Medicolegal Death Investigators and Swatting - 083

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This week on the Writer's Detective Bureau, Medicolegal Death Investigators and Swatting. I'm Adam Richardson and this is the Writer's Detective Bureau. Welcome to episode 83 of the Writer's Detective Bureau, the podcast dedicated to helping authors and screenwriters write professional quality crime related fiction. And this week I'm answering your questions about Medicolegal Death Investigators and swatting.

But first, I need to thank Gold Shield patrons, Debra Dunbar from debradunbar.com, C.C. Jameson from ccjameson.com, Larry Keeton, Vicki Tharp at vickitharp.com, Chrysann, Larry Darter, Natalie Barelli of nataliebarelli.com, Craig Kingsman of craigkingsman.com, and my latest Gold Shield patron Lynn Vitale for their support. And I'd also like to send a huge thank you to my Silver Cuff-link and Coffee Club patrons as well.

You can find links to all of the writers supporting this episode in the show notes at writersdetective.com/83. To learn about setting up your own Patreon account for your author business or to support the show for as little as $2 per month, visit writersdetective.com/Patreon, P-A-T-R-E-O-N.

So do you have any good recipes for that new cocktail? The Quarantini? You're probably thinking a coronavirus joke. et tu Brute, that's a twofer right there, a coronavirus joke topped with an ides of March reference. Man, oh man, I leave you guys alone for a week, go take a little alcoholaday for my birthday and I come home to this mess? Ah, in all seriousness, I hope you are home and healthy and enjoying a little solitude while COVID-19 runs its course.

And please, seriously do take the recommended precautions seriously, I know you've been bombarded with notices and alerts and instructions and emails from every business you've ever done business with, but now is the time to take a much deserved staycation. If you're in the U S and your workplace has closed or reduced your hours and they aren't paying you, file for temporary unemployment right now then finish all those online courses you paid for, never finished.

Download a new book, reread that page turning you love back in the '90s and it's been collecting dust in that overstuffed bookcase. Finish writing your book, hey pot, I'm kettle. Send me a question to answer on next week's podcast, sleep in, run a bath, just relax, it's time for a mindset shift. Right now, the world is getting a multi-week break just to chill, to learn to be still to enjoy the peace and unplug.

I mean, you guys are writers, just imagine you're on deadline, this should be easy, you've been training for this, I certainly wish I could. Being in law enforcement means that we're going to get busy very soon because all of those closure orders that the state governors and city managers are working on signing right now, well, guess who gets to enforce all of those.

Now it won't be the public health department's six employees, it's going to be the cops. Okay, that's enough pandemic talk, let's get to this week's questions. Death investigators, medical examiner death investigator, forensic medical examiner investigator, deputy coroner investigator, or Medicolegal Death Investigator, whichever you want to call it, it might be the fascinating job you've never heard of.

In both the Facebook group and in messages sent directly to me this week, I had questions that relate to the role of the Medicolegal Death Investigator, and medicolegal is a single word, M-E-D-I-C-O-L-E-G-A-L, so it's anytime you have medical and legal overlapping, it's medicolegal. So most agencies don't actually use that specific title for the job of Medicolegal Death Investigator, but that is the catch-all name used by ABMDI the American Board of Medicolegal Death Investigators.

And definitely check out the FAQ page on the American Board of Medicolegal Death Investigators' website, which is abmdi.org, which I will also link to in the show notes, which you will find that writersdetective.com/83. So who are these Medicolegal Death Investigators and how would they realistically show up in your stories?

Contrary to what TV and movies will have you believe when someone from the medical examiner or coroner's office shows up at a potential crime scene, it's usually not the forensic pathologist. Now the forensic pathologist is the medical doctor that actually conducts the autopsy, and the majority of their work day is spent at the morgue doing those autopsies. It's the death investigator that responds to the scene, usually in the van to haul the decedent's body away.

