Let's go back to the coroner

"Still" by Damien Hirst, Art Institute of Chicago

     Cook County Medical Examiner Dr. Stephen Cina announced his retirement Wednesday, claiming a desire to seek a "more peaceful lifestyle."
     Which immediately raises the question: What about his four-year tenure wasn't peaceful?
     Perhaps he was referring to the dramatic press conference where he revealed that teenager Laquan McDonald was shot 16 times, 14 while lying in the street, dying.
     Oh right. There was no such press conference. Cina's term was distinguished by a big hike in funding, allowing him to hire more staff and modernize the medical examiner's office, and though we played connect-the-dots last week, I would be so bold to suggest that those two elements — his keeping mum and his being served a big heaping slice of county pie — are not unrelated. Just a theory.
      I'd love to ask him about it, but no interviews, at least not with me. Then again, I'm the one who pointed out when he showed up that he planned to keep his $5,000-a-day forensic consultancy sideline. That kind of thing tends to sour relations.
     Not so for his predecessor, Dr. Nancy Jones, who had a habit of articulating medical findings, even ones that her bosses found unwelcome. Such as in 2009 when she said that Chicago Board of Education President Michael Scott committed suicide, even though Scott's pal, Mayor Richard M. Daley, and Scott's family preferred to dwell in an alternate universe of flimsy conjecture. Daley threw Jones under the bus, and her staff passed around photographs of the messes they were supposed to be cleaning up.....

To continue reading, click here.

"It's hard to take the fingerprints of the dead"

Anti-NATO protest, Chicago, 2012. 

      The Cook County Medical Examiner, Dr. Stephen Cina, quit on Wednesday, saying he wanted "a more peaceful lifestyle"—whatever that means, perhaps a reference to his $5,000 a day forensic consultancy sideline. 

     One that got away. I heaved a weary sigh—having known every Cook County Medical Examiner since the first, Dr. Robert Stein, and watching most of them work, I know that the morgue produces interesting stories. Not Dr. Cina, too modest, or too circumspect, to allow that. 

     But his predecessor, Dr. Nancy Jones did, after sufficient pleading directed at her boss, Todd Stroger, a process that ended up in my book, "You Were Never in Chicago." I am proud of this story on a number of points,  particularly noticing the tools she was using. Anyway, I thought it worth reposting.

     'It is difficult to take fingerprints of the dead," says Dr. Nancy Jones, the Cook County medical examiner. "They really are not that cooperative."
     She immediately reconsiders this.
     "These are the best patients in the world," she corrects herself, as if reluctant to criticize broadly people she sees by the thousands, though they don't see her. "If you come to me as a clinician, and I tell you to quit smoking, you don't. I tell you to take your medicine, you don't. It's the living patients who don't do what you tell them to."

Dr. Nancy Jones

    Here, in an autopsy room at the county morgue, however, the patients stay put, quietly waiting their turn on rolling steel tables, their lightless eyes half open. Technician Tiffany Gregoire helps arrange the body of a large, muscular young man, then gently washes him with a sponge. He was found face-down in a roadway, a bullet hole in his back, the latest victim this year of heightened violence, one of a dozen corpses to arrive in the previous 24 hours.
     "A little lighter load," says Dr. Jones. The average is about 16 cases a day. She reads off today's list: "A drug death, a gunshot, an unknown bone that may or may not be human, a couple of elderly people without families, a pedestrian . . . Actually, it's not a bad day."

