And post head injury her cardiac activity was so weak that this loss wasn't as great as expected? It doesn't make sense to me either and I'm not going to try to make things fit, I distinctly remember reading the heart muscle was pale which was noted as consistent with significant blood loss and being a bit surprised, which is why i remembered it. But I agree that arterial spurting is not possible without a beating heart. I'm not a pathologist either, maybe one will turn up.
Edited to add : after that head injury Reeva was effectively dead. She would have been blue, lifeless and still. Some minutes of weak, likely poorly coordinated heart muscle contraction is not that controversial.
I'm glad we agree, excellent earlier post btw. I also wanted to thank everyone for the interesting debate.
Sadly, the major limitation remains that Reeva's autopsy report was never made available and the pathologists testimony was not aired nor a transcript made available. We are left with reporters' summaries.
The brain areas directly damaged are critical to our understanding and conclusions and to my knowledge none of us know the details of her brain injury, just the report that it was incapacitating and (eventually?) fatal. Was it a shot through the cortex, midbrain or brain stem or some permutation. Makes a huge difference. She was also sumultaneously exsanguinating from her other wounds which should hasten death.
What is an accepted medical fact I personally heard this from Cyril Wecht, a noted medical examiner and found several references inluding in the journal 'Forensic Medicine,' no heart beat no arterial spurt.
Notes from 'Essential Forensic Biology' By Alan Gunn
It should be remembered that bleeding takes place both internally and externally so the amount of blood surrounding a body may not reflect the amount actually lost.
Wounds, after death do not bleed profusely because the heart
is no longer beating and blood pressure is not maintained.
Blood from even a severed artery therefore trickles out as a consequence of gravity rather than spurting.
...I would conclude from the latter that squeezing or compressing an injured limb with said injured artery, would consequently not yield an arterial pattern, although it might 'eject' blood.
CORRECTION from an earlier post:
Unlike at the wound site, initially blood remains liquid within the circulatory system after death, rather than coagulating.
I have no idea what happened maybe the blood in the bedroom & below the stairs is the first case of some type of mimic of arterial spurt, but as is often said- If It Looks Like A Horse, Walks Like A Horse and Sounds Like A Horse, It's Probably Not A Zebra.
I hope, PlayItCloseToTheVest Gerrie Nel, will be able to tie it all together. He may be waiting for the pertinent defense experts to testify, if they have one.
I'm going to catch up on on the posts I've missed
hwow:
