A place where death is just business

Published Jul 31, 2013

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Cape Town - When Randall Phillips first arrived at the Salt River Mortuary in 2008, he was shocked by the large number of murder victims they were called out to collect.

And while five years later, most of his duties as a forensic pathology officer have become familiar, he is still shaken by the brutality of some of Cape Town’s killings.

“Especially when it’s a baby, then it becomes very difficult,” he says.

At the end of last month, the Mother City cemented its reputation as a murder capital when 44 people were killed in a single weekend.

Of these deaths, 29 people were stabbed to death, 12 were shot and three were beaten.

Four of the 12 shootings are believed to have been gang-related. The victims died in Mitchells Plain, Lavender Hill and Valhalla Park, and the 44 bodies were taken to the Salt River and Tygerberg mortuaries.

But it was revealed that while the number was high, it was not far from what the mortuaries saw regularly.

Over the past three weekends, the bodies of 79 alleged murder victims have ended up at the facilities.

On Saturday night, the Cape Argus joined the Salt River Mortuary night staff to witness an average shift of a forensic pathology officer.

Forensic pathology officers investigate the scenes of deaths from car crashes, murders and suicides.

And where the cause of death still has to be determined, the bodies need to be stripped, catalogued and prepared for identification and further investigation.

Phillips said it was often a waiting game. “We have to wait for the call from the police to let us know they are done, which means the body has often been lying there for five hours or more since it was discovered. We could sit here for hours and then suddenly get 10 calls at once.”

But by midnight, only one body had been a collected - an elderly man from Gugulethu who had died in bed.

“It looks like it’s going to be a quiet night,” he said.

Phillips was not complaining. Over the past few weeks he had worked shifts during which he was called out to collect almost 15 bodies in one night. Many were murder victims in “problem” areas such as Manenberg, Nyanga and Khayelitsha.

He saw far more murders at the end of the month when people received salaries, pensions and social grants.

On Saturday, the mortuary’s fridge was still full of corpses - men, women and children on metal shelves and stretchers. Staff said that on busy weekends it became almost impossible to move around the storage room.

“All this death gets to some people; they can’t handle it. In the beginning I couldn’t believe how many people were being killed,” said Phillips.

“Some people drink and smoke to cope with it, others just don’t come back. I go to the gym.”

Salt River facility manager Wayne Mitten said that over the years they had become used to so many cases over the weekend. Last month’s bloody weekend was not uncommon.

In 2007, over the weekend of June 29 to July 2, 35 murder victims arrived at Salt River and Tygerberg.

In 2010, over the weekend of July 30 to August 2, they took in 28 victims.

This month, over the weekend of July 12 to July 15, 31 murder victims were collected.

Mitten said pathologists, who were generally limited to three cases a day, had to take on an extra case to work through the backlog of murder victims that built up over the weekend.

But the facility was “completely adequate” to deal with the influx.

The only problem was storage, which often resulted in bodies being shifted from one side to the other.

“We need to be extra-careful to preserve evidence and make sure that we work correctly and don’t contaminate anything.”

Professor Lorna Martin, head of forensic pathology at the University of Cape Town, said a backlog of a day or two was to be expected with the big load of murder cases over the past few weekends.

But 90 percent of the time pathologists would conduct an autopsy within three-and-a-half days, and complete a report within two weeks.

“The backlogs that are often referred to are those that pertain to the finalisation of the case, or the ability of the case to be presented in court. This requires a fully investigated docket before the prosecutor. There is often a delay in the special investigations that we request, such as toxicology, alcohol or DNA analysis.”

The investigations are outsourced to forensic chemistry laboratories of the national Department of Health.

She said the mortuary could often not conclude the cause of death on their reports until the investigations were complete. The facilities were often erroneously blamed for the delay and/or backlogs in finalising a case.

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Cape Argus

 

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