ACCIDENTAL DROWNING, SUICIDE OR HOMICIDE

• Published in: Romanian Journal of Forensic Science (English ed.) 2017-04, Vol.18 (110), p.2542-2544
• Main Authors: Paparau, Cristian, Popa, Marius Florentin, Ghiţă, Andreea Elena, Alexandra, Stănescu Ana Maria, Zorilă, Valentin Marian, Alexandru, Iorga
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Consciousness; Criminal investigations; Edema; Emphysema; Forensic medicine; Forensic pathology; Murders & murder attempts; Suicides & suicide attempts
• ISSN: 2069-2617; 2069-2617

The death by drowning representing one of the most important public health problems, and 9% of deaths worldwide [1] out of which usually more than half are accidents, and the rest suicides or homicides[2] (in homicide cases, most often the cause of death was other than drowning [13]) and due to this fact, it could benefit from increased preventive measures, especially by monitoring risk individuals (elderly people or with mental illness, children, etc.) [3]. Necropsic diagnosis of death by drowning is one of the most sensitive issues of forensic medicine [4], especially in cases with advanced putrefaction or when the body shows traumatic injuries [5] (their absence cannot exclude the hypothesis of murder, but certainly raise difficulties duringb the investigation [7]). in order to obtain a high accuracy, a correlation must be done between aspects observed at autopsy (after external and internal examination), results from complementary tests (histopathology, toxicology and sometimes the diatom test) [6] as well as information provided by the criminalistic team. A study conducted in the United States on approximately 7,000 cases of drowning, deemed accidental, concluded that about 20% of them had another cause of death, and the law had been misapplied [9]. [...]this current report sustained that diagnosis of drowning, and clarification of legal circumstances in which the death occurred should be done by correlating police investigations, forensic autopsy, microscopic analysis and biochemical tests. Discussion in such cases the forensic pathologist when conducting the medico-legal investigation must first exclude other circumstances which could have caused death (eg individual gets sick and dies due to a pathological condition, after that he is falling into water or thanatogenesis is due to a traumatic event and then the body is immersed in water), then to prove that the person was alive when the immersion took place [18] and later to clarify the legal circumstances in which the death occurred. Besides the tests complementary to autopsy, previously detailed we recall a recent acquisition in the field of forensic represented by immunohistochemistry with application even in cases of drowning, in which the detection and quantification of surfactant protein A expression may estimate time since death and vitality of asphyxia making this investigation usseful and perhaps it should be part of every forensic autopsy of drowning [20]. in our case the death due to anot