A day in the life of a police mortuary officer …
By Catherine Sasman
WINDHOEK
A thick smell of blood emanates from the white dissecting table, so thick it sticks in your throat. The table had been scrubbed clean in the morning, but it is as if it still remembers the bodies it carried. It holds in its porous texture the touch and taste of the severed corpses that were gutted and emptied and stitched up as if to honour lives that had been violently and abruptly ended.
This is the dissecting room of the Police mortuary. Black boards on its white walls give instructions and descriptions of scratches and bruises, blunt injuries with irregular edges and damaged veins.
“We do not smell anything anymore,” giggles Sergeant Mac Williams. This cold and lifeless place has become normal to the people working at the mortuary. Williams has been working there for more than 20 years.
“I really enjoy my work,” he says as he takes out a string of keys from his blue overall to unlock a chill room.
The cold air of the refrigerator flows out when he opens the door. In the room lie six naked bodies on metal slabs, still as if they are in a deep sleep. On one side is a corpse wrapped in white plastic.
“This one is prepared to travel,” says Unit Commander of the Police mortuary, Jooste Baneka. “The others are naked because they do not need any clothing.”
The mortuary serves the entire Khomas Region, including Okahandja and Rehoboth.
“We collect and receive bodies,” says Baneka. The unit also reacts to calls with information of suspicious deaths and goes on searches for the bodies. The officers are also called upon to remove corpses from accident scenes.
“These are the usual duties of a mortuary curator.”
Baneka joined the unit in 1996 as a young police officer. He had always wanted to be a policeman, and when a friend told him of the mortuary, he became interested
“I was never interested in medicine, but I enjoy learning something new every day; and that is the case here,” says Baneka. “From the first day at the mortuary I felt that this is where I ought to be.”
But before that day, he would not enter restricted areas in the building on his own. These areas hold corpses in chilled rooms, body chambers, dark rooms, and silver metal stretches with bloodstains and thick plastic body bags.
“I regard this work as quite normal. There is nothing strange about it although people often hold the perception that it takes a mad person to work with corpses every day. But this job does not interfere with my social life.”
The mortuary only holds bodies in cases of sudden deaths. Other bodies are being dealt with by the State mortuary.
The police officers undergo a two-week “mortuary course” and assist the two forensic medical practitioners on site. They also prepare the bodies for families who come in to identify and collect the dead.
Bodies arrive at the mortuary often in badly bruised shapes. Baneka tells of one body they had to gather from a car accident scene: “The ribcage of the driver was thrown 100 metres from the car and other parts of the body lay strewn around the wrecked car.”
What the officers had never seen before, however, were the butchered victims of the B1 butcher.
Only when speaking about these victims do the police officers show a glimmer of unsettled nerves.
“I really felt very sorry for the families of these women,” says Baneka, wiping his hand over his face. The recovered body parts of the women were held in the mortuary.
With his experience, he says, he still is not sure how – and with what – the killer had violated the women’s bodies, except to say that it might have been done with a very sharp blade.
“It might have been a very sharp butcher’s knife, but then again, there are many different sharp instruments that might have been used.”
The morgue usually handles between 60 and 80 bodies per week. Two out of 10 of these are usually female bodies. The average ages are 16 to 45.
“What this tells me is that young men live rough lives,” reflects Baneka.
“We mostly recover bodies from suicides, murders and deaths in car accidents. Many of these deaths could be avoided if people were more alert when driving, or did not get drunk with the wrong crowd.”
When bodies arrive at the mortuary they are tagged and placed in the refrigerator. They are taken out the next morning to be weighed and measured. Then these are taken to the dissecting room where – in most cases – they get cut open and all internal organs are carefully removed and scrutinized. Where necessary, samples are taken for histological and toxicological analysis to the National Institute of Pathology.
If rape of a victim is suspected, bodies are taken to a dark room where they are scanned for any evidence of bodily fluids.
Protective clothing, gloves and goggles are worn during the dissecting process, says Baneka.
“It is important because we may deal with commutable diseases like Congo fever or rabies. Equally, the blades we use are razor sharp; the slightest touch, even if you do not wear gloves, can penetrate the body.”
After examination, the organs are replaced in the open abdominal cavity, and sewn up.
The bodies are then washed and prepared for viewing by family members. The bodies are pushed into a viewing room, and family members can view them through a window. At no point before a body is released can anyone from the outside touch it.
The corpses are kept in the chilled rooms at temperatures of zero to 10 degrees Celsius. If less than zero, says Baneka, the bodies get too cold. At more than 10 degrees Celsius, the bodies will go – well – “off”. Bodies “identified for travel” – to be taken to another town – are kept at much lower temperatures. Decomposed bodies are stored in chilled body chambers outside the building because of the strong odour.
Families are always informed of a death within 48 hours after a body arrives at the morgue. If families do not claim the bodies, a storage fee of N$14 per day is charged.
Often, says Baneka, bodies are never claimed. There are currently four bodies – male, one of which is a newly-born baby found dumped in the bushes in Windhoek – waiting to be identified.
In all likelihood, says Baneka, they will receive paupers’ burials sponsored by the State because they are “old cases”.
Paupers’ burials are usually arranged when bodies are unclaimed for longer than a month and if the public does not respond to announcements made.
“I would like to make a plea to the public to give their full cooperation to the Police morgue. If someone is missing or people do not know where that person is, they should come to the morgue to see if the person is not perhaps dead. In that way we can conclude our cases sooner.”