UNCONVENTIONAL TOOLS

     Dr. Jones examines a 24-year-old who hanged himself with a shoelace—one of two suicides on today's schedule. Suicides are up. "We always know when the economy goes sour," says Dr. Jones, who suspects hard times might also explain the spike in child murders they saw in April and May.
     At the next table, Dr. Larry Cogan examines the gunshot victim. With a potential murder trial in mind, he inserts a steel rod into the wound and Sherry Davis photographs it, so a jury can see the bullet's trajectory.
     After the victim is rolled over, Gregoire takes a scalpel and cuts across the big man's chest, just below his collarbone, and down his sternum, making a rough "T." Below the brown skin is a beige layer of fat, then deep red tissue that looks disconcertingly like steak. In short order, his heart is on an electronic scale. It weighs 374 grams.
     Dr. Jones has short, coiffed red hair and frameless glasses. She was born in Aliquippa, Pa., a small steel town; her father worked in the mill there for 40 years. Though she has lived in Chicago since 1970, she is, she admits, a small-town girl at heart, and she brings a certain practicality to her job. Her medical kit includes carpet needles and a regular pair of pliers instead of a medical dura stripper costing four times as much. The cutting instrument she uses for autopsies is not a scalpel, but a fancy kitchen knife—a Henckels with a 10-inch blade, the kind found in upscale kitchens.
     "The reason I have this is because they hold their edge, and they're a lot less expensive," she says.
     Gregoire struggles to reach up into the murdered man's throat and pull out his tongue. It is hard, physical work, and while she utters an occasional expletive, her face is placid, expressionless. This is routine. When is it difficult?
     "I would have to say when the bodies come in with roaches," she says. "I don't like that. I'd rather see maggots than roaches."
     After weighing the man's heart, liver, lungs and other organs, then dumping them into a red plastic biohazard bag that will later be inserted into his chest, Gregoire turns her attention to opening his skull. Pulling away the dura inside the skullcap sounds like fabric ripping.
     "This is the part of work that gets a little tiresome," Gregoire says.
     The weight of each organ is recorded on a chalkboard. The photographs are shot on film, leading to "racks and racks and racks" of slides.
     Dr. Jones uses carbon paper to fill out multiple death certificates. The modernization that led hospitals to bar-code every last pair of Tylenol hasn't reached here yet. Dr. Jones -- who joined in 1986 but only became medical examiner last year—is planning to bring the office into the modern age as fast as possible, assuming the money can be found.

'IT'S A LOT OF STRESS'

     She also hopes—someday—to have enough staff to give them breaks from the routine, because "it gets to everybody." Some time away from the autopsy room, maybe an occasional month doing paperwork, filing slides, perhaps educating hospitals and funeral homes, which sometimes forget that certain deaths—suicides, infants, industrial accidents, murders—are required by law to be sent to the medical examiner.
     "It will make a huge improvement, to have relief, and not do the same thing day after day after day, month after month after month," she says. "It's a lot of stress."
     Despite the county budget crisis, she is hopeful.
     "I've been getting a lot of help from downtown," she says. "They really do understand my issues here."
     Beneath Dr. Jones' no-nonsense demeanor beats a warm heart. She likes riding horses, owns two, and adopts rabbits from a rescue group. When a friend, a police officer, died, the officer's wife asked Dr. Jones to perform his autopsy. She did so with her usual professionalism, crying only later, as she dictated her notes. Dr. Jones is 55 and proud of it.
     "Getting old is a privilege that many people don't have," she says. "Every time you get up in the morning and feel those aches and pains, you should thank the Lord."
     Her job has strengthened her faith.
     "I believe in God, very, very much," she says. "Doing autopsies on human beings, you see how intricate we are. The wonder of the human body. How well it meshes together, and how little it takes to stop a person's existence. One little thing."
     A few feet away, Dr. Cogan has removed the bullet that killed the man. A mangled lump of whitish metal, no bigger than a fingertip.

                    —Originally published in the Sun-Times, June 2, 2008

Hey George, don't let the door hit you in the ass on your way out.

     Chicago! Yo! Over here! I have a question.
     So the 2016 Summer Olympics begin in Rio de Janeiro on Aug. 5 — three months from Thursday — assuming the city doesn't first dissolve into unrest or the region become overwhelmed by Zika-carrying mosquitoes or Brazil collapse into political anarchy.
     That said, how many of you have had this thought: "Darn, if only we had gotten the 2016 Olympics. I sure wish it were taking place right here instead."
     A show of hands. Anybody?
     Thought so. While I'm sure there must be someone who wishes that, among Chicago's complex raft of woes, the city were also throwing a weird mega block party for shot-putters and pole-vaulters and all those other sports we studiously ignore the 47 consecutive months between Olympics. But I'm not expecting many.
     The general reaction has to be a collective, Whew!
     Dodged that bullet.
     One disaster that Richard M. Daley didn't foist upon Chicago despite trying with all his might....

