When my brother Mark died the day after being burned in a truck fire on September 23, 2003, it was not made clear by the N.Y.S.P. investigators just how severe his burns had been. Even when Mark’s son sent me a copy of the autopsy report in November 2003, the report did not specify the extent of third-degree burns.
The first specific information came on Christmas Day 2003, when my nephew John McKenna, who had been at the burn unit the morning of September 24, mentioned that Mark’s attending physician Dr. Edward Piotrowski had told him that Mark's skin was saturated with a flammable liquid, with burns penetrating to the muscles. According to John, the doctor added, “This was no accident.”
In late January 2004, on the advice of Atty. Tony Tanke, I contacted Dr. Piotrowski to find out how much of my brother’s body had suffered third-degree burns. The doctor stated that essentially all the burns were third degree, some even fourth degree, covering approximately 90% of Mark’s body; he specifically mentioned very severe burns on Mark’s chest, his upper body, his legs, and even his head. In a phone conversation in March 2005, Dr. Piotrowski affirmed to me that Mark’s skin had been saturated with a flammable liquid, presumably gasoline from the can found in the passenger’s side of his truck (where my brother never put gas cans). He also wondered how Mark had got gasoline on his head.
An eye-witness account of Mark’s condition in the burn unit concretely reinforces what Mark’s attending physician stated about the severity of his burns. In a phone conversation in October 2005, my nephew elaborated on what he himself had observed about my brother’s condition in the burn unit. According to John, Mark's feet were burned to nothing; there was no hair left on his head; his face was all burned up, with a brown-yellow appearance to the skin; and his nose was almost burned away, appearing black from the burns.
Given Dr. Piotrowski’s statements about both the extreme severity of my brother’s burns over almost his entire body as a result of saturation with gasoline, it is disturbing that the N.Y.S.P. investigators and the Cattaraugus County District Attorney with whom I spoke denied that explanation. In October 2005, when I mentioned to N.Y.S.P. Sen. Inv. John Wolfe the issue of Mark being doused with gasoline, he insisted that the worst burns were on Mark’s legs rather than the upper part of the body, thus downplaying the severity of the burns to Mark’s head and torso. (Wolfe’s claim directly contradicts what both Dr. Piotrowski and my nephew John stated they had specifically observed.) Wolfe then insisted that suicide was a strong possibility.
When I raised the same issue with N.Y.S.P. Capt. George Brown in February 2006, he simply replied that Mark could have spilled gasoline on himself because of his drunken state. To my question of how Mark could have accidentally got gas on his head, he simply claimed that the saturation with gas suggested suicide. Was Capt. Brown unaware that, as recorded in the police report, the Cattaraugus County District Attorney at the time of Mark’s death had explicitly stated that there was no evidence of a suicide?
When I brought up the saturation of Mark’s skin with gasoline in a phone conversation with N.Y.S.P. Lt. Allen in April 2007, he said that he did not know where that is stated in the records. I referred to Dr. Piotrowski’s statements, but Lt. Allen replied that he did not understand how the doctor could possibly have known that Mark was saturated with gasoline just by examining him, without lab tests.
In a meeting in May 2010 with the current Cattaraugus County District Attorney Lori Rieman and John Ensell, who had been the N.Y.S.P. Sen. Inv. in the investigation into Mark’s death, I mentioned Dr. Piotrowski's statements about the gasoline. D.A. Rieman immediately replied that she did not know how a doctor could make such a statement. She added that the police report refers to gasoline on specimens of Mark’s clothing. Apparently, D.A. Rieman did not consider the obvious and likely possibility that the gasoline had soaked through Mark’s clothes and onto his skin.
The N.Y.S.P. investigators’ and current Cattaraugus County District Attorney’s denial of the extent to which my brother had been doused with gasoline raises yet more questions about the quality of the investigation into his death. In 2012, I asked a highly experienced forensic toxicologist about the issue of saturation with gasoline. He stated that the degree of Mark’s burns would indicate that he had been doused with gasoline, asking if Mark’s clothes had tested positive for gasoline. He further explained that if someone is burned but not doused with gasoline, he could pull his burning clothes off and get the fire out. But, he added, when a person is doused with gasoline, the skin continues to burn after the clothes are off, which explains why Mark’s burns were so severe over almost all of his body. In fact, evidence of clothing found near Mark’s body shows that he had pulled off some of his clothes, and EMT Cheryl Simcox, the first emergency worker on the scene, saw two-foot flames shooting from Mark’s body when she arrived on the scene.
Trained N.Y.S.P. investigators should certainly have known that such extensive severe burns indicated that the gas can found on the passenger’s side floor of Mark’s truck had been used to douse his body. They should also have known that the gas can did not simply cause a fire by Mark accidentally lighting a cigarette while in the driver’s seat. That would have caused a flash fire and would not have caused gasoline to saturate his body (or douse the driver’s seat area itself). The N.Y.S.P.’s continued insistence that my brother most likely committed suicide, with no support for that theory, and their stubborn refusal to probe any evidence that contradicted that notion (especially the wound on Mark’s forehead and the pool of his blood in his driveway) goes beyond incompetence.
