Drowning is a violent assault on the body during which the frightened victim fiercely, albeit briefly, battles to survive. Death follows exhaustion within only two or three minutes.
..... Struggling is one of the key stages leading to unconsciousness and death. In fact, so intense can this final fight for life be that, in more than ten percent of drowning fatalities, an autopsy will actually reveal bruised and ruptured muscles, particularly in the shoulders, chest and neck......
..........evidence of injuries of this nature suggest to a medical examiner the strong likelihood that a victim was alive .....The stages of a full-immersion drowning event are fairly quick
......, it’s often completely soundless. There will be panicked thrashing .....
... differing biochemical reactions depending on whether they’re in saltwater or in fresh.
.... last stage of drowning ends with coughing, vomiting, convulsions, loss of consciousness, death, and rigormortis....
.......... shortly after the victim dies their body will start to sink. If retrieved soon thereafter, their arms and hands may display cadaveric spasm, a posture in death borne out of extreme mental anguish
.............. a victim is not promptly retrieved at death, then, without exception and no matter how deep or how swift the water may be, their corpse will continue to drift downward until it reaches the bottom.
............this is where it will remain in a somewhat fetal position until gases from putrefaction cause it to rise to the surface once more. ....
A semi-fetal posture is the norm .............
.....if divers do locate such a body before it ascends, but it isn’t in this pose and/or the head is seen to be tilted to one side, they will include these observations in their police recovery report, as it reveals the victim died on land and was put in the water post-rigormortis......
Refloat: largely varies on the water’s depth and temperature, taking only a matter of hours to occur if extremely warm and up to two weeks or longer if at 40 degrees Fahrenheit or less. .... at 40 degrees Fahrenheit it takes approximately fourteen to twenty days for a drown victim’s corpse to resurface..............
...................butt in temperate oceans, rivers, lakes, ponds, pools, reservoirs, quarries, or the like, a corpse will inevitably rise again sooner or later, o.....
............when it does reappear, if the person did genuinely die from drowning, then they will always be discovered floating face down in the water...............
...........relatively easy to determine the length of time a victim’s actually been submerged. ....
.....damaged or not, though, if a body has been in the water for at least one to 48 hours, wrinkling of the skin will be present already, particularly on the palms of the hands and fingertips and on the soles and toes of the feet. ...........
...... victim’s epidermis may look a greenish bronze
...........body will rapidly deteriorate when fully exposed to air, therefore an autopsy must be performed immediately ...........
..........in forensic terms, there is nothing whatsoever deemed “classic” about any drowning,
......methodology for reaching a determination that it was a water death and accidental is one that is chiefly focused on excluding foul play.......
.......this places a great deal of importance on the initial investigative role of police personnel.....................
............signs of trauma to the body, if any, can be equally as perplexing at a glance. While bloody wounds the victim may have received when still living will leach from prolonged soaking and no longer be as noticeable to the naked eye, postmortem injuries a corpse derived from impacts as it traveled along may be much more prominent and deceptively appear as intentional.............
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