April 3, 2025 • 46 mins
A shocking video our of New Orleans shows an Orleans Parish Coroner's Office employee dragging a murder victim's body down the front steps of his home! Project NOLA posts the video to social media and the next day, OUTRAGE. Joseph Scott Morgan and Dave Mack take a look at what happened on the scene to allow this to take place. Joe takes the time to explain the possible damage being done, not just to the victim, but to the prosecution case at trial.
Transcribe Highlights
00:05.89 Introduction, New Orleans
05:18.12 Description of Large Man dead for a long time
08:26.46 Getting the man down the stairs
10:27.13 The dead deserve dignity and respect
14:28.29 Recalling a story from autobiography
20:08.56 A body being drug from a home
25:08.48 Dragging a body down the stairs
30:00.43 Body is being damaged
35:56.52 Everything in the case can be ruined
40:41.59 Homes are very close
45:51.47 Conclusion
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
Quody dynamis, but Joseph's gotten more having spent many, many
years working in the Morgue. One of the most difficult
things about the Morgue as a workplace, particularly if you're
at a smaller jurisdiction, it is not having to deal
(00:21):
with decomposed bodies or complex gunshot one case where the
victim might have multiple wound tracks through the body, or
even being exposed to infectious diseases, which we were quite
a bit. You know what the most difficult thing was
was being alone in the morgue. And I don't mean
(00:45):
you know, ghosties and goblins and those sorts of things.
I've never seen one as a death investigator, and I
was around a lot of dead bodies. The one thing, though,
give me a little latitude here, that haunts me is
the fact that I had to move bodies by myself.
I have found myself in positions where I was moving
(01:08):
individuals that were well in excess of three hundred pounds,
all by myself, and to this day I paid the
price with my back and my shoulder and my hip.
If you can get a second pair of hands to
(01:29):
help you to move the dead, because they are dead weight,
it's always best, But there are certain things that we
do when we're around the dead that indicate to us
and to the world around us more importantly, that we
(01:50):
care for those that have passed on. The worst thing
anyone could ever be seen doing in public that works
for eight Corner's office is the abuse of a corpse.
I'm Joseph Scott Morgan and this is Bodybacks. I'm going
(02:17):
to regal you with a story, Dave to start off with,
and this actually happened in a New Orleans suburb on
what is referred to as the west bank of the
Mississippi River, even though there it's technically not west, it's south.
But they call it the west bank because it's on
(02:37):
the side of the river that would be, I don't know,
the Louisiana side, and you know, as it flows southbound,
so they but they because it makes the big curve.
You've heard the term of the Crescent City. Uh. The
reason New Orleans one of the nicknames is Crescent City
(02:57):
is because there is a big crescent shape end in
the river there. I was in a town and I
think it was Marrero, Louisiana, and we got a call
that we had a severely decomposed body of a fellow
that was living in, oh there's no other way to
(03:19):
put it, in a flophouse and his taxi driver and
what was so there were several surreal things about this case.
First off, the guy lived in a room that had
a single window unit and it operated off of quarters
(03:39):
and there were quarters stacks of them everywhere, so when
the air would begin to run down, he would drop
into the quarter in And then there were hostess, you know,
snack cake wrappers everywhere, you know, like ding dongs and
things like twinkies. They were just all around the room,
(04:02):
just littered the area. And then you come to him, Dave,
this guy, I don't know, he was well in excess
of four hundred I think probably five high fives. And
what really made it interesting, not that that's not interesting already,
is he was a taxi driver and he had a
(04:27):
Chevy Caprice four door that he drove. And did you
know that he was so big that the front seat
was busted and so he would have to recline. And
so if you wanted to have an additional fare in
there like where his, you would I've thought about this
(04:48):
several times. You would have to ride down the road
with the driver's head in your lap. You know, if
you could squeeze your legs between. This guy was really
big and he was severely decomposed. In this room, it's
a single bed, and he used every inch of it.
He died of a heart attack, but had been down
(05:10):
for a long time, and I remember we had to
call the fire department out to help us move. Well,
first off, there's not a body bag big enough to
accommodate this guy. And even if you did do that,
the straps there's these nylon straps on the corner and
on the corners and on the sides of body bags
that could not have worked in order to move this
(05:32):
guy around. You would have ripped him, that's how heavy
he was. So we called the fire department, and myself
and the firefighters kind of scratched our head over this thing,
and we came to conclusion the best thing that we
could do is get a big blue crash tarp, place
him in it and wrap him up. And the thing
(05:53):
about it is, if you've ever seen what an old
fashioned joint looks like, you know, where people used to
twist the ends of it. It looked like no.
Speaker 2 (06:01):
Way you're talking about having I'm gonna have to look
that up.
Speaker 1 (06:09):
It looked like a gigantic blue joint in the floor.
And we had to get this guy down a set
of stairs, a set of stairs, interior stairs, and the
stairs were wide. This is an old, old building. The
day he was so decomposed, and the human body, when
we decompose it, you know, it becomes very slimy, very greasy,
(06:33):
as we like to say. And this decompositional grease was everywhere.
It was on our gloves, it was on the back
because we had to wrestle to get him in. We're
fighting flies. It's horrible. Well, long story short, and I've
made this very long, but just understand me. We knew
(06:54):
that we had to get him out of the building,
and it took I think I might be miss from
That's one of the reasons I love firefighters because they're
always willing to work. They put their shoulder to the
stone all the time. They're the coolest cats in the world.
I think it took six of us to get him
down the staircase, and we lost our grip and I
(07:14):
wound up heart of my hip really bad and my
shoulder because the body took me down. But I was
on the side bouncing off of these wooden stairs and
pressed against a wall. One of the firefighters actually he
either broke his leg, his leg was broken or it dislocated.
(07:36):
His hip. Is horrible, you know. We were all moaning
and groaning, you know, and still we've got this huge body.
Now that's that's with six grown men, and we're trying
to do this, and we're trying to be as respectful
as we possibly can. But there are certain circums dances
(08:00):
when it comes to bodies that the conduct involving the
bodies is reprehensible.
Speaker 2 (08:08):
Did you get the did you get the big guy
down the stairs?
Speaker 1 (08:11):
We got him down the stairs and we actually had
a firefight, a bunch of firefighters. I'm glad you mentioned this.
That just came to mind. We got him downstairs, got
him into the van, and we couldn't use a mortuary
stretcher in the van, it would have broken it. We
had to set it aside, and he just his body
(08:33):
was just laying in the floor of the van. So
a bunch of the firefighters, uh followed us to the morgue, which,
by the way, is was back then was on the
east bank. It's on the west bank now, but was
on the east bank. So here we are, we're all riding,
you know, in tandem. It's me and my car, and
then the mortuary service that we hire to move bodies,
(08:56):
and then this line of firefighters, and we pulled into
the gate. We had to get him into what we
call the decomp room, which is this really tight space,
onto a stainless steel gurney, by the way, in order
for his body to be examined the next day. You
would not take a body like this into what we
referred to this clean area. And but yeah, we got
(09:18):
him up on the on the.
Speaker 2 (09:19):
Gurney, and all the while, everyone that was involved in
this process was concerned about being respectful. Even though it's hot,
slimy flies, it's the worst of the worst, But there
is still the underlying professionalism that requires you to do
this as respectful as you possibly can. Is that correct?
Speaker 1 (09:42):
It is? And you know you, I think you made
a comment. I can't remember how back, how far back
it was. We talked so much at but uh, we
you had made a comment relative to the dead. And
it's really insane, rightful, because I've used it before. That's
somebody's baby, you know. I don't care if you weigh
(10:06):
five hundred pounds or decomposing in a room makes no
difference to me. You're covered with flies, you're living in
lessen favorable conditions. It's still you know, somebody held that child,
held that man as a child, as a as a
wee little one. At some point in time, they might
(10:29):
not be around anymore, but it's somebody's baby. You know.
The dead are at you know, they're they're at our mercy.
Their remains are at our mercy. How we treat them,
and it says a lot about I think a lot
about a society how you treat the dead. Now I'm
not where. You know, our normal fear on the show
(10:49):
is to talk about things like dismemberment. We understand how
insulting that is. And there's a whole group of there's
a whole you know, underpinning of psychopathy that goes with
people that we even did a special episode on dispayment.
