People around the world have talked about the life and death of Terri Schiavo, but Pinellas-Pasco Medical Examiner Jon hogmartin will get the last word.
For the past month, he has been working on her autopsy. She has taken over his office and consumed his working hours. He appeared for an interview in blue scrubs, looking every bit the wiry medical examiner with his bald head and tiny wire-rimmed glasses."That's her and that's her," he says, pointing to piles of documents and boxes of slides stacked all over his office.
And so you must stand in the doorway of his office to look at the old skulls and microscopes and fading picture of his dapper grandfather in knickers and the lifesize pencil drawing of Spock and Capt. Kirk.
Thogmartin, 41, knows Schiavo's autopsy will probably be the most publicized of his career. He won't talk about it until he is done and estimates it will be two or three more weeks.
He has received hundreds of letters and e-mails about the brain-damaged woman who died March 31, 13 days after her feeding tube was removed. Many ask him to look for signs she wasn't brain-dead or signs of abuse, among the allegations made during the protracted battle between her parents and her husband over whether to keep her alive.
"They are of no consequence to me," says Thogmartin of the letters.
The lively Texan, publicity shy and fiercely protective of his wife's and child's privacy, is known for doing everything by the book. He denied requests from Schiavo's parents, Bob and Mary Schindler, and her husband, Michael Schiavo, to allow their own pathologists to observe the autopsy. "It is routine in cases of criminal importance to not allow any biased pathology advocates in the morgue," he said. "I'm the independent pathologist."
Now at the center of the Schiavo hurricane, Thogmartin says he feels the pressure but is not influenced by it.
"I get e-mails that say, "Please be thorough, please be thorough, please be thorough,"' he said. "Then in the next paragraph, they say, "Hurry up, hurry up, hurry up, why aren't you done yet?"' He admits he is probably treating Schiavo differently than he would other autopsies.
"This is a case that as far as the pathology goes is fairly routine," he said. "But there is all this ancillary stuff and the problem is the time delay. You have a 15-year delay between the incident (when Schiavo collapsed and her brain was deprived of oxygen) and the time of death." Some have questioned whether Thogmartin has jurisdiction over Schiavo. He says he does because she was cremated and he must approve all cremations, and also because there are allegations of unusual circumstances.
"Somebody could say this isn't a medical examiner's case and medically speaking it's not," said Dr. Cyril H. Wecht, the Allegheny County, Pa., coroner whom the Schindlers initially asked to review Thogmartin's work. "However, with all the allegations, I must say I would agree and have no problem understanding jurisdiction."
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