with the fiancee it helped to know that this was
a fluke and it had really nothing to do with this bad binge drinking event that occurred because they were going to get married.
You know, when anybody dies and they leave behind loved ones, it's difficult, but I think to die just
at the door of the rest of your life, a week before he got married, is especially sad.
Unfortunately, we never know when our time is up. [SOFT MUSIC]

Reed Baley is found unconscious the morning after his bachelor party. Now, it’s up to Dr. G to determine if alcohol was to blame or if there was another cause of death.

A Florida medical examiner takes viewers through puzzling cases while explaining procedures and conclusions.

Brief Summary

Dr. G investigates the deaths of a drug mule and a groom-to-be, revealing shocking truths about drug smuggling and hidden health issues.

Key points

A Mysterious Death. An unidentified man is found dead in a hotel room, sparking a baffling investigation.
Tragic Timing. A 23-year-old dies just a week before his wedding, leaving his family searching for answers.
Dinner in the Morgue. Dr. G treats her staff to a special dinner in the new morgue, a first for them.
Cocaine Discovery. Dr. G discovers packets of cocaine in the deceased's stomach, revealing a shocking truth.
An Indigent Burial. Eduardo's body is laid to rest without anyone to claim him, highlighting the tragedy of his life.
A Night of Revelry Turns Tragic. Reed's bachelor party ends in tragedy as he suffers cardiac arrest after heavy drinking.

Episode highlights

Episode quotes

Eating in the morgue?

A humorous moment during the morgue staff dinner.

2:00WatchJun 22, 2021

Tension

85/ 100High tension

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