Why Did the NYSP Investigators Refuse to Reconsider the Autopsy’s Report of Mark’s Serum Alcohol Level?

As reported to me by Atty. Michael Kelly, the principal NYSP investigator in my brother’s death Edward Kalfas acknowledged to him in September 2005 that Mark’s very high blood alcohol level was the main factor for the determination that Mark himself had caused his truck fire.  At that time, Atty. Kelly was trying to persuade the senior investigator John Wolfe to re-open Mark’s case, based on aspects of the truck fire and of my brother’s injuries that had been overlooked or insufficiently investigated.

Those issues included the pool of Mark’s blood found in his driveway, which the police virtually ignored; the gas can found in the cab of Mark’s truck, where he never put gas cans; and information that I had recently obtained from Mark’s attending physician at the burn unit about soft-tissue damage to Mark’s head, which was not mentioned in the police report; and the attending physician’s view that Mark’s blood alcohol level could not have been anything close to the .25 serum alcohol [=.215 blood alcohol] level recorded in the autopsy report.

Atty. Kelly himself spoke with the medical examiner who had performed my brother’s autopsy and reported that M. E. Baik agreed that the .25 reading was too high, but explained that it was what the lab people had given him.  That information was also relayed to the NYSP senior investigator, but it was simply dismissed.

However, Sr. Inv. Wolfe and NYSP officials up the chain continued to insist that Mark had to have been very drunk and caused his truck fire, either by accident or, more likely, by suicide.  In a phone conversation with Wolfe in Oct. 2005, I requested that he check on the test used to determine Mark’s blood alcohol level, as Mark’s attending physician was certain that the alcohol level reported was far too high, especially because Mark had been pumped with fluids in the burn unit, and he wondered about the test used since he was most familiar with the test that uses milligrams per deciliter.  Claiming that the doctor had to be wrong, Wolfe Insisted that even if a person is flushed with fluids, alcohol still remains in the blood, and the lab people would have obtained a blood alcohol reading at the autopsy.

In a phone conversation with NYSP Captain George Brown in February 2006, I brought up the view of Mark’s attending physician about the alcohol level in the autopsy.  In addition, I mentioned the skepticism of a highly experienced chemist about the reading of .25, because parameters in the autopsy report were absent for the headspace test used, which requires careful calibration, and because while determining the presence of alcohol, the headspace test is not accurate as a measure of actual quantity.

I also reported that, according to the chemist, that the serum alcohol reading of .25 would indicate that Mark was non-functional at the time of the incident, given that ten hours had passed between my brother’s death and the autopsy.  Capt. Brown insisted that the technician involved in the testing would have been an experienced professional and the doctor reading the results would have known how to interpret them.

In a phone conversation with NYSP Lt. Allen in April 2007, I repeated the information from Mark’s attending physician about the alcohol level in the autopsy.  Insisting that the .25 alcohol reading was accurate, Lt. Allen stated that the reading was obtained by blood taken from the heart, the liver, and vitreous humor.

A previous post (September 1, 2013) discussed problems with the .25 serum alcohol level obtained from my brother’s corpse and recorded in his autopsy report, which an experienced forensic toxicologist explained to me in some detail.  According to this toxicologist, there were significant procedural problems:

(1) The reading was obtained through a headspace test, but only one test was performed, instead of the usual two to account for contamination of the fluids tested and post-mortem movement of chemicals in the body, thus making the results questionable.  One would have expected a second test using vitreous humor.  (2) A blood alcohol test is normally done on a person while alive in a hospital and is used to check against a post-mortem test.  Since no such test was performed on Mark in the burn unit, the alcohol reading in the autopsy report is more complicated.  (3) To determine the validity of the .25 serum alcohol reading, it is necessary to have the graphs and chromatogram information from the lab test.  That information, however, is not recorded in the autopsy report.  (4) There is no indication in the autopsy report that the medical examiner consulted with Mark’s attending physician in the burn unit, as he should have, for he could not draw proper conclusions about Mark’s death without knowing about his condition when he was hospitalized.

Sr. Inv. Wolfe’s claim that despite an infusion of fluids, alcohol still remains in the blood, enabling the lab personnel to obtain an accurate reading in the case of Mark’s alcohol level, must at least be qualified.  As the forensic toxicologist pointed out, fluids alone do not flush out the alcohol but would speed the process up; the combination of the I.V. fluids and the continued metabolization of alcohol during the fourteen hours in which Mark survived makes the .25 post-mortem reading [= more than .40 blood alcohol at the time of the fire, which would almost certainly put Mark into a coma] hard to believe.

Although Capt. Brown insisted that the technician involved in the testing would have been an experienced professional, the forensic toxicologist noted that lab technicians are known to make mistakes in recording data, sometimes reversing digits.

Lt. Allen was obviously wrong when he stated that in the autopsy they had used the heart, liver, and vitreous humor to test for Mark’s alcohol level.  As the forensic toxicologist observed, the vitreous humor and the liver had in fact been used to test for other chemicals in Mark’s system, ones that turned out to have been used in treating Mark at the hospital, but not for the alcohol reading.  Vitreous humor obviously should have used for the second test the toxicologist indicated was necessary for an accurate reading.

It is difficult to comprehend how the NYSP investigators could simply reject the positions of experienced scientists, such as Mark’s attending physician at the burn unit and the very experienced chemist whom I had consulted.  The analysis of the experienced forensic toxicologist summarized above demonstrates just how flawed the intransigent views of the NYSP investigators really were.