Shattered Lives | Next of Kin and the Heartbreaking Task of Death Notifications
Body Bags with Joseph Scott Morgan
CrimeOnline and iHeartPodcasts
4.8 • 1.8K Ratings
🗓️ 2 May 2023
⏱️ 39 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
In this emotional and powerful episode of the Body Bags podcast, hosts Joseph Scott Morgan and Jackie Howard delve into the emotional challenges faced by medical legal death investigators, specifically when it comes to the difficult task of notifying next of kin about the death of a loved one. Joe Scott shares his personal experiences and insights on how the emotional aspect of death notifications can impact both the investigator and grieving family members, the lasting impact these moments have on both the families and himself, how science plays a role in his job but its limitations in dealing with the emotional aspects of death notification, as well as the importance of mercy and compassion in the face of death.
Time-codes:
00:00 - Introduction.
03:30 - Joe Scott's first experience with a death notification.
06:10 - Improvements in emotional training for death investigators.
07:00 - Challenges of handling multiple cases and notifications.
08:55 - Families' need for confirmation of the deceased's location.
12:00 - The importance of timeliness in death notifications.
15:45 - Being vigilant during investigations and protecting loved ones' privacy.
17:25 - Balancing speed and thoroughness in death investigations.
19:05 - Family members as key sources of information for cases.
20:00 - The limited information retention of grieving families.
22:25 - The lasting impact of death notifications on families.
25:00 - Delivering death news directly.
26:50 - Notifying a family of a second son's death within six months.
28:55 - JoScott’s love for science and its role in his work but its limitations when it comes to dealing with the emotional aspects of death notification.
31:20 - The necessity of accurate deceased identification and location knowledge.
33:00 - Keeping information simple for grieving families.
33:45 - The need for compassion and mercy during emotionally low moments.
36:00 - Joe Scott's personal struggle with PTSD and the end of his career.
38:55 - Outro.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Body Bags with Joseph Scott Morgan |
| 0:20.5 | For most of us there's some place out there in our past that we can reflect back to |
| 0:27.7 | and folks will say, do you remember when this happened in your life? Do you remember |
| 0:32.5 | where you were when you heard the news? And it seems so that our minds at least in those moments |
| 0:42.7 | are anchored back at that second that second that we found out something that was revealed to us |
| 0:52.0 | perhaps under the water circumstances. In my experience as a medical legal death investigator, |
| 0:59.9 | I saw a lot of these anchor points along the way and most of them had to do with that moment in time |
| 1:10.1 | when somebody is just living their life going about their lives day after day some mundane |
| 1:18.6 | but then I would show up at the door and I would let them know that quite possibly the worst |
| 1:26.6 | thing that has ever happened to them in their life has occurred. Today we're going to talk about |
| 1:35.0 | a notification of next to Ken. I'm Joseph Scott Morgan and this is Body Bags. |
| 1:47.3 | I still remember the first one as if it were the last one. Throughout my career it never got |
| 1:59.5 | easier. No matter how many times you did it, it was still bad. Jackie Howard, my good friend, |
| 2:10.0 | from Nancy Grace, executive producer. We've talked about this before off air and you had actually |
| 2:16.4 | asked me and had mentioned that this is something that folks might want to hear about and it's a job |
| 2:21.7 | within the world of death investigators that many people outside don't really know that we do but it is |
| 2:31.4 | what we do. It's a major part of what we do. Like I said, it never got easier over the course |
| 2:38.2 | of my entire career. It's never easy to deliver bad news even when there is not a suspicious death |
| 2:46.9 | associated with it. I know in my own family having to tell my mother, for example, that her sister |
| 2:53.2 | died. It's not easy and the range of emotions, you know, the four stages of grief that you go through, |
| 3:01.3 | part of that is the anger that you were talking about. But how do you, and you've been doing this |
| 3:07.5 | for a very long time as you pointed out, how do you get through this telling people that someone |
... |
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