ASHLAND — It was around 3 p.m. before Ashland Police officer Adam Srnis decided to stop for a bathroom and lunch break. His shift ended at 6 p.m. and he started at 10 a.m.
I had been with him since the start of his shift for a ride along. My aim was to document a typical day for an Ashland police officer. You can read about it here.
We pulled into Ashland’s Goasis station. After using the bathroom, I waited in line at Popeye’s for a chicken sandwich. Srnis bought a salad.
When we got back into the marked SUV, he told me why.
“I can’t bring myself to eat meat today,” he said.
He laughs a little nervously. Then I connect the dots. Being around that dead body must have really shaken him.
“Oh. Yeah.” I think to myself: should I feel differently? Should I feel weird about eating this deliciously smelling chicken sandwich?
“I’ve just never tried a Popeye’s chicken sandwich,” I say, acknowledging his predicament and trying to explain myself.
He just laughs and tells me it’s OK.
At the station we run into Kara Pearce, the officer who had also responded to the DOA, or Dead on Arrival.
Pearce handles being around dead bodies a little differently than Srnis. She’s responded to many dead on arrival calls. At this point in her career, she experiences them the way I’d imagine a medical examiner would. Like an organism, an object of science. It probably helps her cope and compartmentalize.
Srnis, in his mid 20s with just 2 1/2 years as an officer, has more difficulty with it. I didn’t get a chance to really pick his brain about why, but it affected him enough to the point where he felt like he couldn’t eat meat that day for lunch.
So what about me?
I ate my fried-meat sandwich and enjoyed it.
Was something wrong with me? Or do I just have a tougher stomach?
‘All units’
Let’s back up.
I was riding along with officer Srnis for the day. It was the second shift I had picked up as a ride-along with APD. The first night, I was with Adam Wolbert. It was slower that night compared to others, he said. But it was still exciting. You can read about that here.
On this particular January day, the temperature hovered around 40 degrees around 10:30 a.m. We had just finished giving a man a warning for mistakenly placing a fictitious tag on his white minivan’s license plate.
We pulled out onto the road to continue patrolling. Srnis is a young, chipper man who, I think, genuinely loves his job. He’s firm with people, but also has a respectable humility about him. He was explaining to me why fictitious tags are a no-no.
“Fictitious tags could mean the car was stolen or a fugitive is using it as — “
“All units,” a woman on the scanner interrupted his thought. “Landlord called in a DOA, elderly man. Ex-wife is on scene.”
He takes a deep breath, lets his head hang back, eyes closed as he exhales. It was almost like the exaggerated gesture said: “Not again.”
I later learn this DOA call would be the second he’s responded to in a week for him. I could tell they were hard for him.
He lets dispatch know he’s on his way.
I wonder to myself: would he have taken the call had I not been with him? During the drive, he tells me stories of other dead bodies he’s had to encounter during his green career.
One of them involved a body that had “literally melted into the floor.”
“It was bad, man,” he tells me. “This one could be bad, too.”
As we approached the front door, he warns me: “If I throw up, I’m sorry.”
The man’s apartment was on the second floor of a multi-residential house. We climbed the stairs and walked in, immediately greeted by concerned faces and the smell of putrefaction — the fifth stage of a decaying body.
There were five living people in that apartment — the man’s landlord, the man’s ex-wife, two police officers and me.
I gave a sheepish nod with that pursed-lip crooked smile we give in awkward situations.
“Hi,” I managed to say to the landlord and the ex-wife. “I’m with the news.”
It was a stupid thing to say. I found myself waiting for someone — anyone — to tell me to leave. I felt out of place. I didn’t belong in this area and I would have gladly waited outside, behind the yellow caution tape. As a reporter, that’s usually my place.
They didn’t seem to care who I was or why I was there; there were more pressing matters.
We made our way into the silent living room. It was so quiet. The two officers had their flashlights beaming downward toward the floor, just between a coffee table and an L-shaped couch.
That’s where the body was — the source of the smell of death and the silence. He lay on the floor, shirtless. He had died wearing only his sweatpants. His head rested on his left forearm, exposing his hand, his black fingers curled in both a menacing and almost peaceful way.
I scanned the living room for photos that matched the man who now lay dead on his carpeted floor. I couldn’t find any.