That's not what we're talking about here. We're talking about
representatives of a duly elected office in the City of
(11:14):
New Orleans, the Parish of New Orleans, Parish of Orleans.
Rather where you have such disregard and you have a
level of callousness toward the dead that you would treat
a dead body in the manner in which we're going
to discuss in public like this, and you have no
(11:35):
shame over it, no shame. I think that that indicates more.
It's a reflection of who we are as a people,
because if you'll treat the dead that way, you know,
on camera, by the way, and you know there there
is a chance you're going to be seen, okay, and
(11:58):
particularly in today's world, it goes beyond pay all day.
Speaker 2 (12:03):
You know. This was actually the story is how a
watchdog group that is watching crime or watching police rather
in New Orleans shows up at crime scenes in the
video what's going on? And this video captures somebody from
(12:24):
the coroner's office removing the body of a sixty one
year old man from his home. And as he is
as the body is being brought out of the home,
it is in a body bag on a tarp and
the tarp is being pulled by this employee of the
coroner's office and it is pulled down stairs. By the way.
(12:49):
This is the victim of a homicide. An investigation is underway,
and this body is not carried out by several people.
The body is being drug I cannot say that hard enough,
but I got to understand that this body bag is
on a tarp and this employee is pulling the tarp
(13:11):
bump bump, bump, bump, bump, bump, all the way down
the stairs. Boom, and it's captured on video. That video
was uploaded and within a matter of hours already was
in the six figures in terms of views. The coroner,
the guy who actually the elected official, he didn't know
anything about it until he sees it popping up online.
(13:34):
And he's watching an employee of his office do the
most disrespectful and by the way, damaging to the investigation
by treating this body in such a manner. And Joe,
we've got two different cases to discuss. In this one one,
it is the murder of a sixty one year old
(13:55):
man who was not seen by by neighbors and they
were concerned and started looking for him. As we mentioned
the other day on a previous show, it's like, if
you don't see somebody before your report of missing, how
about going to the house and just look through the
windows or something, peek around, see what you see. But
in this particular case, we have the death, the murder
(14:17):
of a sixty one year old man. We have an
eighteen year old who was arrested driving the man's car
and having his wallet and cell phone with him, and
then we have this horrible display of disrespect from an
employee of the coroner's office. Take your pick as to
which way we're going to go, Joe, because in every
aspect of this story, I know you have a comparable
(14:38):
story to tell and how you dealt with it in
the moment.
Speaker 1 (14:42):
Yeah, And look, I've had embarrassing instances. You know, at scenes.
There have been bodies that have been dropped over the years,
but it was it was not a purpose to act,
and people still got hot over that, you know, just
(15:03):
really enraged. But you know, I don't ever I never
recall I wrote about I did write when I wrote
my memoir, I wrote a story or recalled a story
that involved a kid that had been shot actually in
the projects just south side of New Orleans. And he
(15:24):
had had a bullet that and it was an AK round, Dave,
and he took a headshot and it didn't make it
all the way through his head as a dry by shooting,
and this seven point sixty two round fired by the
aka by the perpetrator utilizing an ak platform kind of
(15:45):
diagonally went through this kid's head and lodged behind his
right ear. And the name of the story was actually
called the Earache because it deals with mama's and how
they take care of their kids. And I do have
a point with this. We had a huge crowd where
we were where the shooting took place, and they were angry.
(16:07):
I remember the cops even brought the dogs at one
point in time. People wanted blood in this case, and
so you could actually feel the round and it had
partially broken the skin. Now, one of the things that
(16:28):
I like to do with bodies relative to like a
head like this, I'm not going to remove that projectile
at the scene. It's a fool's air and if you
do that, So what I do, just like with you
know how we baged the hands. I bagged this kid's
head and put tape around the base of it so
(16:51):
that if the round fell out and transit, we would
still have the round. But there's a high probability that
if we take care and getting this kid's body to
the morgue, the round will remain inside to you and
the pathologist will be able to appreciate it. Remember there's
(17:11):
not a pathologist at the scene. Well, anyway, I go
through this whole thing. We've got murmurings in the crowd.
I wrapped the tape around the base of the back,
secured it. And his mama, this kid's mama was sitting
just outside the tape and she was weeping openly. This
(17:32):
is her baby, okay, dead on this dirty ground in
the projects. And her sisters were with her too. And
you'll see a situation where you'll have people that are
kind of in a I don't know how to describe it.
You'll see somebody. You can see people that will beat
(17:54):
their chest and scream and carry on and whatnot. That's
really not the people you need to watch out for.
This mother was openly weeping, and she wasn't saying anything,
and she had collapsed the grounds, and it's kind of
that quietness that's the people you need to watch out for.
And I remember seeing her grieving for her at the
(18:18):
scene because she saw me examining the body. Can you
imagine that watching your child's body be examined on this
dirty ground out there while my back was turned. I
had a police officer that took a magic marker and
drew a smiley face on the outside of this back
(18:40):
and put a bubble, a cartoon bubble coming up out
of the mouth that said good morning, doctor Mac. Now
Mac was one of our pathologists, and he thought that
it was funny to do this. See, that's the kind
of thing that you never because once you cross over
that you've now left what civil society is and what
(19:06):
our expectations are where there are certain boundaries that you
don't go across. And that night will ever for ring,
will ever ring in my mind. And that's one of
the reasons I think that it's just one of the
many reasons that I brought this case to your attention
when we were thinking about it, because it it made
(19:28):
me think about all of the times where as an
old death investigator, I think back and I think, did
I do everything I could to respect the dead in
this environment? But on this particular night, in what's referred
to as the Bywater neighborhood of New Orleans, one of
(19:48):
New orleans most lovely and ancient of neighborhoods that didn't
happen as a grown man had been the victim of
a crime. His body was drug from his home, bounced
along an external staircase and driven off in the night.
(20:26):
Just so folks understand where this neighborhood is. It's when
Katrina hit. You heard about the Lower ninth Ward. A
lot of people heard about that, you know, when the
levees gave way and we had flooding throughout the city.
The Lower ninth Ward, the ninth Ward is actually a neighborhood,
(20:49):
and the city itself was broken down into wards. And
it's a political assignment, you know here from the eighth
ward the ninth Ward, those sorts of things, and you
can supplant it with district. You know, you'll hear other people.
But the Lower ninth Ward is immediately adjacent to the
Bywater area, and the Bywater area is old. I mean
(21:11):
it's like really really old. As a matter of fact,
it's so old that it was one of the first
if you want to refer to it as a suburb,
began to be built in the early eighteen hundreds. Okay,
So these homes are old in this area and prior
to it being developed for a place for people to live,
(21:32):
you know, when they finally got roads and carriages and
all that sort of thing in New Orleans that were
passable before that. It was a plantation. So it goes
back a long long ways and it's adjacent to a
couple of canals that are in New Orleans everything. You know,
you come across a bayou and don't think about byous
(21:54):
in the sense like you see in Cajun Land. These
are bayous that are still moving. Are you know, by
use nothing but a river that really moves slow. But
these are all cleaned up, you know, they're very immaculate there.
You know, people want to live around around these areas.
And you've got not too far away, You've got another
large canal that, uh, you know, will get you into
(22:16):
the Mississippi River. So water surrounds everything and I've often
thought that that's why they called it by water. But
the house where this event took place, Dave, is a
typical what is referred to as a creole cottage, and
Creole cottages typically if you ever look at photos of
(22:37):
New Orleans, there are some of the most lovely homes
that you'll ever see. In their shotgun homes. They're painted
in bright pastel colors. They always have a porch, they're
always a walk up by the way you hear that
term associated with New York quite a bit, but their
walk up in New Orleans for the purpose of people
elevate their homes down there because of water, and the
(23:01):
homicide that we're referring to actually took place in a
home that is a not only a creole cottage that
is a shotgun, but it's a shotgun double. So that
means that you've got two homes that are well, you've
got one structure that makes up two homes and they're
(23:21):
all linear. So as you're standing at the foot of
the staircase at this home, our victim's home is on
the right, okay. And so when these people captured this
image of the morgue worker or the corner's office worker
(23:41):
bringing this gentleman's body, mister Hankins down the staircase, you're
looking at them not it's not like they're peeping through
a wind to day. This is done in public, man,
and they're being drug out on a Tarp's not even
a mortuary stretcher, because every every corner's office has mortuary stretchers,
(24:06):
and for those that don't know what those are, they're
stretchers that one person can manage. If you can get
the body onto it. Then it's got separate locks on
the feet and the head, and it's got a brace
down at one end. It's like a little grill work
where the feet would go, and it keeps the body
(24:28):
in place. And it's got straps that look like seat belts.