To continue reading, click here.

Chicago's own circus, City Council, once put on an elephant show

     Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus had their last show using elephants in Rhode Island on Sunday. I can't claim to be particularly saddened to see the 120-year tradition end. Society changes. I used to enjoy taking the boys to the circus, and the shows were dramatic, especially the elephants forming a massive living tableau of animal bulk. But I understand that elephants are sensitive beings, and abusing them into public performance is not a particularly laudable human achievement. I'm sure feeding slaves to the lions in the Colosseum was a thrilling spectacle too, but that isn't a convincing argument against doing away with it.
    This view represents—I won't say "progress"—how about "evolution" on my part, to borrow Barack Obama's term. Ten years ago, in the wake of three elephants dying at the Lincoln Park Zoo, the Chicago City Council was holding hearings whether to effectively ban elephants in the city. I swallowed hard and attended a meeting. 
    It's a shame the aldermen couldn't have applied this zeal to shortfalls in pension funding; could have saved everybody a lot of grief. Elephants aren't the only ones who suffer. 

     Old people shouldn't live in nursing homes, where they are crammed in small, overlit rooms, often with cantankerous roommates. A few are neglected, suffering terrible bedsores, or abuse at the hands of churlish, undertrained "attendants."
     Instead, they should live out their days with their families, relaxing in wicker rockers, sipping lemonade on the wide front porches of splendid Victorian homes, their grandchildren capering around their knees.
     To help facilitate this, the City of Chicago should ban nursing homes within its borders.
     This, as best I can figure, is the kind of logic underlying arguments against allowing elephants -- either at the Lincoln Park Zoo or in passing circuses -- to reside in Chicago. Since elephants sometimes in some places are treated poorly, they shouldn't be kept in captivity at all.
     This was laid out in the City Council chambers Thursday, during a Rules Committee hearing for Ald. Mary Ann Smith's (48th) proposed ordinance to require so much free space for elephants that it would effectively ban them.
     We saw slides of elephants with abscesses on their feet. A brief, soundless, green-tinged video of a man with a hooked staff, instructing another man how to use it to discipline elephants.
     "Hurt 'em, make 'em scream," read the closed captioning, helpfully provided by PETA.
     Somehow, these incidents were supposed to jell into a general indictment. Testimony in support of the bill began -- for some inexplicable reason -- with a 16-year-old Lincoln Park High School sophomore named Francie Flannigan.
     "The elephants didn't ask to be here,'' she said. (They didn't ask to be in Africa, either, but no matter). "They are our guests. We should treat them like guests and not prisoners."
     The theater major ended by reciting from that elephant classic, Dr. Seuss' Horton Hatches the Egg.
     " 'I said what I meant and I meant what I said, an elephant is faithful, 100 percent.' "
     Ald. William Beavers (7th) responded to this curious display with a pertinent question:
     "Have you ever seen an elephant?"
     "Yes,'' said the girl. "At the Lincoln Park Zoo."
     "Anywhere else?
     "Also at the circus."
     Some three dozen other youngsters, all in identical neon green T-shirts memorializing the last three elephant inmates of the Lincoln Park Zoo, were in the public gallery, which is probably 1 percent of the kids who go through the zoo on a rainy afternoon.
     In general, Beavers provided a steady, thoughtful counterpoint, as we sailed to the realm of the absurd, acting as the Council's voice of reason (as opposed to Ald. Arenda Troutman [20th], whose rambling, incoherent speech left people scratching their heads).
     After the video, Beavers summarized the situation:
     "It's a video of one idiot, and you want to punish the whole city because you saw one person doing something."
     Patti Miles, a former employee of the Detroit Zoo, described how that zoo's elephants were shipped to a sanctuary in California -- she didn't explain why, if the elephants were so terribly abused, they nevertheless lived into their 50s, nor did she point out that the Detroit Zoo managed to make the decision without the intercession of government.
     She seemed to be speaking, not only against zoos, but against human experience of the living world in general.
     "Why is it so important to see something with your own eyes?" she asked.
     The assumption of all the pro-ban people was that there was some idealized state of nature, over in Africa, where all these elephants would be joyfully roaming if they weren't kidnapped and taken here, some Eden with no poachers, no droughts, no hyenas, no illness.
     There are 2 million Americans in prison in this country, some kept in horrendous, overcrowded conditions -- such as at the Cook County Jail. There are 600 elephants in the United States. I just don't think our priorities are straight.
     —Originally published in the Sun-Times, Feb. 24, 2006

