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From: Jasper
Date: 2/12/03
Time: 4:54:29 PM
Remote Name: 66.72.160.244
Rose,
It seems amazing to me that we did the same research and came up with so many of the same things that didn’t connect. I don’t see how both of us could have missed finding the time the officers knocked on the doors or why the fire captain’s name came up but not the Emergency Medical team that pronounced Nicole dead.
Seeing the way you put your findings together it occurred to me that there is a simple, non-conspiratorial explanation for most of it.
Riske’s fist priority was to provide medical assistance to anyone who might need it – thus the call for an ambulance before he could determine that both victims were dead. He simply failed to mention that he made another call to tell them that there was no rush because the victims were obviously beyond help. The EMT (we call it EMS in Detroit) are a branch of the Fire Department. Therefore I can see why a high ranking officer in the Fire department showed up just to make sure that the police and fire department touched all of the bases.
It doesn’t take a trained professional to see that a couple of people lying motionless with deep stab wounds in the neck have expired. Riske could tell by looking at Nicole that she was gone and he touched Ron’s eyeballs (his eyes must have been open) to make sue about him. By the time Assistant Watch Commander Rossi got the call, he knew that he had a double homicide on his hands.
In American Tragedy Lawrence Schiller gives a detailed account of what the coroner’s investigator Claudine Ratcliffe and the mortuary attendant John Jacobo did on the seen (page 137-138). Phillips called the coroner at 8:08. An hour later Claudine Ratcliffe arrived (over five hours after Bushey told Phillips to make the death notification), took two Polaroids of the bodies, checked them for rigor mortis and took their liver temperature. Ratcliffe and Jacobo but the bodies into body bags and drove away at 11:35. Schiller says nothing about the EMT unit or the firefighter who pronounce Ron and Nicole dead.
I don’t think this was as big a deal to the people involved as it sounds to us. Pronouncing the victims dead was a formality that only a doctor or a paramedic could do. The EMT guy could have been standing by to perform that chore. He didn’t even have to go into the crime scene All he had to do was sign a sign a form that Ratcliffe brought with her. My guess is that this sort of thing is so routine that nobody thought twice about it.
The police knocking on doors to find out what anyone saw or heard is another matter. That’s part of the investigative process. Until the detectives arrive the responsibilities of the patrolmen and their supervisors were to assist anyone in need, to preserve the evidence and to guard the scene. The timing of Storfer’s knock on the door suggest to me that sending the patrolmen to knock on doors was one of the first things that Phillips (Fuhrman’s supervisor – not his partner) did. –Jasper