I didn't even have that. And so, you know, because
you can take a mortuary stretcher and even if somebody
is big, one person can manage this thing. And yeah,
it would have you know, still bumped down the staircase.
(24:49):
But that's not the case. And I couldn't for the
life of me, because I watched the video day. I
couldn't for the life of me, because this is not
the only He's not this person that worked for the corner.
And mind you, I said that in the past tense,
this person that worked for the corner. I don't understand
why no one else was given on my hand to
(25:12):
pick up the corners, the corners of the tarp to
help transport the body down. He's the singular individual that
is moving the body. And we don't see what happened
to the body once it got to the ground.
Speaker 2 (25:27):
No, and why, and I mean this asking for help
is not weakness. But in this particular case, somebody working
for the corner's office. You've got other individuals around that
are all law enforcement or they're around crime victims. At
what point do you think it's okay to do this?
(25:48):
I guess is my bottom line? Really, I'm looking at
this from every angle possible, and it's like, Hey, if
I'm standing there at the street doing my cop business
or whatever, and I look over and I see a
man dragging this body down the stairs, you know, all
the way down, I'm going to be mad because all
you had to do is say, hey, I need help.
(26:09):
You know, well you must, I didn't bother to ask.
Speaker 1 (26:12):
You might be mad, but I've got one better for you.
I'm drinking. I'm thinking this is go to the culture
of what happens to crime scenes down there now that
we just don't that we just don't care to the
point that everybody's numb to it.
Speaker 2 (26:30):
Is this why we have this camera crew or a
person they're watching it because they see this kind of
garbage happening and they have to get it on video.
Speaker 1 (26:40):
I think that that's part of it. And this is nothing.
There's nothing new under the sun. I love my hometown
I really do. You know that I do. And I
love the people, and you can make excuses all day
long for the activities of people. But when you see
and I don't care what the classification of death is,
I don't care. I don't care what the uh financial
(27:03):
standing of an individual is. You can be poor as
a church mouse or you can be the richest person
in the world. You're still dead, okay. And there's there's
a certain there's a certain code that you adhere to
when you're you know, when you're taking care of you're
you're really you have been entrusted. And I wax kind
(27:27):
of philosophical about this stuff. Now, you know, I don't
have that robotic mindset where I'm just trying to get
the body from point A to point B. And so
forgive me for that, but I see it. And you know,
if you'll treat the dead this way, how do you
treat the living? And so there's several things to consider here.
(27:50):
First off, the mortuary worker, the corners employee that drug
this body down the staircase, and let me tell you
what happened when he drug it down staircase. Because he's
dragging from the feet, the head, the head there's a
grand opportunity here that the head is up at the top,
(28:13):
and even if the head is not up at the top,
could be at the feet or down below. With the
feet above, you're dragging this homicide victim down these external
wooden stairs and literally is bouncing, is bouncing as they
go down. Well, any kind of trauma that's there that
(28:35):
has been perpetrated, because we're talking about a second degree homicide. Here,
you can dislodge projectiles, you can disrupt trace evidence. Oh,
here's a great one. You can actually traumatize post mortem.
From post mortem perspective, you can traumatize the body. And
(28:57):
let's just say that, let's just say that there was
a fracture in the body already. Okay, Well, if you're
dragging and this is not a slight step, Okay, this
is not like a couple of steps. This is like
it's like ten or eleven steps that.
Speaker 2 (29:15):
We shocked seeing the video, Joe I was shocked.
Speaker 1 (29:17):
Yeah, and you know you see it and you think,
oh my gosh, it's really really going to drag him
all the way down. You're thinking, oh my lord, I
hope that I hope this isn't going to happen and
you watch it. It's like that train wreck, you know,
just kind of sitting there, you know, and watching the thing.
But yeah, I mean, let's just say that the victim
(29:38):
had any kind of bony fracture that's there. Well, you
can further exacerbate that by dragging them, you know, like this.
There's any number of things that could have happened, and
we don't know if it happened. What we know is
that we see a body being subjected to post mortem trauma,
(30:00):
is postmartem trauma. Do care is not being taken? You know,
people can say, you know, things like, well, in other
countries they handle bodies. I don't care about other locations.
I care about what we do in America. And there
is a there's a certain standard that we're to adhere
to when we're investigating desk and most importantly, when we're
(30:22):
taking care of the dead.
Speaker 2 (30:23):
Dave, you know, we mentioned the that in the morgue,
the in the funeral home, that the body that is
there is the most important thing, and that when there's
a body in the funeral home, that you have a
live person there that stays so that in case of
something fire, flood, whatever, that that individual is responsible for
(30:44):
getting the body out, because that's the only thing that matters.
Everything else can burn and be gone, but this is
somebody's loved one and this is it. You've got to
get them out. And I think about that and how
that was impressed upon me as a very young man,
and I see this behavior, and you know, when I
see something like this show, I try to think of
myself in the moment, you know, of what I would
(31:05):
have done, decisions I would have made, because I try
to put myself in that position to try to understand
why somebody made the decision they made. And one the
one thing that caught my attention was the fact that
there was somebody there videotaping a fairly innocuous crime scene,
videotaping the police activities surrounding it. That surprised me. I thought,
(31:30):
I thought maybe it was a class project, you know,
for a school thing. But when I look deeper and
found out that this was there's a reason for them
doing this, it's still is shocking that it.
Speaker 1 (31:44):
Is because you know, you you ever have you ever
been around a person that some people might label as well,
you're just a conspiratorial nut.
Speaker 2 (31:55):
And then all of a sudden, Hi and then they
present you with, hey, was that Dave Mac.
Speaker 1 (32:02):
They present you with videography or video evidence of it happening,
and you say, oh, my lord, and listen, this is
I can only imagine because this group is following around
the police. This is probably not the thing that they
that was on their bingo card. You know that they
were going to capture. They're they're looking for inappropriate behavior
(32:25):
by the police. And I'm talking about in a a
in in the heat of the moment when something is
going on. Now, I can tell you this. I look
at that that that video image and I see uniforms
(32:45):
walking around and I'm thinking, well, you might not be
doing it, but you're passively allowing it to happen. And
the police, officers, crime scene text, everybody else they have
to understand. And we've talked about this extend exhaustively on
body bags, that the body is the biggest piece of
(33:09):
evidence that you that you have at any death scene.
You know, that's where that's the font that every that
knowledge is going to come from. Where discovery and these
sorts of things. Well, let me ask you this. If
you let's say you recovered a pistol at a crime
scene and you had it in an evidence bag. All right,
(33:33):
Just imagine if the crime scene tech that had the
pistol was taking that pistol, holding onto the bag and
slamming it onto the sidewalk. Okay, you're slamming it against
the big oak tree in the front yard, or you know,
taking it and they're on videotape and the doors of
the crime scene van are open. Can you imagine mac
Mac wouldn't do this. I'm talking about my friend Cheryl,
(33:58):
you know you She wouldn't take a weapon and a
bag and just randomly toss it into the well. If
you look at just purely from an evidentary standpoint, that's
kind of what's happening here. Because you want to take
due care, you know, with this, and people will say,
you know, they very well might say, you don't understand.
(34:19):
We're undermanned. We're undermanned. You're not undermanned to the point
where you can't bring a mortuary stretcher out where you
can take a one man job and make it a
little bit easier and certainly dave more dignified than what
we saw born out before us in this kit. Well,
(34:50):
what can't be lost? I think in this disturbing set
of circumstances with the treatment of a fellow human beings remains.
