Call the Judge

One of the more grisly parts of being a Police Officer is dealing with death, and I deal with it a lot. Fortunately, every dead body I've come to know has become deceased due to natural causes.

The first deceased person I had the pleasure of meeting was a 50-year-old man who suffered from emphysema, was on oxygen, and still smoked almost a two packs of cigarettes a day. I found him completely naked on the side of his bed with his face planted in the ashtray he was apparently attempting to use when he died. I'll spare you all the details about how I had to roll his body back, photograph it, and listen to the slow hiss of a still functioning oxygen tank while I circled the bed where he lay, sifting through trash, and body fluids, looking for signs of struggle.

Instead, I'll tell you about the family members that showed while I was in the bedroom filled with the warm, humid ambiance of death. These family members all but broke down the bedroom door, not to see the body or mourn the passing of a soul, but to pillage and plunder. I had to stop them from pulling a simple silver cross from the neck of the dead man, whose body was stiff with rigor mortis, and whose face was beginning to cave. While I was gathering a list of his medications and talking to the Justice of the Peace, two individuals walked by carrying a safe. When asked where they were going they simply replied, "Outside to crack it."

I'd had enough and finally banned all family and friends from the property until I left the scene. It's not all fun or glamorous, this cop life. Sometimes it's tragic, not because I have to deal with death, but because I have to deal with the people that have no reason to show any courtesy to the dead. After all, who are they really going to disappoint when their only measure of conscience is lying face up on an old mattress...dead?