The death investigator is the one doing the initial exam of the body at the scene and the back at the morgue, and they may even draw specimens from the body before the autopsy as well as doing their own photography. Right now you're probably thinking about this in terms of what a death investigator would do in a homicide case, but the day-to-day work is much more routine and they stay busy.

They are the ones coordinating with the mortuaries and hospitals and the next of kin and of course, law enforcement agencies. So during the autopsies they're often assisting the forensic pathologist just as an OR nurse might in a surgery. These job duties are pretty much the same regardless of who you work for as a Medicolegal Death Investigator, but what differs is the job title, job requirements and who they work for.

Now, as we've talked about in previous episodes, you may have a medical examiner's office to handle death investigations, or you may have a coroner's office, or you could be like Los Angeles and confuse all the crime writers by calling yourself the Los Angeles County Department of Medical Examiner-Coroner. But anyway, back to the job of the death investigator, the death investigator may or may not be a sworn law enforcement officer.

In many California counties at least, the coroner is often also the sheriff, so you'll have a sheriff coroner where the deputy sheriffs are also legally speaking, deputy coroners. So then within that sheriff's departments organization will be a coroner's office, staffed with deputy sheriffs, often holding the rank of detective working as a coroner's investigator or a deputy coroner investigator or some such title.

The sheriff's department or sheriff's office, depending on which agency you're talking about, very likely uses their patrol deputy sheriffs, the ones handling law enforcement calls for service in their patrol cars to handle the duties of a death investigator in routine deaths for these agencies that are sheriff corners, traffic accident fatalities, folks who die in surgery at the hospital in some circumstances, or just plain, I'll check the welfare cases where the mail and newspapers had been piling up on the doorstep for days, those are the bread and butter of patrol deputies that are also working as deputy coroners.

In those routine cases, the patrol deputy sheriff/deputy coroner does the initial death investigation and barring any signs of foul play or suicide, they will call for mortuary to transport the decedent to the morgue. And then if there are signs of foul play or suicide, then that deputy will notify a supervisor who will in turn contact their investigators in the coroner's office, those Medicolegal Death Investigators, and of course, the homicide detectives for that jurisdiction.

Not every sheriff's department is a coroner's office but it's not uncommon, and I'm only speaking from my experience in California though, I know things vary greatly from county to county, state to state, and certainly in different countries. Now if the investigator works for a medical examiner's office, it's very possible that they are not a sworn law enforcement officer, or there may be some sort of in between where they only have a abbreviated police academy or some sort of law enforcement training that they're required to attend that is not the same as a fully sworn peace officer like a police officer or a deputy sheriff.

So definitely pick a place for your story setting to research and figure out not only what the death investigation agency is, whether that's a coroner's office or medical examiner's office, whether it's city or county or state, but also the job title for the death investigator job. And you can do this by finding the human resources website for the county or city where you've set your story, and then searching the job descriptions in the coroners or medical examiner's office. And if nothing comes up there, double check to see if the coroner's office is part of the sheriff's office there or if it's a state where the state has the medical examiner's office.

But knowing that this career exists and the folks working as death investigators, honestly, death investigators seems weird for me to call it that, but I'm using it here as a catch-all to keep from confusing you. But anyway, knowing about this career and then finding what the title is for where you are writing will help create a realistic cast of characters in your story, and it will be more believable than having Quincy MD rolling out on every dead body call.

Christopher [Craftman 00:10:32] ask, "Are there special procedures when dealing with cases of swatting? You know, when somebody's on Xbox or PlayStation calls the cops and creates a false alarm to get the police and SWAT to an address?" Thanks for the question, Chris. If you've never heard of swatting, it's as Chris alluded to, a false report to law enforcement, usually of a violent and actively occurring incident at the home of the swatter's intended victim.

The calls are usually ones where the caller states something along the lines of, he's killed one or more people in the home and that moral will be killed, or something equally as egregious in the hopes of prompting a major response of major police response to the location. I have actually responded to a swatting incident as part of a critical response team, so I can tell you there are two things that are going to happen.