Is the fact that we're looking at a homicide here, Dave.
This is I'm not saying that any death is any
more important than any other death. However, you know and
(35:14):
I know that there are certain things that if you
do not take care of them at that moment time
and take due care in what you're doing, you can
ruin everything moving forward. In my gosh, we're talking about
a homicide here, Dave, that's committed in a bywater area
of New Orleans.
Speaker 2 (35:32):
And that's where when looking at this case, because the
case got national attention because of the body bag being
pulled down the stairs and that just is such a
shocking thing to see. But we got to remember that
there is a six to one year old man named
Michael Hankins who is dead and it was high he
(35:53):
was murdered. There's a young man, Trevor Lee del Ree.
He's eighteen now. Trevor del Ree had lived with Michael
Hankins on and off. It wasn't like he was a
permanent fixture there, but he spent a lot of time there.
And I point out again he's eighteen sixty one year
(36:13):
old Michael Hankins is the victim.
Speaker 1 (36:16):
Now interesting age combination.
Speaker 2 (36:18):
It is, that's kind of odd when you're looking at
a non relative. Right, del Rey living with Hankins on
a semi regular basis. He gets arrested. Delrie gets arrested
Tuesday in Alexandria, Louisiana. How far is that from where
the house is, Joe.
Speaker 1 (36:35):
It's not that it's that far. It's that it's it's
a bit more difficult to get to. You think about
if people are familiar with Baton Rouge. If you're in
New Orleans and you take ten to get up to
Baton Rouge, Baton Rouge will take you. You know, it's roughly
(36:55):
about sixty five seventy miles per that you're going, So
you have to go beyond Baton Rouge headed northbound and
you wind up in Alexandria, and it's literally the geographic
center of the state. And for all of my fellow
Army veterans, you're very familiar with Fort Polk. It's it's
(37:17):
not a desirable place to be assigned, and it's you know,
but that's essentially where he was found. So he's he's
outside of the Metro New Orleans area when he is,
you know, when he stopped by the police and he's
driving a vehicle one that doesn't belong to him, and oh,
(37:37):
by the bye, turns out he happens to have the
homicide victims and correct me if I'm wrong day homicide
victims wallet in his possession as well. Is that correct?
Speaker 2 (37:49):
Right, He's got the wallet and phone and.
Speaker 1 (37:52):
Yet the phone as well.
Speaker 2 (37:53):
Yeah, but here's the thing. Okay, when they this, they
pull him up, they being police when and delrig gets
pulled over in Alexandria on Tuesday night. Hankins's body has
not been found. They don't know he's dead. But think
about this for just a minute. You've got an eighteen
(38:13):
year old man, Trevor del Rey, and the police are
asking him, you know, they pull him over for routine
traffic byas so they say routine traffic stop, and they're
asking him questions. You know, Okay, it's not your car,
whose car is it? He's a friend, not a relative.
You know, the things just seem suspicious. And so when
(38:36):
del Ree doesn't give them the answers they're looking for,
they go ahead and they bring him in suspicion. They
suspect he stole the car, so they bring him into
police headquarters, you know, and they're holding him finding They've
got a few things, I'm sure that they're working on.
And neighbors haven't seen mister Hankins in a couple of days.
Got to remember too, in the neighborhood like this, people
(38:57):
know who's going in and out. They know what to
expect and where. Trevor del Rey had been seen in
the neighborhood from time to time. Now he's gone. Hankins
hasn't been seen by anybody by the Hankins car is
gone too, So there is some interest in their community
in days there is.
Speaker 1 (39:14):
Let me let me tell you something about the nature
of these these older New Orleans neighborhoods as well, because
many many folks might think that, you know, if we
modern subdivisions where you'll have you know, homes ranch maybe
ranch or multi story type homes that are adjacent to
(39:36):
one another. And no, no, no, no, no, that's it's
not the way it is in New Orleans. Places are adjacent,
but literally you could look out your kitchen window and
look over into the living room perhaps or the other
person's kitchen and read the labels on the can. That's
a close thing. Like if the reason I'm pointing this
(40:00):
out is if his car is missing, That's something that
people would tune into very quickly. They would have an
awareness of it. You can be inside of your home.
These homes in New Orleans, the old neighborhoods particularly, are
so close together. You can hear your neighbor clear their
throat if they're outside their house. Okay, which is not
(40:20):
something I'm a big fan of. Yeah, yeah, just the
you know, the the spatial relationship, you know, when you're
and if anything had happened in that house. And to
this point, interestingly enough so far, I mean, the only
thing that's really been released from the corner in this
(40:41):
case is not a cause of death. We know that
an individual has been charged with second degree homicide, But
what the coroner has talked about in this case is
the fact that this individual viewed the video of the
body being treated as it was, and they, you know,
(41:04):
they begin to talk about how horrific this is. In
the corner's long career, this is the worst thing that
they've ever seen. And of course, the corner employee that's
responsible for this who you can clearly see on the video,
has been fired, you know, by the corner's office. But
(41:25):
we still don't know a lot about the homicide itself.
We know that this individual was left behind in their home,
we know that they're domiciled there. We know that the
suspect that has been arrested actually had frequented this location.
And oh, by the way, he stole this guy's car
and had his personal possessions with him. So yeah, and
(41:49):
so that's really what we know at this point relative
to this case, Dave.
Speaker 2 (41:55):
And the bigger question now is we have the victim, Okay,
Michael Craig Hankins, sixty one years old.
Speaker 1 (42:02):
He's dead.
Speaker 2 (42:03):
We have a suspect who is in custody and charged
with second degree murder in the Trevor Lee del Ree
who's eighteen. But as you go through this investigation, Joe,
starting with the victim's body, I know that they do
they being corner forensic people, they study the crime scene,
but the body is not autopsy that the crime scene.
(42:26):
The body is taken from the crime scene back to
the office where they do the work. But the damage
done to the body, the evidence that could be lost, damage, hurt,
all of that all I'm as a defense attorney, I
would be watching this thinking, if I can't do this case,
everything is gone. They're going to have to negotiate it down,
(42:47):
mainly because you get this in front of a jury
and they're going to say they care so little about
the truth, they just want to get a conviction. This
totally damages their case. You don't know what happened to
this body. You don't know if it happened, what did
they do in the house before we even caught them
on video? If they would do.
Speaker 1 (43:04):
This, well Noel said, Well said Dave, because you're right,
you know, we know what happened in plane view. And
if I was an attorney working on this case and
trying to defend this eighteen year old this Trevor de Delry,
I would draw into question. I would draw that to
(43:25):
the attention of the court and say, look, we we
don't know. You know, if they're bold enough to do
this outside the house, my lord, what happened inside? How'd
they get the body in the bag? Did they lose
any critical critical evidence? And you want to blame my
client for this? You can't even manage them. You're on scene,
(43:46):
and so this is how the snowballs. And I think
that any defense attorney worth their salt, you know, would
try that approach. And yeah, I think that there's a
high probability it could be reduced. It's certainly a a
leverage point. I think that the Defense Council is going
to have you know, whoever's desk this lands on. I
don't know what kind of resources that this eighteen year
(44:09):
old has. My suspicion is is that this is going
to be something that's going to fall to more than
likely public Defender's office. And you know, we'll see where
it goes from there. But the fact is is that
when because these questions are going to be it's tough
(44:29):
enough being a forensic pathologist and what they have to
do on the stand. Okay, just follow me here. When
you're talking about complex injuries and certainly a cause of
death of all things, a homicide trial, a homicide case,
now that forensic pathologist is going to be grilled over
(44:53):
the status of the body. That will be asked, you know,
what type of trauma did you see on this body?
And this is a mouse trap they're walking into that
the you know that the defense sets up because they'll
ask the question, well, how do you know? How do
you know? How do you know? And again, if you've
got a jury and paneled, you know the jury is
(45:14):
like looking. They're looking, you know, over the prosecution's table
and they'll say, you know, they're in their mind. You know,
they might be saying, oh my god, these people are beastly.
