Mayhem in the Morgue | Alcohol, Meth, or Showing Off for Women?
Crime Stories with Nancy Grace
iHeartPodcasts and CrimeOnline
4.2 • 8.1K Ratings
🗓️ 14 September 2025
⏱️ 8 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Content Warning: This episode contains graphic descriptions of fatal injuries and autopsy findings related to a fireworks-related death. If you’re sensitive to detailed accounts of trauma, please proceed with caution.
What happens when alcohol, bravado, and high-powered explosives mix? In this explosive episode of Mayhem in the Morgue, Chief Medical Examiner Dr. Kendall Crowns breaks down a July 4th case that began with fireworks and ended in fatal blunt force trauma. What seemed like a freak accident soon turned into a full-blown forensic experiment, complete with shattered ribs, broken equipment, and one very disgruntled physicist.
Highlights
- (0:00) Welcome to Mayhem in the Morgue with Dr. Kendall Crowns
- (0:15) The fatal trifecta: alcohol, meth, or women?
- (1:00) Fireworks 101 — and why they don’t belong on your chest
- (2:00) A party turns tragic
- (2:30) Autopsy reveal devastating internal injuries
- (3:30) The physicist with a luggage scale
- (4:30) Broken scales slow-mo failures and scientific dead ends
- (5:00) Enter Bonnie: the PhD student with the right tools
- (6:15) Blistered thumbs and the final answer — 90mph to the chest
- (7:00) The final cause: intoxication, bravado, and a deadly decision
About the Host: Dr. Kendall Crowns
Dr. Crowns is the Chief Medical Examiner for Travis County, Texas, and a nationally recognized forensic pathologist. He las led death investigations in Travis County, Fort Worth, Chicago, and Kansas. Over his career, he has performed thousands of autopsies and testified in court hundreds of times as an expert witness. A frequent contributor to Crime Stories with Nancy Grace, Dr. Crowns brings unparalleled insight into the strange, grisly, and sometimes absurd realities of forensic pathology.
About the Show
Mayhem in the Morgue takes listeners inside the bloody, bizarre, and often unbelievable world of forensic pathology. Hosted by Chief Medical Examiner Dr. Kendall Crowns, each episode delivers real-life cases from the morgue, the crime scene, and the courtroom. Expect gallows humor, hard truths, and unforgettable investigations, ranging from courtroom drama to deaths that even seasoned pathologists struggle to explain.
Connect and Learn More
Learn more about Dr. Kendall Crowns on Linkedin, catch him regularly on Crime Stories with Nancy Grace and follow Mayhem in the Morgue where you get your podcasts.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is an I-Heart podcast. |
| 0:04.0 | This episode discusses the death of an individual in their subsequent autopsy. |
| 0:09.3 | If things like this upsets you, this is not the episode for you. |
| 0:14.2 | Welcome to Mayhem and the More with your host, Dr. Kendall Crowns. |
| 0:25.7 | Thank you. with your host, Dr. Kendall Crowns. My wife once asked me, |
| 0:27.5 | where are the most common things associated with people's deaths? |
| 0:30.2 | And my response to her was alcohol, methamphetamine use, |
| 0:35.0 | and showing off for women. |
| 0:37.0 | So today we're going to play a little quiz |
| 0:38.7 | called, Is it Alcohol, Meth, or Women? So this case occurred on a July 4th evening. The scene was a |
| 0:45.3 | 30-year-old male. He was out on a lake with friends. They were firing off fireworks and having a good |
| 0:50.3 | time. At some point in the evening, the seaten decided to pick up a fireworks mortar and launch |
| 0:55.2 | it off his chest. So let's stop right there. For those of you unfamiliar with fireworks, a fireworks mortar |
| 1:01.2 | is a consumer firework that uses launch tubes, which are commonly called mortars. These are fiberglass, |
| 1:08.1 | pressed wood, or cardboard, or plastic. They are a long tube with a flat base at the bottom. |
| 1:14.2 | What the mortars are used for is to launch the mortar shells, which can be spherical or cylindrical, and they can be almost two inches in length. |
| 1:22.3 | They have a lift charge that launches the firework into the air and also lights a time delay fuse, which after a period of time |
| 1:29.2 | lights what is called the brake, which is a bursting charge in stars, and the stars are the colorful |
| 1:34.4 | things that fall from the sky. The ones that the decedent was using were 60 gram mortar shells, |
| 1:39.9 | which means 60 grams of chemical composition, which includes gunpowder. |
| 1:44.9 | Just for reference, a shotgun shell has about 28 grams of gunpowder. |
| 1:49.3 | So these aren't fireworks you want to fool around with or do something crazy. |
... |
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