First, we're going to treat this call like every other call, it's an active and real threat until we determine it isn't. In that said, there are a few hallmarks of swatting calls that will tip us off pretty early into the incident that we're dealing with the swatting incident some of the time. One common tactic in these cases is that the calls go into 911 through the TTY system.

TTY is a text telephone or teletypewriter, which is a device used by the hearing impaired or those who have speaking difficulty to place phone calls. So in actively unfolding violent crime being reported through the TTY system is a pretty good red flag that this is a possible swatting incident, but that doesn't mean we just assume that it's a swatting incident. Just like I mentioned a second ago, and not all swatting incidents are reported through TTY, which makes it harder to discern whether it's a real incident or not.

Unfortunately, there have been fatal incidents of swatting in the US, so it is a real problem and it seems to be growing. Now, the second thing, once the swatting incident has been resolved, meaning we determined that it was a false report, then we go into investigation mode. And while the vast majority of swatting incidents have stemmed from online gamers using swatting as payback for some perceived in game dispute on platforms like Xbox or PlayStation, it's also being used by hate groups to harass religious groups and others, even just the target people that are holding public office.

So it's not only online gamers, but that's certainly where the majority of them have stemmed from. Now the investigation will involve interviewing the intended victim and learning if they're aware of any recent disputes or if we're talking about the gaming stuff, persons that would want to target them, but assuming the gaming thing is in play, it will also involve serving search warrants on Microsoft or Sony, the companies that make Xbox and PlayStation, to get evidentiary data like access logs and account subscriber information to figure out who may have had the motive to pull a swatting.

And from there, it's a typical investigation of piecing together what happened, and often that means more search warrants to telephone companies and internet service providers. Essentially, you're creating a picture with your evidence to show a jury that the suspect is responsible for the swatting incident. Now, if you have an online gamer in your household, this is something to take notice of. Gamers use a gamer tag or a username that in theory should offer a bit of anonymity at first glance.

But when that becomes your online persona in a game, it often becomes your online persona elsewhere. So look to see if your favorite online gamers username is also their Twitter or Instagram name, then look to see how much information would be swatter could glean from that knowledge. If I'm writer's detective one, two, three on Xbox and you find @writersdetective one, two, three on Instagram, then you see my selfies at my high school and I'm tagged in any photos with my real name and all my friends, you've got a lot of info you can use to find me through a simple online search.

It could take all of three minutes to figure out where I might live, and the swatter doesn't have to be right about where I live. The reason why I think swatting is going to increase is because of the popularity of online gaming increasing dramatically. If you've never heard of Twitch, it's a video streaming service, not unlike YouTube, only much of the content is live streams of people actively playing video games online. Top players with huge followings will make a living off of being popular on Twitch or YouTube, and simply being in the limelight on these platforms is enough to get you targeted.

So if you or a loved one have a significant online presence and you think you or they might be at risk for swatting, seriously consider talking to your local police or sheriff's department about flagging your residents as being at risk for swatting incidents. Most police agencies now have computer aided dispatch or CAD, and in CAD you can add alerts or flags to addresses, things like the gate code to your driveway or the door code to get into your building.

So the police department may also be able to flag your address for you being at risk to swatting, and then list a name and a phone number they can contact if something comes up. Seattle Police Department in Washington state has already implemented an anti-swatting registry, so it isn't totally unheard of. Remember, swatting isn't only for gamers, but one great way to keep from being swatted is to be serious about anonymity, so you might seriously consider or reconsider using a pen name.

Thanks so much for listening this week, this show is powered by your questions, send them to me by going to writersdetective.com/podcast, and don't forget to work on growing your mailing list while you're locked in the house, it's the single most important thing you can do to build the moneymaking side of your author business. The tool I use is ConvertKit and you can now use my affiliate link to get a free ConvertKit account that includes landing pages and unlimited emails to your first 100 subscribers. All you need to do is go to writersdetectivebureau.com/ckfree to sign up right now. Thanks again for listening, have a great week and write well.

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