You know that they would treat this guy's body like this.
How can we how can we believe anything that comes
out of their mouths? There's a dark cloud hanging right now,
(45:35):
and sometimes sometimes out of the worst, most horrific circumstances
that we may bear witness to things that set us
back on our heels, things that make us gasp. Sometimes
it's those events that can be a catalyst for change.
(45:59):
I'm josephst. Morgan and this is Bodybacks
Speaker 2 (46:05):
MHM
Quody dynamis, but Joseph's gotten more having spent many, many
years working in the Morgue. One of the most difficult
things about the Morgue as a workplace, particularly if you're
at a smaller jurisdiction, it is not having to deal
(00:21):
with decomposed bodies or complex gunshot one case where the
victim might have multiple wound tracks through the body, or
even being exposed to infectious diseases, which we were quite
a bit. You know what the most difficult thing was
was being alone in the morgue. And I don't mean
(00:45):
you know, ghosties and goblins and those sorts of things.
I've never seen one as a death investigator, and I
was around a lot of dead bodies. The one thing, though,
give me a little latitude here, that haunts me is
the fact that I had to move bodies by myself.
I have found myself in positions where I was moving
(01:08):
individuals that were well in excess of three hundred pounds,
all by myself, and to this day I paid the
price with my back and my shoulder and my hip.
If you can get a second pair of hands to
(01:29):
help you to move the dead, because they are dead weight,
it's always best, But there are certain things that we
do when we're around the dead that indicate to us
and to the world around us more importantly, that we
(01:50):
care for those that have passed on. The worst thing
anyone could ever be seen doing in public that works
for eight Corner's office is the abuse of a corpse.
I'm Joseph Scott Morgan and this is Bodybacks. I'm going
(02:17):
to regal you with a story, Dave to start off with,
and this actually happened in a New Orleans suburb on
what is referred to as the west bank of the
Mississippi River, even though there it's technically not west, it's south.
But they call it the west bank because it's on
(02:37):
the side of the river that would be, I don't know,
the Louisiana side, and you know, as it flows southbound,
so they but they because it makes the big curve.
You've heard the term of the Crescent City. Uh. The
reason New Orleans one of the nicknames is Crescent City
(02:57):
is because there is a big crescent shape end in
the river there. I was in a town and I
think it was Marrero, Louisiana, and we got a call
that we had a severely decomposed body of a fellow
that was living in, oh there's no other way to
(03:19):
put it, in a flophouse and his taxi driver and
what was so there were several surreal things about this case.
First off, the guy lived in a room that had
a single window unit and it operated off of quarters
(03:39):
and there were quarters stacks of them everywhere, so when
the air would begin to run down, he would drop
into the quarter in And then there were hostess, you know,
snack cake wrappers everywhere, you know, like ding dongs and
things like twinkies. They were just all around the room,
(04:02):
just littered the area. And then you come to him, Dave,
this guy, I don't know, he was well in excess
of four hundred I think probably five high fives. And
what really made it interesting, not that that's not interesting already,
is he was a taxi driver and he had a
(04:27):
Chevy Caprice four door that he drove. And did you
know that he was so big that the front seat
was busted and so he would have to recline. And
so if you wanted to have an additional fare in
there like where his, you would I've thought about this
(04:48):
several times. You would have to ride down the road
with the driver's head in your lap. You know, if
you could squeeze your legs between. This guy was really
big and he was severely decomposed. In this room, it's
a single bed, and he used every inch of it.
He died of a heart attack, but had been down
(05:10):
for a long time, and I remember we had to
call the fire department out to help us move. Well,
first off, there's not a body bag big enough to
accommodate this guy. And even if you did do that,
the straps there's these nylon straps on the corner and
on the corners and on the sides of body bags
that could not have worked in order to move this
(05:32):
guy around. You would have ripped him, that's how heavy
he was. So we called the fire department, and myself
and the firefighters kind of scratched our head over this thing,
and we came to conclusion the best thing that we
could do is get a big blue crash tarp, place
him in it and wrap him up. And the thing
(05:53):
about it is, if you've ever seen what an old
fashioned joint looks like, you know, where people used to
twist the ends of it. It looked like no.
Speaker 2 (06:01):
Way you're talking about having I'm gonna have to look
that up.
Speaker 1 (06:09):
It looked like a gigantic blue joint in the floor.
And we had to get this guy down a set
of stairs, a set of stairs, interior stairs, and the
stairs were wide. This is an old, old building. The
day he was so decomposed, and the human body, when
we decompose it, you know, it becomes very slimy, very greasy,
(06:33):
as we like to say. And this decompositional grease was everywhere.
It was on our gloves, it was on the back
because we had to wrestle to get him in. We're
fighting flies. It's horrible. Well, long story short, and I've
made this very long, but just understand me. We knew
(06:54):
that we had to get him out of the building,
and it took I think I might be miss from
That's one of the reasons I love firefighters because they're
always willing to work. They put their shoulder to the
stone all the time. They're the coolest cats in the world.
I think it took six of us to get him
down the staircase, and we lost our grip and I
(07:14):
wound up heart of my hip really bad and my
shoulder because the body took me down. But I was
on the side bouncing off of these wooden stairs and
pressed against a wall. One of the firefighters actually he
either broke his leg, his leg was broken or it dislocated.
(07:36):
His hip. Is horrible, you know. We were all moaning
and groaning, you know, and still we've got this huge body.
Now that's that's with six grown men, and we're trying
to do this, and we're trying to be as respectful
as we possibly can. But there are certain circums dances
(08:00):
when it comes to bodies that the conduct involving the
bodies is reprehensible.
Speaker 2 (08:08):
Did you get the did you get the big guy
down the stairs?
Speaker 1 (08:11):
We got him down the stairs and we actually had
a firefight, a bunch of firefighters. I'm glad you mentioned this.
That just came to mind. We got him downstairs, got
him into the van, and we couldn't use a mortuary
stretcher in the van, it would have broken it. We
had to set it aside, and he just his body
(08:33):
was just laying in the floor of the van. So
a bunch of the firefighters, uh followed us to the morgue, which,
by the way, is was back then was on the
east bank. It's on the west bank now, but was
on the east bank. So here we are, we're all riding,
you know, in tandem. It's me and my car, and
then the mortuary service that we hire to move bodies,
(08:56):
and then this line of firefighters, and we pulled into
the gate. We had to get him into what we
call the decomp room, which is this really tight space,
onto a stainless steel gurney, by the way, in order
for his body to be examined the next day. You
would not take a body like this into what we
referred to this clean area. And but yeah, we got
(09:18):
him up on the on the.
Speaker 2 (09:19):
Gurney, and all the while, everyone that was involved in
this process was concerned about being respectful. Even though it's hot,
slimy flies, it's the worst of the worst, But there
is still the underlying professionalism that requires you to do
this as respectful as you possibly can. Is that correct?
Speaker 1 (09:42):
It is? And you know you, I think you made
a comment. I can't remember how back, how far back
it was. We talked so much at but uh, we
you had made a comment relative to the dead. And
it's really insane, rightful, because I've used it before. That's
somebody's baby, you know. I don't care if you weigh
(10:06):
five hundred pounds or decomposing in a room makes no
difference to me. You're covered with flies, you're living in
lessen favorable conditions. It's still you know, somebody held that child,
held that man as a child, as a as a
wee little one. At some point in time, they might
(10:29):
not be around anymore, but it's somebody's baby. You know.
The dead are at you know, they're they're at our mercy.
Their remains are at our mercy. How we treat them,
and it says a lot about I think a lot
about a society how you treat the dead. Now I'm
not where. You know, our normal fear on the show
(10:49):
is to talk about things like dismemberment. We understand how
insulting that is. And there's a whole group of there's
a whole you know, underpinning of psychopathy that goes with
people that we even did a special episode on dispayment.
That's not what we're talking about here. We're talking about
representatives of a duly elected office in the City of
(11:14):
New Orleans, the Parish of New Orleans, Parish of Orleans.
Rather where you have such disregard and you have a
level of callousness toward the dead that you would treat
a dead body in the manner in which we're going
to discuss in public like this, and you have no
(11:35):
shame over it, no shame. I think that that indicates more.
