It was not clear if he was the victim of a fire accident or a suicide attempt, but a pathologist later found that Doan Si Phong had been attacked with a crowbar. Further investigations revealed that an acquaintance who had spent the night there had killed him to rob his property. The culprit had then committed arson to cover up his crime.
It was not the first time that the painstaking, hard work done by pathologists from the Lam Dong General Hospital’s forensic department had helped police uncover crimes or prevented miscarriages of justice.
The Central Highlands province’s only department offering forensic examinations and records has just three pathologists who have to deal with all the cases that occur in an area that sprawls over 1,000 square kilometers with a population of more than one million people.
An average of one case of murder, suicide or traffic accident requiring autopsy services occurs every two or three days in the province.
Morbid fascination
Tran Thien Nghia, 42, who has been a pathologist for 15 years in the department, says he has been carrying out an average of 10 autopsies per month recently.
Nghia says he was a construction worker destined to take up his current vocation. “My family lives near the morgue of Lam Dong General Hospital and I used to sneak into the place to watch their work.
“I was a construction worker when a forensic pathologist asked for my help and taught me the work as he examined the body of a colleague’s brother who had been murdered.”
Nghia was recruited by the Lam Dong General Hospital in 1994 and became a pathologist after graduating from a training course three years later.
Another pathologist from the team, Mai Van Loc, says he has been working in the department for more than 20 years.
“I used to think of treating humans with diseases when studying at the university. But my job is mostly examining corpses.”
However, Loc adds that the work that he and his colleague’s do is worthy because it has helped police uncover crimes and maintain justice.
“We always feel uneasy whenever we fail to decode the mystery from a corpse.”
Says Lam Dong General Hospital director Nguyen Ba Hy: “They are supposed to be on duty at anytime. Nghia has worked 200 extra hours in just six months of this year.
“The staff is thin and overloaded with work, but the department has never been accused of any mistake,” Hy says.
Key evidence
Late last month, Nghia was on the way back from Di Linh District after working on a case, when he was called at around midnight to examine the body of a man found dead on a road in Don Duong District.
The victim, head judge of the district People’s Court, Truong Van Tuong, had been killed in a traffic accident after a truck coming in the opposite direction had hit his motorbike.
In some cases, forensic examinations have also helped clear relatives of the dead of suspected involvement in the death.
The pathologists from Lam Dong General Hospital’s forensic department recently helped free a mother of guilt in Da Teh District after she had been accused by her husband’s parents of having killed her own daughter.
The three-month-old baby was found to have died of pneumonia.
In another case, his wife’s family had accused a husband from Di Linh District’s Tam Bo Commune of killing her, saying a previous quarrel between the victim and her mother-in-law was the motivation.
However, the husband was later found not guilty after forensic examinations showed the wife had committed suicide by ingesting pesticide.
Difficult and dangerous
As if the nature of their job was not gruesome enough, the pathologists are stuck with insufficient equipment, which exposes them to grave health hazards.
Some of the corpses they have to perform autopsies on are AIDS patients or victims of other fatal diseases.
“The job of a forensic pathologist is supposed to be one that is refused by almost everybody,” says Hy. “It’s a hard and sometime harmful job.”
Pathologist Loc says: “It is terrible sometimes to cut up decomposed corpses. Sometime, we just can’t eat anything afterwards.”
Another department staff says he had to be hospitalized once after having to work overtime for a whole week, handling up to three cases in a single day.
To make matters worse, the remuneration they receive for this work is a relative pittance.
For a full autopsy in a traffic accident case, they get VND21,000 (US$1.25); between VND56,000 ($3.34) and VND70,000 ($4.17) for each corpse that has been dead for between 48 and 72 hours; and VND105,000 ($6.26) for each exhumed corpse.
Source: TN, Tien Phong |
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