It was only later I realized I was looking for an overweight Black man in photos. The man who died was white and only slightly roundish. There were pictures of him on several surfaces in his home. Posing with grandchildren. Hoisting a freshly caught fish. Holding a handful of morels.
The discoloration of his skin can be explained with the phrase, “postmortem lividity,” or livor mortis.
Essentially, it’s when gravity causes blood to pool in parts of the body closest to the floor. It happens pretty quickly after death. The man had likely been there a week or so, the officers thought.
At that point, according to the people who study this sort of thing, if a body part isn’t touching the floor, but still dangling, the blood could turn deep purple or black. That explains the blackish fingers.
My misjudgment on the man’s weight can also be explained by science. Enzymes in the body begin to break down cells, releasing all sorts of gasses. This causes the body to bloat.
Being around a dead body is incredibly uncomfortable. I don’t want to imagine what it’s like with one I have a relationship with. Or had.
Which tense do you use?
The experience really makes you confront mortality. So I couldn’t suppress my too-close-to-home experiences with death.
The first time I experienced it was at an open-casket viewing at a funeral home. I was young. The boy who died had been run over by a truck while playing in his driveway. It was horrifying. He was 3.
The family had an open-casket viewing and my parents took me and my sister. I was 12; my sister, 10. I don’t remember much about that experience. I just remember feeling extremely sad. And to this day, I compulsively look all around me when backing out of a driveway.
I remember losing a close friend to an untimely death. It was almost 10 years ago. I remember getting the call from my mom. She had been trying to call me first thing in the morning.
A college student, living on my own, I was groggy. Finally, my mind became aware of the vibrating noise on my bedside table.
I picked up the phone and immediately knew something terrible had happened. My mom’s voice was low and shaky. She told me my best friend had died during the night. He had been killed.
“What?”
I had heard her. It was more a question I asked in disbelief.
“He’s gone. I’m so sorry, Dillon.”
I hung up the phone. I was sitting up in my tiny twin-size bed, room a-clutter. Homework at my feet. I don’t know how much time passed as an uncontrollable sob came out of me.
The rest of the day was weird. I spent it with my friend’s family, who’s primary concern enveloped the “how” question. There were tears. Hugs. Memories. I don’t remember if there was any tense confusion. It was too close. Too traumatic. I didn’t take notes. My memory has shut out a lot of that week’s memories.
So I’ve been there. I’ve lost friends and family. But my encounter with their bodies has always been sanitized, controlled and short-lived.
This experience, however, gave me an intimate glimpse into the immediate moments following the death of someone I didn’t know. As morbid as the reality, it captivated me. And maybe in some small way I’ll be prepared for the next death I experience.
Collapsing capillaries
“He was a nice man,” the landlord said, looking at a picture of a very much alive man posing with his grandchildren.
“Yeah,” she said, smiling at the photo. “He is a nice man — was. His grandkids, they all call him Pop Pop. They’re going to be devastated.”
I didn’t mention the fact that’s what my two kids call my dad.
The interchangeability of tenses caught my attention.
Her former husband, whom she had built a life with, was lying motionless — lifeless — on the living room floor. Dead. Physically he was there; he was also gone.
Yet his memory was still very much alive in her, or at least wounded. Perhaps I was witnessing the woman’s ushering into a sort of pre-grief stage.
When a person dies, very real and predictable things happen to the body. A process called pallor mortis represents the very first stage of body decomposition. When we die, blood circulation stops.
Pallor is the Latin word for paleness. (Mortis, of course, is death.) Within 10 to 15 minutes after death, capillaries — tiny vessels in our bodies that transport blood, nutrients and oxygen to cells — collapse. This results in the skin turning pale.
Perhaps a tiny part of the woman’s psyche had also collapsed just minutes after learning her former husband was dead. Like collapsing capillaries, she was releasing the idea of him being alive.
The Death Smell
The landlord had found him. He lives in one of the units below. After days of noticing his neighbor’s mail piling in the wall-mounted mailbox, he decided to check in. He knocked for a while. No answer. He had a key, so he unlocked the door and went upstairs.
The ex-wife said it was somewhat normal for the extended family to not hear from him for days at a time. He was known to withdraw periodically. She said they respected his privacy.
But too much time had passed, she said.
“I knew something had happened. It never goes by this long without at least a text or something,” she said. No one knows exactly how long he had been there. The ex-wife said it had been a while since anyone in the family had heard from him.
The stench that emanates from a dead body is profound. It resembles a funeral home, honestly. Maybe a little more … organic?