It's a reflection of who we are as a people,
because if you'll treat the dead that way, you know,
on camera, by the way, and you know there there
is a chance you're going to be seen, okay, and
(11:58):
particularly in today's world, it goes beyond pay all day.
Speaker 2 (12:03):
You know. This was actually the story is how a
watchdog group that is watching crime or watching police rather
in New Orleans shows up at crime scenes in the
video what's going on? And this video captures somebody from
(12:24):
the coroner's office removing the body of a sixty one
year old man from his home. And as he is
as the body is being brought out of the home,
it is in a body bag on a tarp and
the tarp is being pulled by this employee of the
coroner's office and it is pulled down stairs. By the way.
(12:49):
This is the victim of a homicide. An investigation is underway,
and this body is not carried out by several people.
The body is being drug I cannot say that hard enough,
but I got to understand that this body bag is
on a tarp and this employee is pulling the tarp
(13:11):
bump bump, bump, bump, bump, bump, all the way down
the stairs. Boom, and it's captured on video. That video
was uploaded and within a matter of hours already was
in the six figures in terms of views. The coroner,
the guy who actually the elected official, he didn't know
anything about it until he sees it popping up online.
(13:34):
And he's watching an employee of his office do the
most disrespectful and by the way, damaging to the investigation
by treating this body in such a manner. And Joe,
we've got two different cases to discuss. In this one one,
it is the murder of a sixty one year old
(13:55):
man who was not seen by by neighbors and they
were concerned and started looking for him. As we mentioned
the other day on a previous show, it's like, if
you don't see somebody before your report of missing, how
about going to the house and just look through the
windows or something, peek around, see what you see. But
in this particular case, we have the death, the murder
(14:17):
of a sixty one year old man. We have an
eighteen year old who was arrested driving the man's car
and having his wallet and cell phone with him, and
then we have this horrible display of disrespect from an
employee of the coroner's office. Take your pick as to
which way we're going to go, Joe, because in every
aspect of this story, I know you have a comparable
(14:38):
story to tell and how you dealt with it in
the moment.
Speaker 1 (14:42):
Yeah, And look, I've had embarrassing instances. You know, at scenes.
There have been bodies that have been dropped over the years,
but it was it was not a purpose to act,
and people still got hot over that, you know, just
(15:03):
really enraged. But you know, I don't ever I never
recall I wrote about I did write when I wrote
my memoir, I wrote a story or recalled a story
that involved a kid that had been shot actually in
the projects just south side of New Orleans. And he
(15:24):
had had a bullet that and it was an AK round, Dave,
and he took a headshot and it didn't make it
all the way through his head as a dry by shooting,
and this seven point sixty two round fired by the
aka by the perpetrator utilizing an ak platform kind of
(15:45):
diagonally went through this kid's head and lodged behind his
right ear. And the name of the story was actually
called the Earache because it deals with mama's and how
they take care of their kids. And I do have
a point with this. We had a huge crowd where
we were where the shooting took place, and they were angry.
(16:07):
I remember the cops even brought the dogs at one
point in time. People wanted blood in this case, and
so you could actually feel the round and it had
partially broken the skin. Now, one of the things that
(16:28):
I like to do with bodies relative to like a
head like this, I'm not going to remove that projectile
at the scene. It's a fool's air and if you
do that, So what I do, just like with you
know how we baged the hands. I bagged this kid's
head and put tape around the base of it so
(16:51):
that if the round fell out and transit, we would
still have the round. But there's a high probability that
if we take care and getting this kid's body to
the morgue, the round will remain inside to you and
the pathologist will be able to appreciate it. Remember there's
(17:11):
not a pathologist at the scene. Well, anyway, I go
through this whole thing. We've got murmurings in the crowd.
I wrapped the tape around the base of the back,
secured it. And his mama, this kid's mama was sitting
just outside the tape and she was weeping openly. This
(17:32):
is her baby, okay, dead on this dirty ground in
the projects. And her sisters were with her too. And
you'll see a situation where you'll have people that are
kind of in a I don't know how to describe it.
You'll see somebody. You can see people that will beat
(17:54):
their chest and scream and carry on and whatnot. That's
really not the people you need to watch out for.
This mother was openly weeping, and she wasn't saying anything,
and she had collapsed the grounds, and it's kind of
that quietness that's the people you need to watch out for.
And I remember seeing her grieving for her at the
(18:18):
scene because she saw me examining the body. Can you
imagine that watching your child's body be examined on this
dirty ground out there while my back was turned. I
had a police officer that took a magic marker and
drew a smiley face on the outside of this back
(18:40):
and put a bubble, a cartoon bubble coming up out
of the mouth that said good morning, doctor Mac. Now
Mac was one of our pathologists, and he thought that
it was funny to do this. See, that's the kind
of thing that you never because once you cross over
that you've now left what civil society is and what
(19:06):
our expectations are where there are certain boundaries that you
don't go across. And that night will ever for ring,
will ever ring in my mind. And that's one of
the reasons I think that it's just one of the
many reasons that I brought this case to your attention
when we were thinking about it, because it it made
(19:28):
me think about all of the times where as an
old death investigator, I think back and I think, did
I do everything I could to respect the dead in
this environment? But on this particular night, in what's referred
to as the Bywater neighborhood of New Orleans, one of
(19:48):
New orleans most lovely and ancient of neighborhoods that didn't
happen as a grown man had been the victim of
a crime. His body was drug from his home, bounced
along an external staircase and driven off in the night.
(20:26):
Just so folks understand where this neighborhood is. It's when
Katrina hit. You heard about the Lower ninth Ward. A
lot of people heard about that, you know, when the
levees gave way and we had flooding throughout the city.
The Lower ninth Ward, the ninth Ward is actually a neighborhood,
(20:49):
and the city itself was broken down into wards. And
it's a political assignment, you know here from the eighth
ward the ninth Ward, those sorts of things, and you
can supplant it with district. You know, you'll hear other people.
But the Lower ninth Ward is immediately adjacent to the
Bywater area, and the Bywater area is old. I mean
(21:11):
it's like really really old. As a matter of fact,
it's so old that it was one of the first
if you want to refer to it as a suburb,
began to be built in the early eighteen hundreds. Okay,
So these homes are old in this area and prior
to it being developed for a place for people to live,
(21:32):
you know, when they finally got roads and carriages and
all that sort of thing in New Orleans that were
passable before that. It was a plantation. So it goes
back a long long ways and it's adjacent to a
couple of canals that are in New Orleans everything. You know,
you come across a bayou and don't think about byous
(21:54):
in the sense like you see in Cajun Land. These
are bayous that are still moving. Are you know, by
use nothing but a river that really moves slow. But
these are all cleaned up, you know, they're very immaculate there.
You know, people want to live around around these areas.
And you've got not too far away, You've got another
large canal that, uh, you know, will get you into
(22:16):
the Mississippi River. So water surrounds everything and I've often
thought that that's why they called it by water. But
the house where this event took place, Dave, is a
typical what is referred to as a creole cottage, and
Creole cottages typically if you ever look at photos of
(22:37):
New Orleans, there are some of the most lovely homes
that you'll ever see. In their shotgun homes. They're painted
in bright pastel colors. They always have a porch, they're
always a walk up by the way you hear that
term associated with New York quite a bit, but their
walk up in New Orleans for the purpose of people
elevate their homes down there because of water, and the
(23:01):
homicide that we're referring to actually took place in a
home that is a not only a creole cottage that
is a shotgun, but it's a shotgun double. So that
means that you've got two homes that are well, you've
got one structure that makes up two homes and they're
(23:21):
all linear. So as you're standing at the foot of
the staircase at this home, our victim's home is on
the right, okay. And so when these people captured this
image of the morgue worker or the corner's office worker
(23:41):
bringing this gentleman's body, mister Hankins down the staircase, you're
looking at them not it's not like they're peeping through
a wind to day. This is done in public, man,
and they're being drug out on a Tarp's not even
a mortuary stretcher, because every every corner's office has mortuary stretchers,
(24:06):
and for those that don't know what those are, they're
stretchers that one person can manage. If you can get
the body onto it. Then it's got separate locks on
the feet and the head, and it's got a brace
down at one end. It's like a little grill work
where the feet would go, and it keeps the body
(24:28):
in place. And it's got straps that look like seat belts.