     Postscript: Stung by ridicule over its banning foie gras in 2005, the City Council ended up not banning elephants. In 2008, the City Council did pass a weak tea anti-elephant abuse ordinance, making it illegal "to use on an elephant any device or instrument with the intent to cause pain and injury" without mustering the courage to specifically mention "bull hooks" etc. and thus missing the heart of the matter.  The Lincoln Park Zoo got rid of its elephants, no law necessary, in 2012. 

U.S. Supreme Court leans toward legalizing corruption

Bob and Maureen McDonnell

     Things are a mess.
     They sure feel like a mess, don’t they?
     Chicago teeters on insolvency. Illinois hurtles toward its first anniversary of utter fiscal gridlock.
     Nationally, the view is even more surreal, like some semi-obscene Dali painting come to life. This crude New York punchline has shanghaied the Republican Party. While the Democrats who aren’t still skipping happily toward Shangri-La behind Pied Piper Bernie Sanders, banging tambourines wrapped in ribbons, grimly assemble around scarred old campaigner Hillary Clinton, like yeomen clutching pointed staffs in a muddy field around Henry V, psyching themselves up to fight off the legions of bowl-haircut Middle American sexist idiocy for the next six solid months.
     So I hate to point out another looming problem, one not on your radar yet. It won’t show up until June, maybe. But it bobbed to the surface of our national discourse last week before being flushed away by the next jaw-dropping set of bad news. Since you may have missed it, I feel compelled to pluck it out and hold it up, gingerly, between thumb and forefinger.
     Bob McDonnell.
     Name mean anything? Of course not. Don’t feel bad, it drew a blank with me too....

To continue reading, click here.

Postscript: Wondering what happened? Read it and weep. 

Chris Christie in rags

    The presidential election is Tuesday, Nov. 8.
    One hundred and ninety days from now.
    A tad more than half a year.
    Quite a lot, really.
    And given that, right now, it looks as if those days—4392 hours — will be taken up listening to, looking at, and thinking about Donald J. Trump, some words of comfort are in order.
    I'd like to direct your attention to Chris Christie in the photo above.
    Now the governor of New Jersey was never going to be president. That dream vanished when his top aides shut down a few lanes of the George Washington Bridge leading to Ft. Lee in 2013, as some kind of crazy political payback by creating huge traffic jams. Meaning either Christie knew about it and lied about that knowledge. Or ran an administration where henchmen ran riot while he sat in the dark.
    And really, which was worse?
    The man was a political corpse and didn't know it.
    Still, Christie showed up at the Republican debates, delivered his prepackaged zingers and hit his cues. And when it was over he was among the first former opponents to embrace Donald Trump.