According to my Google search, there are around 30 different chemical compounds that are released when a body dies. Not all of them produce an odor, but the ones that do are unforgettable.
Here’s my stab at describing it. Musty. Sweet, almost like a moth ball. Rotting pineapple flesh. In conclusion, it’s wretched. It’s not unique, though. That’s how this works, it happens to all of our bodies. Unavoidable.
So in a sense, a bad smell is a little bit like death.
We all smell it, but no one wants to call attention to it because if we do, that means we have to keep smelling it, now consciously, for as long as it hangs around.
Talking about death, even writing about death, is hard. We tend to avoid it.
When I first arrived to the scene, it was unpleasant, but bearable. I kept finding myself wishing it was worse so I could remember how to describe it. It almost felt like the smell was hovering above my head and every so often it would seep into my nostrils, giving me a brief disagreeable taste.
Around 30 minutes into the encounter, the officer I spent the day with had to go back to the station to calibrate his dash-mounted speed radar.
We left the scene and came back maybe a half-hour later.
When we got there, the smell had worsened. Someone had opened a window in the living room and the kitchen, which produced an airflow, I presume to address the worsening putrefaction. I think it made it worse.
Before, the air was still. Now, it swirled all around. Instead of a ghostly, hovering eminence, it now lined my nasal passage and blanketed everything. I shortened each breath, afraid to breathe deeply. I moved to the window in the living room. The ex-wife stood at the window in the kitchen.
You know when you walk into a restaurant and the aroma that hits you right when you walk in becomes less conscious the longer you stick around? It’s called olfactory adaptation. It’s something our brain does to help us concentrate on new or potentially hazardous smells.
In this case, my brain just kept pumping new odors right up to the ‘ole olfactory bulb — the part of the brain that processes smells before sending stimuli to other parts of the brain.
I’m not a scientist. I can just tell you I felt like the smell was getting worse. Maybe this was because of the increased air flow in the room. Or maybe it was just time, allowing for the very natural scientific process to continue unimpeded inside his body.
I wanted to get away from it and simultaneously couldn’t look away.
Fight or flight
Some psychology academics back in 2015 studied people’s reactions to the smell of death. The theory was that the odor, known as “putrescine,” would cause someone, whether conscious or not, to increase a person’s readiness to either escape or engage in aggressive readiness when escape is not possible.
In other words, does smelling a dead body cause us to confront it or to run away? Fight or flight.
The study is fascinating, and worth a read if you have time. They found that, yes, the smell of putrescine causes someone to be more vigilant. It causes someone to be more defensive. To walk away from a situation quicker than if exposed to other non-putrescine smells. To avoid it at all cost.
“As a whole, the findings indicate that even brief exposure to putrescine mobilizes threat management responses designed to cope with environmental threats,” the authors concluded.
Essentially, they found our response, whether conscious or not, is related to that of an animal’s when it smells death.
We all like to think of ourselves as fighters. But when it comes to death, we’re all trying to avoid it. Or at least fighting its inevitability.
Everyone in that apartment that day couldn’t avoid it. We were forced to deal with it. Not just the smell, but the idea of death itself. None of us really wanted to be there and we all differed in our dealings.
The landlord made some difficult calls that day. He honored the dead man, his friend and neighbor, by smiling at photos and acknowledging a life lived well.
The ex-wife, in grief, mixed up her tenses. Their marriage had ended years before, but the relationship, and the memory attached to that relationship, was still very much alive in those moments.
Pearce found a way to get the job done by allowing herself to be fascinated by the scientific process.
Srnis did his job. He evaluated and secured the scene, as he is supposed to. He prepared me for the unknown by telling stories before entering the apartment. But the encounter with the dead body stayed with him. It caused his stomach to turn.
I was just there for the ride and to document it all. And apparently, I’m fine with eating meat after seeing a decayed body. I don’t know if that means I have a tougher stomach or what. It did affect me, though.
For me, the experience reinforced the idea that everyone processes death differently. Whether it be mixing up tenses, eating salad, eating a chicken sandwich, taking vigorous notes or gathering evidence, it’s OK. There’s no playbook.
It also reminded me of the unavoidable moment we all must face someday. So go hug someone you love today. You never know.
Please be aware this story contains content that might be disturbing for some.
We left out names out of respect to the family’s privacy during this time of grief.