I didn't even have that. And so, you know, because
you can take a mortuary stretcher and even if somebody
is big, one person can manage this thing. And yeah,
it would have you know, still bumped down the staircase.
(24:49):
But that's not the case. And I couldn't for the
life of me, because I watched the video day. I
couldn't for the life of me, because this is not
the only He's not this person that worked for the corner.
And mind you, I said that in the past tense,
this person that worked for the corner. I don't understand
why no one else was given on my hand to
(25:12):
pick up the corners, the corners of the tarp to
help transport the body down. He's the singular individual that
is moving the body. And we don't see what happened
to the body once it got to the ground.
Speaker 2 (25:27):
No, and why, and I mean this asking for help
is not weakness. But in this particular case, somebody working
for the corner's office. You've got other individuals around that
are all law enforcement or they're around crime victims. At
what point do you think it's okay to do this?
(25:48):
I guess is my bottom line? Really, I'm looking at
this from every angle possible, and it's like, Hey, if
I'm standing there at the street doing my cop business
or whatever, and I look over and I see a
man dragging this body down the stairs, you know, all
the way down, I'm going to be mad because all
you had to do is say, hey, I need help.
(26:09):
You know, well you must, I didn't bother to ask.
Speaker 1 (26:12):
You might be mad, but I've got one better for you.
I'm drinking. I'm thinking this is go to the culture
of what happens to crime scenes down there now that
we just don't that we just don't care to the
point that everybody's numb to it.
Speaker 2 (26:30):
Is this why we have this camera crew or a
person they're watching it because they see this kind of
garbage happening and they have to get it on video.
Speaker 1 (26:40):
I think that that's part of it. And this is nothing.
There's nothing new under the sun. I love my hometown
I really do. You know that I do. And I
love the people, and you can make excuses all day
long for the activities of people. But when you see
and I don't care what the classification of death is,
I don't care. I don't care what the uh financial
(27:03):
standing of an individual is. You can be poor as
a church mouse or you can be the richest person
in the world. You're still dead, okay. And there's there's
a certain there's a certain code that you adhere to
when you're you know, when you're taking care of you're
you're really you have been entrusted. And I wax kind
(27:27):
of philosophical about this stuff. Now, you know, I don't
have that robotic mindset where I'm just trying to get
the body from point A to point B. And so
forgive me for that, but I see it. And you know,
if you'll treat the dead this way, how do you
treat the living? And so there's several things to consider here.
(27:50):
First off, the mortuary worker, the corners employee that drug
this body down the staircase, and let me tell you
what happened when he drug it down staircase. Because he's
dragging from the feet, the head, the head there's a
grand opportunity here that the head is up at the top,
(28:13):
and even if the head is not up at the top,
could be at the feet or down below. With the
feet above, you're dragging this homicide victim down these external
wooden stairs and literally is bouncing, is bouncing as they
go down. Well, any kind of trauma that's there that
(28:35):
has been perpetrated, because we're talking about a second degree homicide. Here,
you can dislodge projectiles, you can disrupt trace evidence. Oh,
here's a great one. You can actually traumatize post mortem.
From post mortem perspective, you can traumatize the body. And
(28:57):
let's just say that, let's just say that there was
a fracture in the body already. Okay, Well, if you're
dragging and this is not a slight step, Okay, this
is not like a couple of steps. This is like
it's like ten or eleven steps that.
Speaker 2 (29:15):
We shocked seeing the video, Joe I was shocked.
Speaker 1 (29:17):
Yeah, and you know you see it and you think,
oh my gosh, it's really really going to drag him
all the way down. You're thinking, oh my lord, I
hope that I hope this isn't going to happen and
you watch it. It's like that train wreck, you know,
just kind of sitting there, you know, and watching the thing.
But yeah, I mean, let's just say that the victim
(29:38):
had any kind of bony fracture that's there. Well, you
can further exacerbate that by dragging them, you know, like this.
There's any number of things that could have happened, and
we don't know if it happened. What we know is
that we see a body being subjected to post mortem trauma,
(30:00):
is postmartem trauma. Do care is not being taken? You know,
people can say, you know, things like, well, in other
countries they handle bodies. I don't care about other locations.
I care about what we do in America. And there
is a there's a certain standard that we're to adhere
to when we're investigating desk and most importantly, when we're
(30:22):
taking care of the dead.
Speaker 2 (30:23):
Dave, you know, we mentioned the that in the morgue,
the in the funeral home, that the body that is
there is the most important thing, and that when there's
a body in the funeral home, that you have a
live person there that stays so that in case of
something fire, flood, whatever, that that individual is responsible for
(30:44):
getting the body out, because that's the only thing that matters.
Everything else can burn and be gone, but this is
somebody's loved one and this is it. You've got to
get them out. And I think about that and how
that was impressed upon me as a very young man,
and I see this behavior, and you know, when I
see something like this show, I try to think of
myself in the moment, you know, of what I would
(31:05):
have done, decisions I would have made, because I try
to put myself in that position to try to understand
why somebody made the decision they made. And one the
one thing that caught my attention was the fact that
there was somebody there videotaping a fairly innocuous crime scene,
videotaping the police activities surrounding it. That surprised me. I thought,
(31:30):
I thought maybe it was a class project, you know,
for a school thing. But when I look deeper and
found out that this was there's a reason for them
doing this, it's still is shocking that it.
Speaker 1 (31:44):
Is because you know, you you ever have you ever
been around a person that some people might label as well,
you're just a conspiratorial nut.
Speaker 2 (31:55):
And then all of a sudden, Hi and then they
present you with, hey, was that Dave Mac.
Speaker 1 (32:02):
They present you with videography or video evidence of it happening,
and you say, oh, my lord, and listen, this is
I can only imagine because this group is following around
the police. This is probably not the thing that they
that was on their bingo card. You know that they
were going to capture. They're they're looking for inappropriate behavior
(32:25):
by the police. And I'm talking about in a a
in in the heat of the moment when something is
going on. Now, I can tell you this. I look
at that that that video image and I see uniforms
(32:45):
walking around and I'm thinking, well, you might not be
doing it, but you're passively allowing it to happen. And
the police, officers, crime scene text, everybody else they have
to understand. And we've talked about this extend exhaustively on
body bags, that the body is the biggest piece of
(33:09):
evidence that you that you have at any death scene.
You know, that's where that's the font that every that
knowledge is going to come from. Where discovery and these
sorts of things. Well, let me ask you this. If
you let's say you recovered a pistol at a crime
scene and you had it in an evidence bag. All right,
(33:33):
Just imagine if the crime scene tech that had the
pistol was taking that pistol, holding onto the bag and
slamming it onto the sidewalk. Okay, you're slamming it against
the big oak tree in the front yard, or you know,
taking it and they're on videotape and the doors of
the crime scene van are open. Can you imagine mac
Mac wouldn't do this. I'm talking about my friend Cheryl,
(33:58):
you know you She wouldn't take a weapon and a
bag and just randomly toss it into the well. If
you look at just purely from an evidentary standpoint, that's
kind of what's happening here. Because you want to take
due care, you know, with this, and people will say,
you know, they very well might say, you don't understand.
(34:19):
We're undermanned. We're undermanned. You're not undermanned to the point
where you can't bring a mortuary stretcher out where you
can take a one man job and make it a
little bit easier and certainly dave more dignified than what
we saw born out before us in this kit. Well,
(34:50):
what can't be lost? I think in this disturbing set
of circumstances with the treatment of a fellow human beings remains.
Is the fact that we're looking at a homicide here, Dave.
This is I'm not saying that any death is any
more important than any other death. However, you know and
(35:14):
I know that there are certain things that if you
do not take care of them at that moment time
and take due care in what you're doing, you can
ruin everything moving forward. In my gosh, we're talking about
a homicide here, Dave, that's committed in a bywater area
of New Orleans.
