Expert Witness in Drug Cases Is Found Dead of Apparent Overdose

A prominent forensic psychiatrist who specialized as a defense witness in narcotics cases was found dead in his Hollywood Hills home from an apparent drug overdose, Los Angeles police said Monday.

The nude body of Dr. Donald Martin Trockman, 46, was found on the floor of his bedroom Sunday night by a house guest, police said, adding that he was curled up in a fetal position and clutching an empty hypodermic syringe in his hand.

Pending the results of an autopsy and toxicological tests, police initially ruled the cause of death as undetermined.

But Detective Glen Day said, “It appears to be an accidental overdose.”

Well Known

“Dr. Trockman is a well-known defense witness in narcotics criminal cases,” Police Lt. Ed Hocking said. “He has testified in hundreds of cases for the defense and is well known to LAPD officers, as well as district and city attorneys.”

Police said what appeared to be narcotics residue was found in Trockman’s bedroom, but the material could not immediately be identified.

Trockman, who has authored texts on heroin use for defense lawyers, was considered an expert witness on the effect of drugs, including heroin, cocaine and PCP.

Head of the Trockman Medical Corp., the psychiatrist had lived alone since a divorce about four years ago, according to friends.

Law enforcement officials said they began hearing talk of drug use by Trockman at about that time.

“I had heard the rumors and saw him testify in a few cases recently where he did not appear as well put together psychologically as in the past,” said Dino Fulgoni, head of the special crimes and medical legal section of the Los Angeles County district attorney’s office, who once taught Trockman forensic psychiatry at USC.

Innocent Verdicts

“He was almost entirely a defense doctor, one of the more prominent in Los Angeles,” Fulgoni said. “Once in a while he’d be called by prosecutors, but his work was increasingly for the defense. In a couple of cases, his testimony was credited for resulting in verdicts of innocent.”

Expert Witness

In addition to drug cases, Trockman was an expert defense witness as a neurologist. In 1986, his testimony in the case of a Canoga Park teen-ager accused of fatally strangling his mother was credited with winning a reduced verdict of involuntary manslaughter instead of murder.

Using a computer brain-wave test, Trockman argued that the defendant’s brain was so “abnormal” that he could find no way to avoid mounting stress, other than violence. The testimony was challenged by two prosecution experts, who argued unsuccessfully that the computer tests showed the boy to have a normal brain.