The Fight Against Crime: Notes From the Front : When a Body Shows Up, She Does Too

At 9:30 a.m., when she walked into her office, Coroner’s Investigator Leilana Aranda discovered that one dead house painter and two live police officers had been waiting across town for her for more than an hour.

And none of them could go anywhere until she got there.

At a crime scene--any homicide, suicide, accidental death, sudden infant death or undetermined death is a potential crime scene to a coroner’s investigator--law enforcement officers from various departments are charged with different parts of an investigation.

For police, a crime scene includes witnesses, suspects, weapons and other physical evidence. For an investigator from the coroner’s office, the body itself is the scene.

After picking up her assignment, Aranda headed from the Sylmar office to the Canoga Park home of the painter.

Police officers at the home told the coroner’s office that a neighbor had come to the house, as she does every morning, to have coffee with the 83-year-old widower who lived there. This morning, however, she found him in a heap on the floor and called police.

The officers said that the man’s doctor said he had high blood pressure and a pacemaker, which could indicate a natural death.

No matter. “You go in thinking the worst, looking for the worst and then eliminate,” Aranda said. “The body tells us a story, and a good investigator looks at a body and sees the changes that occur. What we’re looking for are any inconsistencies with the facts we’re given.”

By the time Aranda got to the modest, single-story home, two police officers were sitting on the couch in front of a yellow blanket-covered mound. Aranda pulled back the cover gently but without hesitation and looked up and down the balding, gray-haired shell of a man on his side.

In spite of the violence and imagery of death rife in pop culture, for most people there is still something foreboding, even frightening, about a lifeless body. Rather than representing the natural culmination of the life cycle, the dead have come to symbolize either a grisly confrontation with an unnatural end or a reminder of our own mortality.

But Aranda, dressed in slacks and a soft brown floral cardigan sweater and wearing a touch of soft-toned make-up, sees nothing grim about poking, prodding and probing dead bodies.

Aranda is no Quincy, television’s passionately iconoclastic investigator-doctor.

Chipper, soft-spoken and a born-again Christian, she considers part of her task to be comforting grieving relatives, shielding them from details that may be too much for them to bear.

“What gets me through is my faith,” she said, snapping on her latex gloves to begin her examination of the painter. “This is just the shell. The soul of him, the life of him, is gone. That gets me through.”

Aranda began by feeling the man’s joints, testing for rigor mortis , the natural stiffening that occurs 12 to 24 hours after death, when muscles that no longer are supplied with blood tighten. A cursory glance told Aranda that the man was in full rigor, a hand and foot unnaturally bent and tense.

She also checked for livor mortis , the purple-red stain that darkens the skin about 12 hours after death when gravity draws the blood to the lowest part of the body. This test, she said, can help time the death, and tell her if a body was moved after death.

Investigators such as Aranda do not determine cause of death, a task assigned to the doctors. Instead, they gather information that can help the forensic physicians. In addition to identifying remains, the coroner’s office is also charged with notifying next of kin.

So before Aranda sent the painter’s body off to the morgue and sealed the house, she took his Rolodex and noted it on her forms and on the police officers’ form.

Aranda took a break from her investigations to explain what happened to an inquisitive neighbor who popped her head in and called the painter’s name. She assured the woman that the painter died quickly and took the neighbor’s hand as she expressed her sympathy.

After the body was removed, she took a last glance around the well-kept home.

“Just his time, I guess,” she said. “He was a neat man. He probably had a pretty good life.”

She closed the door, climbed into her official L. A. County Coroner car, and headed off to the next body.