The dead zone

Lansing — It’s about 3 p.m. on a Friday afternoon as Sparrow Hospital Dr. Joyce deJong opened the door to view the 11 visitors in the area she warmly calls “her waiting room.” While she says “waiting room” with a tone of affection, one step in the cold, dark area removes all trace of optimism. The room, at near capacity, housed 11 dead bodies at a frigid 42 degrees, with two more bodies — the victims of a tornado that blew through Williamston last week — being prepped for admittance.

Each body will be or has been examined and sliced open by deJong or the two forensic pathologists that she oversees at the hospital. From their home base at Sparrow Hospital, deJong and her staff perform 900-1,000 autopsies per year of bodies from 16 counties, including Ingham.

The job entails lengthy external and internal examinations to determine causes of death in a basement autopsy room filled with boxes of latex gloves, bloodied syringes and multiple sizes of stitch scissors.

For deJong — who carries a body bag in the trunk of her Subaru SUV “because you never know when you’ll need one” — spending her days among the dead is as normal as any other occupation.

“I think that for us here, it’s a matter of routine,” she said. “It’s just probably pretty much like you’d imagine — it’s somebody who’s noncommunicative in the standard methods. But for whatever reason, a lot of people are afraid of the dead.”

As chief medical examiner for Muskegon, Allegan, Barry and Livingston Counties, deJong oversees all of the operations for the forensic pathology staff in each county. For the other counties which deJong and her staff do not act as chief medical examiner, including Ingham County, they work as consultants in performing autopsies.

“Dr. deJong and her team perform the autopsies, and we go over the results,” said Dr. Dean Sienko, Ingham County chief medical examiner. “(Nearly all) of the time, we agree with what they find.”

A typical autopsy involves taking a body directly from a scene and performing an external examination of clothing and trace evidence, which can take two to three hours, deJong said. Then, the pathologist moves on to an internal examination most commonly associated with an autopsy.

What they don’t do, deJong said, is what’s typically portrayed on TV — going over causes of deaths in a dimly lit room with catchy one-liners and dramatic background music — though music from an iPod can often be heard emanating from speakers in the autopsy room.

“I think the thing you have to remember from the shows, and even the more realistic ones, is that they tend to focus on the dramatic aspects,” deJong said. “Most often, the whodunit part is somebody else’s job.”

That task typically falls on local and state police whose responsibility is to collect evidence and investigate the accident, East Lansing police Capt. Kim Johnson said.

While deJong calls autopsies a “brisk process,” some cases, such as the murder of 7-year-old Ricky Holland in 2005, can have an emotional impact on examiners.

“Certainly some deaths strike us more than others,” deJong said. “But even more in those cases, and especially in those cases when maybe a child is beaten, we become very objective. We have to be because I know that at some point I’m going to be asked a million questions about this death.”

Still, after about eight years at Sparrow Hospital, the thought of spending her days examining the deceased doesn’t faze the forensic pathologist.

“Some people ask, ‘Well, haven’t you been creeped out before?’ and I don’t think I have been,” deJong said. “I’ve been more intrigued by what has happened to people.”

Published on Monday, October 22, 2007