The Johannesburg mortuary is preparing for the holiday bodies of evidence, writes Emeka Nwandiko
Dr Vernon Kemp has a face you would never forget. But chances are if you were to come into contact with him you would not see him because, most likely, you would be dead. The face of the director of the department of forensic medicine at the Johannesburg government mortuary bears lines that seem to have been deeply etched into it. It is almost as though the delicate dissections he has performed while conducting post- mortem examinations in nearly half a century as a pathologist have been done on himself.
It is a stern but experienced face and it has plenty to say about the causes of death he has to document, especially in the weeks before Christmas. “We have an increasing number of deaths due to road accidents around this time of year. A substantial proportion of these are alcohol-related and it’s getting worse,” he says.
“We are supposed to have some of the worst figures for road accidents in the world. A lot of that is caused by bad driving,” he says, confirming the government’s efforts to reduce the number of deaths due to reckless driving with the Arrive Alive campaign.
In December and January last year an estimated 1 300 people died as a result of car crashes, as millions of motorists flooded the country’s roads en route to holiday destinations. It is reported that about 10 000 people die on the roads in South Africa annually.
According to figures in the South African Police Service’s quarterly crime report, from January to September 1997 about 18 000 people were caught driving under the influence of alcohol. (the legal limit is 0,24ml per 100ml of blood.) Gauteng had the highest number at about 6 000. For the Johannesburg area the figure was just over 1 000.
Until Tuesday last week, 28 people had been catalogued in the mortuary records as dying as a result of motor vehicle accidents, ranging from drunken pedestrians knocked down trying to cross highways; to those who had fallen off the back of trucks; to driver and passenger deaths as a result of car crashes.
Seventy-three year-old Kemp says it is difficult to determine how much a person had had to drink before he or she was killed, as 100ml of blood can absorb 0,15ml of alcohol every hour. But he is quite certain that it is a factor in car-related deaths. “What people don’t realise is the more you drink the more the devil-may-care attitude develops. The main culprits are those who have had a few drinks and believe they can squeeze between cars or jump the red light.”
These devil-may-care victims are more likely to end up in the mortuary in Johannesburg, which has a catchment area that includes 35 hospitals and clinics, stretching from Midrand in the north to Walkerville in the south, and from the western bypass to the eastern bypass.
The mortuary is sited between the Rand Light Infantry Battalion and police residential quarters. It is certainly one of the busiest in the country, conducting an average of 4 000 post-mortem examinations a year.
Victims of motor accidents are brought to the mortuary by one of its four small yellow vans, dubbed “meat wagons”, that can carry up to four bodies at a time. The bodies are transported only after investigating officers at the crash scene have gathered evidence about what led to the accident.
In the mortuary, details such as where and when the accident happened are written in a file and entered into the computer to be booked for post-mortem the following day.
During a post-mortem Kemp is assisted by two police officers: a scribe, who writes down everything the pathologist says while examining the body; and an eviscerator, who removes the internal organs of the deceased before the autopsy process is started.
Kemp says that a post-mortem can take anything from 15 minutes to an hour and a half, depending on whether the cause of death can be easily established. “For example, a bullet can do the craziest things,” he says. “You can shoot a person in the chest and find the bullet in the backside because of the way the bullet deflects inside the body. You can spend over an hour trying to retrieve a bullet.”
The four pathologists who work at the mortuary carry out no more than five autopsies a day. This, says Kemp, is to ensure that no mistakes are made. “If you ask a person to perform more than five a day you are really testing their abilities and they could make a mistake. Here we have no room for that – especially when you have to defend what you have done in court.”
The law requires an autopsy to be carried out on anyone who dies unnaturally or suddenly, to help determine the cause of death at an inquest hearing.
Captain Ina Botes, deputy head of the mortuary, says: “It’s terrible how people die. If I could lead every South African by the hand and take them to a mortuary perhaps they would take life a bit more seriously.”
Botes has worked in the mortuary for over nine years and part of her job is to watch weeping relatives collecting the remains of their loved ones. Her most traumatic experience was a few years ago when a father had to identify the body of his baby daughter. The distraught father, gripping Botes’s collar, could only ask the captain: “Why?” recalls a still-shocked Botes. The baby died when her mother fell asleep at the wheel of her car and crashed into the back of a truck. The mother miraculously survived.
And how do officers and pathologists cope with such a waste of human life on a daily basis? Botes and Kemp reply with equal firmness that there is no time for tears in their line of work. “In this job there is no room to be sentimental. If you are, you’ve had it,” says Botes. “The only thing you can do is offer a shoulder to cry on.”
But both admit to becoming slightly damp- eyed when a child is brought in for autopsy. Botes explains: “Adults have at least lived part of their lives. A child had at some point its whole life to live and it never got a chance to live it.”
For the next of kin the process of reclaiming a lost relative begins when the mortuary doors open for identification from 10am to noon on weekdays. It is a busy period of the morning.
Relatives have first to avoid funeral parlour touts, whose task is to get the unsuspecting people to sign the burial rights to the company the tout represents.
The next step is for the relatives to identify themselves to a desk sergeant, stating their relationship to and a brief history of the deceased. These details are documented in triplicate.
The next of kin is sent to a waiting room after collecting whatever personal effects the deceased wore at the time of death.
Then a police officer takes the relative to the adjoining glass-partitioned viewing room where the body is shown to the grieving relatives, who are carefully counselled prior to the viewing.
Captain Gerhard Rust, head of the identity section of the mortuary, says: “We try to be as respectful to the dead and their relatives as possible. We warn them what to expect, especially if the face of the deceased is badly disfigured.”
This is often the case. A young man, accompanied by a tout, was studying the pages of an identity book the size of two encyclopaedias hoping to picking out a lost relative. Glossy colour pictures show gruesome images of the dead.
On some pages there are pictures of bodies so badly mutilated either by fire or in an horrific car crash that it is impossible for relatives to identify what was once a human being, let alone a loved one.
Once the body is formally identified the relatives are free to take the body away for burial. But there are cases of bodies that have not been collected at all. Botes says such bodies are kept for 28 days and after that any body still not claimed is given a pauper’s funeral. At last count 42 bodies remained unclaimed.
She says that in the run-up to Christmas there is an increase in the number of suicides. “This is a time of year when people travel away to be near their families. For those who live alone it is a difficult period because they can’t take the pressure of being lonely.”
However, most of the dead at the Johannesburg mortuary are victims of crime. Botes taps into her desktop computer to get the numbers for the day’s post-mortems. “Today’s figures aren’t so bad,” she says. “Two shootings, two motor vehicle accidents, one burns [as a result of a squatter camp fire], one stabbing, one strangulation and [what turns out to be] two natural deaths.”
Perhaps it is not as bad as the previous day’s figures: six shootings (one of the victims had been shot 11 times), three car accidents, two burns, one stabbing, two mine accidents, one drowning, one hanging (suicide) and two deaths by anaesthetics (during surgical operations). And not as bad as the day before that, when eight victims of shootings were booked for post- mortem.
The number and frequency of victims of violence leads Kemp to observe: “I have done a lot of post-mortems over the years and the pattern of crime has changed. Many years ago there used to be stabbings but not outright killings.”
He does not believe explanations for the sudden escalation in crime since the elections of 1994 bandied about by experts: “Some people say it’s because of apartheid and they say people are taking what they want because of the past. I can’t see it that way.”
Kemp says he would be very relieved if the number of bodies he had to perform post- mortems on was drastically reduced. “I would be happier if the we saw fewer bodies here. It is such a waste of life.”