    As a reward, Trump lets him join the Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Heart's Club Band album cover melange of models and GOP mercenaries who have drifted over to his banner and are allowed to stand behind him at speeches.
     Christie, though, is noteworthy for that expression, that stunned, miserable stare that often comes over his face. I think of that woman trapped in the hive in "Aliens," who croaks "Kill me."
    Or—and this is a vague memory—there was some Babylonian king, who kept his enemy, blinded, in a small cage at court. It was something I glanced on a TV historical drama years ago, so might not even be true. I can't dig up any facts on the matter, so maybe you can help out.* But the sight of once egomaniac Christie, deprived of the spotlight, showing his throat to Trump, who dressed him in rags and chained him to a post in the corner, where he crouches, miserable, waiting hungrily for scraps of attention.
    That's a beautiful thing. It makes me happy every time I see it, because the obloquy is so well-deserved. The quisling, his head shaved, in a tumbrel, dripping in spit. And perhaps there's a bit of foreshadowing there. It is too much, at this point, to hope that Trump will end up the same way, toothless, ignored and flailing, a male Sarah Palin, spouting gibberish as people avert their faces. He's too rich for that. But it could happen. Some version of that could yet occur. Look at Christie. Really look at him. Whenever Trump is on stage, scan the ensemble of bootlickers and coat-holders and toadies. Find him and be reassured. The wheel turns, and sometimes rough justice does occur. Trump is riding high now, at this moment. But a moment does not last forever. Or so one may passionately hope.


* A Bible-savvy reader, John Anton Weber, offers up the unfortunate I was thinking of, Zedekiah, citing chapter and verse:

"At the end of his eleven year reign, Nebuchadnezzar succeeded in capturing Jerusalem. Zedekiah and his followers attempted to escape, making their way out of the city, but were captured on the plains of Jericho, and were taken to Riblah.There, after seeing his sons put to death, his own eyes were put out, and, being loaded with chains, he was carried captive to Babylon, where he remained a prisoner until he died."  

                                                — Kings 25:1-7; 2 Chronicles 36:12   

Thank you John!

Welcome to the restroom of Mort's Deli.

     "I'm just wondering, with all this talk about transgendered people using the washroom, I want to know, who is going to be doing the checking? How do they plan on enforcing the law?" 
                                                                           —Phone message, April 29, 2016