Speaker 2 (35:32):
And that's where when looking at this case, because the
case got national attention because of the body bag being
pulled down the stairs and that just is such a
shocking thing to see. But we got to remember that
there is a six to one year old man named
Michael Hankins who is dead and it was high he
(35:53):
was murdered. There's a young man, Trevor Lee del Ree.
He's eighteen now. Trevor del Ree had lived with Michael
Hankins on and off. It wasn't like he was a
permanent fixture there, but he spent a lot of time there.
And I point out again he's eighteen sixty one year
(36:13):
old Michael Hankins is the victim.
Speaker 1 (36:16):
Now interesting age combination.
Speaker 2 (36:18):
It is, that's kind of odd when you're looking at
a non relative. Right, del Rey living with Hankins on
a semi regular basis. He gets arrested. Delrie gets arrested
Tuesday in Alexandria, Louisiana. How far is that from where
the house is, Joe.
Speaker 1 (36:35):
It's not that it's that far. It's that it's it's
a bit more difficult to get to. You think about
if people are familiar with Baton Rouge. If you're in
New Orleans and you take ten to get up to
Baton Rouge, Baton Rouge will take you. You know, it's roughly
(36:55):
about sixty five seventy miles per that you're going, So
you have to go beyond Baton Rouge headed northbound and
you wind up in Alexandria, and it's literally the geographic
center of the state. And for all of my fellow
Army veterans, you're very familiar with Fort Polk. It's it's
(37:17):
not a desirable place to be assigned, and it's you know,
but that's essentially where he was found. So he's he's
outside of the Metro New Orleans area when he is,
you know, when he stopped by the police and he's
driving a vehicle one that doesn't belong to him, and oh,
(37:37):
by the bye, turns out he happens to have the
homicide victims and correct me if I'm wrong day homicide
victims wallet in his possession as well. Is that correct?
Speaker 2 (37:49):
Right, He's got the wallet and phone and.
Speaker 1 (37:52):
Yet the phone as well.
Speaker 2 (37:53):
Yeah, but here's the thing. Okay, when they this, they
pull him up, they being police when and delrig gets
pulled over in Alexandria on Tuesday night. Hankins's body has
not been found. They don't know he's dead. But think
about this for just a minute. You've got an eighteen
(38:13):
year old man, Trevor del Rey, and the police are
asking him, you know, they pull him over for routine
traffic byas so they say routine traffic stop, and they're
asking him questions. You know, Okay, it's not your car,
whose car is it? He's a friend, not a relative.
You know, the things just seem suspicious. And so when
(38:36):
del Ree doesn't give them the answers they're looking for,
they go ahead and they bring him in suspicion. They
suspect he stole the car, so they bring him into
police headquarters, you know, and they're holding him finding They've
got a few things, I'm sure that they're working on.
And neighbors haven't seen mister Hankins in a couple of days.
Got to remember too, in the neighborhood like this, people
(38:57):
know who's going in and out. They know what to
expect and where. Trevor del Rey had been seen in
the neighborhood from time to time. Now he's gone. Hankins
hasn't been seen by anybody by the Hankins car is
gone too, So there is some interest in their community
in days there is.
Speaker 1 (39:14):
Let me let me tell you something about the nature
of these these older New Orleans neighborhoods as well, because
many many folks might think that, you know, if we
modern subdivisions where you'll have you know, homes ranch maybe
ranch or multi story type homes that are adjacent to
(39:36):
one another. And no, no, no, no, no, that's it's
not the way it is in New Orleans. Places are adjacent,
but literally you could look out your kitchen window and
look over into the living room perhaps or the other
person's kitchen and read the labels on the can. That's
a close thing. Like if the reason I'm pointing this
(40:00):
out is if his car is missing, That's something that
people would tune into very quickly. They would have an
awareness of it. You can be inside of your home.
These homes in New Orleans, the old neighborhoods particularly, are
so close together. You can hear your neighbor clear their
throat if they're outside their house. Okay, which is not
(40:20):
something I'm a big fan of. Yeah, yeah, just the
you know, the the spatial relationship, you know, when you're
and if anything had happened in that house. And to
this point, interestingly enough so far, I mean, the only
thing that's really been released from the corner in this
(40:41):
case is not a cause of death. We know that
an individual has been charged with second degree homicide, But
what the coroner has talked about in this case is
the fact that this individual viewed the video of the
body being treated as it was, and they, you know,
(41:04):
they begin to talk about how horrific this is. In
the corner's long career, this is the worst thing that
they've ever seen. And of course, the corner employee that's
responsible for this who you can clearly see on the video,
has been fired, you know, by the corner's office. But
(41:25):
we still don't know a lot about the homicide itself.
We know that this individual was left behind in their home,
we know that they're domiciled there. We know that the
suspect that has been arrested actually had frequented this location.
And oh, by the way, he stole this guy's car
and had his personal possessions with him. So yeah, and
(41:49):
so that's really what we know at this point relative
to this case, Dave.
Speaker 2 (41:55):
And the bigger question now is we have the victim, Okay,
Michael Craig Hankins, sixty one years old.
Speaker 1 (42:02):
He's dead.
Speaker 2 (42:03):
We have a suspect who is in custody and charged
with second degree murder in the Trevor Lee del Ree
who's eighteen. But as you go through this investigation, Joe,
starting with the victim's body, I know that they do
they being corner forensic people, they study the crime scene,
but the body is not autopsy that the crime scene.
(42:26):
The body is taken from the crime scene back to
the office where they do the work. But the damage
done to the body, the evidence that could be lost, damage, hurt,
all of that all I'm as a defense attorney, I
would be watching this thinking, if I can't do this case,
everything is gone. They're going to have to negotiate it down,
(42:47):
mainly because you get this in front of a jury
and they're going to say they care so little about
the truth, they just want to get a conviction. This
totally damages their case. You don't know what happened to
this body. You don't know if it happened, what did
they do in the house before we even caught them
on video? If they would do.
Speaker 1 (43:04):
This, well Noel said, Well said Dave, because you're right,
you know, we know what happened in plane view. And
if I was an attorney working on this case and
trying to defend this eighteen year old this Trevor de Delry,
I would draw into question. I would draw that to
(43:25):
the attention of the court and say, look, we we
don't know. You know, if they're bold enough to do
this outside the house, my lord, what happened inside? How'd
they get the body in the bag? Did they lose
any critical critical evidence? And you want to blame my
client for this? You can't even manage them. You're on scene,
(43:46):
and so this is how the snowballs. And I think
that any defense attorney worth their salt, you know, would
try that approach. And yeah, I think that there's a
high probability it could be reduced. It's certainly a a
leverage point. I think that the Defense Council is going
to have you know, whoever's desk this lands on. I
don't know what kind of resources that this eighteen year
(44:09):
old has. My suspicion is is that this is going
to be something that's going to fall to more than
likely public Defender's office. And you know, we'll see where
it goes from there. But the fact is is that
when because these questions are going to be it's tough
(44:29):
enough being a forensic pathologist and what they have to
do on the stand. Okay, just follow me here. When
you're talking about complex injuries and certainly a cause of
death of all things, a homicide trial, a homicide case,
now that forensic pathologist is going to be grilled over
(44:53):
the status of the body. That will be asked, you know,
what type of trauma did you see on this body?
And this is a mouse trap they're walking into that
the you know that the defense sets up because they'll
ask the question, well, how do you know? How do
you know? How do you know? And again, if you've
got a jury and paneled, you know the jury is
(45:14):
like looking. They're looking, you know, over the prosecution's table
and they'll say, you know, they're in their mind. You know,
they might be saying, oh my god, these people are beastly.
You know that they would treat this guy's body like this.
How can we how can we believe anything that comes
out of their mouths? There's a dark cloud hanging right now,
(45:35):
and sometimes sometimes out of the worst, most horrific circumstances
that we may bear witness to things that set us
back on our heels, things that make us gasp. Sometimes
it's those events that can be a catalyst for change.
(45:59):
I'm josephst. Morgan and this is Bodybacks
Speaker 2 (46:05):
MHM
Host
Joseph Scott Morgan
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