Is there life before death?

August 16, 2005 1:33 PM

The (now proven fraudulent) text message that suggested that the Helios Airways flight passengers had already frozen to death when their plane crashed led investigators to determine whether the passengers were already dead at the time of impact. How can a coroner determine this when the difference in times of death is potentially on the order of minutes?
posted by landtuna to Science & Nature (7 answers total)

Generally, they look at blood and lungs. Dead people don't bleed, nor do they breathe. If they have inhaled particulate (smoke, debris, even searing from fire,) in them, that's a sign that they died when the plane crashed and not before. Likewise, if they have internal bleeding, blood in the lungs, evidence of fresh, peri-mortem bruising, or wounds that bled, chances are they were alive when the plane crashed.
posted by headspace at 1:40 PM on August 16, 2005

Response by poster: Right, but in this case, the suspicion was that if they died beforehand, it was of hypothermia or oxygen loss. That wouldn't cause any of your "evidence of life" items. If they died upon impact, it seems like there wouldn't be time to inhale any particulate matter. As you said, though, I could see how they might bleed more if they still had blood pressure upon impact.
posted by landtuna at 1:44 PM on August 16, 2005

Weren't they in the air on auto-pilot for a long time? That would lenghten the difference in times of death.
posted by LadyBonita at 1:47 PM on August 16, 2005

Remember the Payne Stewart crash?
posted by letterneversent at 1:50 PM on August 16, 2005

On the news this morning I heard that coroners had determined that there was blood circulation and respiration at time of death, which led them to determine that the passengers were at least alive if not conscious. IANACSI.
posted by matildaben at 1:53 PM on August 16, 2005

In this case, I'd imagine time of death is less important than cause of death in determining how someone died, and that freezing to death causes permanent tissue damage that would be found by the coroner.
posted by cillit bang at 2:01 PM on August 16, 2005

Best answer: Right, but in this case, the suspicion was that if they died beforehand, it was of hypothermia or oxygen loss. That wouldn't cause any of your "evidence of life" items. If they died upon impact, it seems like there wouldn't be time to inhale any particulate matter.

If they died of hypoxia or hypothermia, there are specific signs of that. Someone who died of hypoxia would be blue, chances are, their eyes and tongue would protrude, and the lungs and eyes would probably show petechial hemmoraging (little, pinpoint bursts of tiny capillaries.) If they were specifically looking for depressurization, there shold be excess nitrogen in the blood. I'm not sure, though, how they would identify death by hypothermia outside the usual sphere of finding a frozen body, or a body with evidence of frostbite, etc..

If they died on impact, the sad but morbid fact is, they died of blunt trauma and even catastrophic blunt trauma is rarely instantaneous. They only need to take one breath to breathe in smoke or fire, and as noted before- if they bled, they were alive, if only for a moment or two.
posted by headspace at 2:14 PM on August 16, 2005