The commission investigating the Lewiston shooting has detailed the chaos on Oct. 25 down to the second. Maine State Police have published their own timelines of the two-day manhunt for shooter Robert Card, which ended when police discovered his body in a trailer at Maine Recycling Corporation in Lisbon at 7:40 p.m. on Oct. 27.

Yet as much as the public has learned about how law enforcement spent those 48 hours, it remains uncertain what Card was doing or when exactly he took his own life – and Card’s autopsy report offers little clarity.

Lindsey Chasteen, a spokesperson for the Maine Office of Chief Medical Examiner, said in November that the moment police found Card’s body would be recorded as his official time of death, but the shooter likely died on Friday morning, about a day-and-a-half after he first escaped into the darkness.

“Postmortem interval based on rigor mortis and other physical signs indicate Mr. Card was deceased likely 8-12 hours before being located,” Chasteen told the Sun Journal on Nov. 3.

But that timeframe was not included on the final report, and experts in forensic pathology say estimating time of death with any confidence is difficult or impossible.

“Determining time of death is fraught with many, many errors,” said Dr. Constance DiAngelo, a consultant and Philadelphia’s former chief medical examiner. “I know it’s important to many people, but it’s just not an exact science.”

After reviewing Card’s autopsy report, DiAngelo said Maine’s former Chief Medical Examiner Mark Flomenbaum appears to have come to a reasonable conclusion. But she said it likely would have been equally reasonable to estimate that Card died as early as Thursday night.

And another expert told the Press Herald that he would have been uncomfortable providing any time of death estimate based on his review of the materials.

Chasteen did not respond to two emails this week asking to explain how the office concluded Card died Friday morning and how confident the team was in that finding.

The medical examiner’s office had denied public records requests for the autopsy report, citing privacy concerns – even though the Card family gave a copy to the New York Times, which shared the document with the Press Herald.

It is only a minor mystery in a case that has raised much larger questions about how law enforcement agencies, the medical system and the Army allowed warnings about Card’s failing mental health to go unheeded. The question has so far barely come up during public hearings held by the commission investigating the mass shooting.

Yet the issue could have implications for Maine State Police leaders who have defended the agency’s handling of the manhunt – which included two unsuccessful searches of the recycling center – by arguing that the swarm of police officers who descended on the region last October helped prevent a still-dangerous shooter from killing more people.

AN INEXACT SCIENCE

When time of death is uncertain, medical examiners are trained to start with the broadest possible window: the last time seen alive, and the time the body was found.

From there, they look for a number of physical clues, said Dr. Kendall Crowns, the chief medical examiner in Tarrant County, Texas. After death, muscles stiffen and then soften, core temperature drops, and purple marks form on the skin from no-longer-pumping blood.

By comparing the condition of a body to the average times it takes for these phenomena to occur, an examiner can pinpoint the time of death.

At least that’s the way it works on TV.

In practice, Crowns said, there are so many exceptions and complicating factors that an examiner usually can’t do more than come up with a very broad window, if they can estimate time of death at all.

“Under perfect circumstances, in a laboratory setting with a standard height and weight male, you could potentially give an estimate on time of death,” he said. “But because none of those circumstances ever happened, it’s impossible to be accurate.”

A person who had been very active just before death would have less glycogen (glucose) in their muscles, which could make the rigor mortis (muscle stiffening) process begin sooner, he said. A body left in the cold might lose core temperature faster than average, but decompose at a slower rate. While a body with very high body fat content could decompose faster.

One apparently confounding factor in the Card case stemmed from the way he died – a self-inflicted gunshot wound. According to the autopsy report, dated Oct. 31, the head wound resulted in “empty heart sign,” which means he had little blood left in his body.

DiAngelo said that was likely why the report noted the body displayed “barely perceptible” lividity (the purple marking examiners can sometimes use to estimate time of death).

She noted that Flomenbaum may have have known more details about the scene where Card was discovered than were included in the report, including information about the air temperature of the trailer. Based on the report itself, which said the body had “strong and symmetrical” rigor mortis and a temperature slightly cooler than room temperature, she said she likely would have given a less specific estimate for the time of death – up to 24 hours before the body was found.

But DiAngelo also stressed that even these imprecise guesses can sometimes be wrong.

“You can pick up any forensic pathology textbook and the author will give you examples of immediate onset rigor to cases where it’s days and days out,” she said. “There’s so much error and so much variability.”

‘CSI EFFECT’

Though the medical examiner’s office shared a time of death estimate with the public last fall, Flomenbaum’s report does not include that figure nor any other estimate. Experts who talked to the Press Herald said that’s normal, because time of death is not a major piece of what medical examiners are looking for.

Yet it continues to hold the fascination of police, prosecutors and the media-consuming public, much to the discomfort of forensic pathologists who constantly bump against this “CSI effect.”

Crowns said he is regularly pressured to give time of death estimates that could help pin a suspect to a crime scene at the appropriate time.

“You get that a lot from detectives, from lawyers,” he said. “They say, ‘If you could just say that those injuries and the changes that you found on the body were 10 hours old, we got the mom in this child abuse case.’ That’s pretty classic.”

Crowns said his typical answer is that he cannot be confident enough in the science to share a time of death. Based on the report, he said it looked like Flomenbaum had done a thorough job with the autopsy.

But if it had been his case, he said would not have shared any estimate with the public.

Though the medical examiner’s office has been slow to share details about the Card’s autopsy, the public could learn more at a commission meeting scheduled for Thursday at 9 a.m. in Augusta. Along with victims and members of Card’s Army Reserve unit, members of the medical examiner’s office are expected to speak at the hearing, though the commission has not announced who will testify or what testimony they will share.

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