     "Good evening. Welcome to the restroom of Mort's Deli. Please feel free to avail yourself to a stick of Wrigley's spearmint chewing gum or Lifesaver mint. But only one, please.
      "Why yes, I remember you, too. You asked for blueberry bagels last year. There is no such thing as a blueberry bagel. Not at the Steinberg Bakery which is closed for a month. Being remodeled. We are installing new, crazy expensive terrazzo counters and tile floor. The contractor said two weeks which means four. In the meantime, I told my brother Morton that I'd help him with the restroom duty at the delicatessen when I wasn't overseeing the work. You have to watch them, like a hawk you do.
      "It is not easy, the rest room duty. Believe me. Now a nice gentleman like yourself, there is no need to ah ... examine the package. But younger men, teenagers, they can be very smooth-skinned and fair. The way they dress nowadays. Hard to tell the boys from the girls....
     "No, I have not had a lady come in here yet a, how do you say, transgendered individual. But I've only been here a week. Morty's sister, Alice, is in the ladies room. She had someone she was certain was a man. I mean, there were shoulders, a mustache....
     "No, no, we cannot touch the patron. That would be assault.  All we can is ask. Insist. Alice asked the lady to ... well, see the goods. This lady, she became very offended, and left before the police could be called. Which is good, you are supposed to call the police, because it is a crime, to go into the men's room with the equipment of a woman, and versus vice.
    "Turns out, Mort said later, it was indeed a woman—Mrs. Berkowitz's sister, visiting from Cleveland. She had never been here before, which is why Alice didn't recognize her. Her own fault, really, for not being a customer. Still, an unfortunate incident. Not only did the sister get mad, but Mrs. Berkowitz too. A good customer for 20 years. She'll come around. Where else can you get such garlic pickles? Nowhere. Mort makes them himself, from Polish cucumbers raised in oaken tubs.
    "But the law is the law. 'The Illinois Restroom Safety and Decency Act.'  It's framed right there on the counter, next to the bottle of Old Spice. Please feel free to avail yourself to the Old Spice. It's bracing.
     "The law requires that the act be framed and prominently displayed, though I think that Moishe would do so anyway. He doesn't want his customers to think that he cares ... about ... you know ... what they have ... down there. He only cares that you order a corn beef sandwich, or something, enjoy your lunch, and not linger. Sometimes people linger, eating the rolls and pickles—the best!—for hours. But what can you do? You can't throw them out. Even a cup of coffee. That was the biggest problem Mort had, people who get a club soda and think they're entitled to a basket of rolls and a jar of pickles.
    "But times change. Mort has had his deli here for, what, 50 years? More. Since 1964. Before it belonged to our uncle Sol. It was called Sol's. But Sol became ill, and had no children. Well, two girls, but no boys to pass the business onto. Girls have no sense for the business. The girls had no interest in the delicatessen, went to school somewhere and got jobs, one became, I don't know, a physicist, the other a pilot.
     "In all that time, there was never trouble with the restroom. Well, sometimes a parent would order their kid the Jumbo Atomic Hot Fudge Sundae, and let the child eat the whole thing—it's supposed to be shared with four people—and he would rush into the bathroom and, well, let me tell you. My brother told me it was like somebody pulled the pin on a grenade in there. There was throw-up on the ceiling. 
    "But as far as men dressed as women lurking about the stalls, pouncing upon the customers doing their business, that was never a problem. Which is what makes the law so strange to me. Now Mort, he says it isn't about restrooms, really. Me, as a baker, I'm used to silly laws. We have to have the kitchen checked for rodent activity, as if that were possible in an establishment of such unsurpassed cleanliness as the Steinberg Bakery. But in other places, yes, so I go along. I try to be a good citizen. Which Mort does too. Though he has a theory. He says, with the Internet and cell phones and freedom, it gets harder to kick the people you hate. Time was, you could, literally, you saw somebody you didn't like, a schwartz, a fairy, whatever, you could walk over, give 'em a kick. And what were they going to do? Nothing. Nobody cared what happened to them.
    "Now, oh boy. Everybody cares. They post the video and everybody cries. Suddenly there are no people ashamed to show their faces in public. They get to ride the bus, use the bathroom, wherever they please. It's a new world. But some people, they don't like it. They have the itchy toe. They're still itching to give their kick and, blocked one way, find another. Not me. I hate no one. I am a businessman. You come in, I sell you butter cookies, no matter how loathsome an individual you happen to be when you are not buying my cookies. It isn't my business. My business is selling you cookies, so give me the money, and get out. Four weeks. Six tops.
    "This law. This stupid law. So now somebody has to sit in the bathroom, checking. In every public restroom with more than two stalls. Sadly, Mort's Deli has three, though he's going to hire my contractor—Sheldon Finkleman and Brothers, the best!— to rip one out. As soon as they're done at the Steinberg Bakery. By June, God willing.
    "Until then, well, here I am. Trying to make the best of it. Not so bad. I got the newspaper. There's the radio, easy listening. Part of it is nice -- like the old days, when there were clubs. The Chez Paree, the Trade Winds. I once saw Tony Bennett at the Double Door. You can't imagine. There was always a colored fellow in the bathroom, handing out towels and brushing off shoulders. Mort should have an actual colored fellow, but it isn't so easy to find one who'll sit in a restroom and guard the mints. Besides, for the enforcement of the law, that requires a certain finesse, a certain authority. Which is why Morty turned to me. I am a figure of respect at the Steinberg Bakery, and run a right ship here. Still, most people are the gender that God intended them to be, and are just answering nature's call, and since I'm here anyway, I try to make it a little elegant for them, for all of us, with the fancy lotions and the music and the aftershave and the combs in blue water. Here's a towel. Please deposit it in the wicker basket. People can be pigs. I know. Here, help yourself to a stick of Wrigley spearmint gum, but only one. Some people scoop up the tray. And thank you -- some gentlemen, they take the gum but leave nothing. Which is their right, but leaves a lingering bitterness. Still, it takes all sorts to make a world. Let me tell you. A little kindness goes a long way. I wish more people knew that.