Carol

     Her name was Carol, and she was the first person I’d ever seen die. I was 23, and I had been a police officer for about a year. She certainly wasn’t the first dead body I’d seen, that number was already in the teens by the end of my first year on the job. Cops see a lot of dead people, mostly from natural causes, elderly people who died on the toilet at 4am, middle aged men felled by heart attacks while cutting their grass, the loners whose neighbors call when the mail piles up and the grass gets too high. Throw in the occasional car accident or drowning, the even more rare homicide, and of course, the suicides. One memorable week I went to four of them; two gunshots, a hanging, and a drug overdose. White suburbia, where I spent a good portion of my career, is a fertile breeding ground for suicide. 

     But this call was different. A trim and attractive woman in her fifties, she was still buckled into her seat when I arrived as first car on scene of a car crash. It was a bitterly cold day in early February, and the bright afternoon sun did nothing to blunt the sharp edge of the frigid air. I’d been right down the street finishing up a domestic abuse report, when I heard the unmistakable sound of metal on metal up the road from the driveway where I was parked. I’d quickly stashed my report in my metal clipboard and raced up the street, several motorists already out of their cars and frantically waving me over. She was a passenger in a small sedan that had been struck broadside by another car, the vehicle she was riding in propelled 50 feet into a nearby ditch, her side of the car completely crushed. Her husband, who had been the driver, sat dazed in the snow next to the vehicle, holding his right arm in a manner to suggest it might be broken.

     I ran to the vehicle, expecting the worst, the sickly sweet smell of burning antifreeze overpowering in my nose. At first glance, she appeared uninjured, but as I attempted to open her car door I heard a sound issuing from her throat that I would, much later and with many more such incidents under my belt, come to think of as a death rattle. A more seasoned officer had showed up shortly after I did, and now his bulky frame and creaking leather jacket filled the shattered and mangled space where the passenger door had been. He was a twenty year veteran, the skin of his face leathery and red from years of hard drinking. Hearing the sound he shook his head sadly and said “better call the Sarge, this one’s a fatal,” which was department lingo for a traffic related fatality requiring a supervisor, before trudging back to his car where he began removing road flares from the trunk to divert oncoming traffic.

     Minutes later, the scene was filled with emergency equipment, and I stood back at a safe distance as the fire department worked furiously to cut her from the car. Once extracted, she was quickly placed on a backboard, then taken on a gurney to a waiting ambulance. I rode in the back of the rig with her to the emergency room, the paramedics calling ahead with all sorts of vital signs and medical terms that I did not understand. We drove at breakneck speeds through the suburbs and into the city as they worked, mostly in silence. Within minutes we arrived at the closest emergency room, where I watched in awe as two surgeons and a team of nurses cut into her chest in order to perform open heart massage in a vain attempt to save her life. After about 20 minutes of furious effort they abruptly stopped, the attending doctor stating a time of death in a flat and emotionless tone before snapping off his latex gloves and walking away from the table to attend to other tragedies. I remained behind in the now silent room, the tangy scent of blood mixed with antiseptic skin prep heavy in the air.

      I would later learn that her pulmonary vein had been torn from the top of her heart, an almost always fatal injury. I spent the rest of that day speaking to her husband, and the driver of the car who had struck them. We had to call an ambulance for the other driver, a pleasant woman in her 40’s, who collapsed upon hearing that her actions had led to another person’s death. I can’t tell you how many more deaths I saw over the ensuing 25 years, and I remember very few of their names, but I will always remember the first. Her name was Carol, and I was there when she died.