Schiavo findings won't be rushed
Despite conflicting calls for thoroughness and quick results, Jon Thogmartin won't let appeals from the public force his hand.
By LEONORA LaPETER
Published May 9, 2005
LARGO - People around the world have talked about the life and death of Terri Schiavo, but Pinellas-Pasco Medical Examiner Jon hogmartin will get the last word.
For the past month, he has been working on her autopsy. She has taken over his office and consumed his working hours. He appeared for an interview in blue scrubs, looking every bit the wiry medical examiner with his bald head and tiny wire-rimmed glasses.
"That's her and that's her," he says, pointing to piles of documents and boxes of slides stacked all over his office.
And so you must stand in the doorway of his office to look at the old skulls and microscopes and fading picture of his dapper grandfather in knickers and the lifesize pencil drawing of Spock and Capt. Kirk.
Thogmartin, 41, knows Schiavo's autopsy will probably be the most publicized of his career. He won't talk about it until he is done and estimates it will be two or three more weeks.
He has received hundreds of letters and e-mails about the brain-damaged woman who died March 31, 13 days after her feeding tube was removed. Many ask him to look for signs she wasn't brain-dead or signs of abuse, among the allegations made during the protracted battle between her parents and her husband over whether to keep her alive.
"They are of no consequence to me," says Thogmartin of the letters.
The lively Texan, publicity shy and fiercely protective of his wife's and child's privacy, is known for doing everything by the book. He denied requests from Schiavo's parents, Bob and Mary Schindler, and her husband, Michael Schiavo, to allow their own pathologists to observe the autopsy.
"It is routine in cases of criminal importance to not allow any biased pathology advocates in the morgue," he said. "I'm the independent pathologist."
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Thogmartin says you don't choose your career. It chooses you.
In his case, it began when he was 4 years old in Dallas - and fired his first handgun.
"I always liked firearms and when you're born in Texas, they say you're born with a diaper and a sidearm," says Thogmartin, now a gunshot wound expert.
He ran 80 miles a week in cross-country track and field from the time he was 15. He ran his way to a partial scholarship at Southern Methodist University in Dallas.
But, he notes wryly, when you run that much, you run yourself down. His legs and hips gave out before he had completed a year of college.
Though he fainted at the sight of blood as a kid, he decided to become a forensic pathologist because it offered surgery without the trauma of life and death. And good malpractice insurance rates.
He learned jujitsu, a martial art, so that he could learn about choke holds and become an expert on asphyxiation.
In 1996, when Thogmartin had been at the Miami-Dade Medical Examiner's Office for less than a year, a Valujet airliner crashed into the Everglades. He found himself hanging off an airboat in a swamp, collecting body parts from divers. He and his colleagues identified 70 of the 105 victims.
"He's the kind of individual to do the job right, and he was able to handle many of the remains with speed and efficiency," said Roger Mittleman, Miami-Dade's former chief medical examiner.
Thogmartin took an associate medical examiner's job in Broward County and then a similar job in Palm Beach County. He racked up some well-publicized cases. He figured out that a man who police thought had been hit by a car had actually dropped 30,000 feet from the wheel well of a plane. He identified the remains of five teenagers missing for two decades in a van that had sunk in a ditch.
In 1997, he became Palm Beach County's medical examiner and told a reporter he would stay there until he was "old and gray." But within a year he left and became an independent medical examiner so he could gain more control. In Palm Beach, he was a county employee. As medical examiner of Pinellas and Pasco counties, Thogmartin answers to Gov. Jeb Bush.
He's also the only medical examiner in the state to run his own crime lab.
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In November 2000, Thogmartin, showed up at the Pinellas-Pasco Medical Examiner's Office. He was an odd-looking figure. He had no hair, no eyelashes and no eyebrows. He'd learned after accepting the job that he had testicular cancer. It had been misdiagnosed and spread to his liver, lungs and pancreas. He had begun chemotherapy and asked Pinellas County for a one-month delay in his start time.
He stood there that day for about five to 10 minutes, watching four or five employees at the front desk ignore him.
He decided right then he would keep only one of them, a woman who was working hard transcribing at her desk.
Today, Thogmartin, whose cancer is in remission, runs the 40-person office like a business and is paid $170,000 a year. He has reversed two findings of his predecessor, Joan Wood, resulting in two fathers who were accused of shaking their babies to death being cleared of murder charges.
He suggested Pasco County might want to pay more than the $25 an autopsy it had been paying since the 1970s. Now they pay $800. He moved his staff into a new $13-million building in Largo.
He recently made a pitch to Pinellas County commissioners to start DNA testing at his lab. Commissioners were receptive.
State Attorney Bernie McCabe and Public Defender Bob Dillinger used the same words to describe Thogmartin: "professional" and "independent."
"There were numerous problems when Dr. Wood was here," Dillinger said, "in terms of (her) not being a neutral independent expert and instead viewing herself as an arm of law enforcement."
Thogmartin requires his staff to go out to any death that does not occur in a hospital or nursing home. As a result, medical examiner investigators went to 890 scenes last year, up from 42 in 2000, the year before Thogmartin took over.
While Thogmartin adopts a laid-back attitude toward his 40 employees, he's quick to fire those who don't meet his expectations. By his own account, he has gotten rid of about a dozen employees, not including those he eliminated when he walked in the door.
Still, he appears to have an easy rapport with his colleagues and a knack for making people laugh.
Once, in Miami-Dade, Thogmartin and three colleagues went to a Subway for lunch. When one of them, Charles Siebert, got up to get something from the counter, Thogmartin hammered Siebert's bag of potato chips with his fist. Then he resumed eating.
Thogmartin's companions tried not to laugh as Siebert pinched crumbs out of the bag and complained that potato chips didn't come like they used to.
"He has a weird sense of humor," said Siebert, Panama City's chief medical examiner, "and I guess you need that in this job."
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Now at the center of the Schiavo hurricane, Thogmartin says he feels the pressure but is not influenced by it.
"I get e-mails that say, "Please be thorough, please be thorough, please be thorough,"' he said. "Then in the next paragraph, they say, "Hurry up, hurry up, hurry up, why aren't you done yet?"'
He admits he is probably treating Schiavo differently than he would other autopsies.
"This is a case that as far as the pathology goes is fairly routine," he said. "But there is all this ancillary stuff and the problem is the time delay. You have a 15-year delay between the incident (when Schiavo collapsed and her brain was deprived of oxygen) and the time of death."
Some have questioned whether Thogmartin has jurisdiction over Schiavo. He says he does because she was cremated and he must approve all cremations, and also because there are allegations of unusual circumstances.
"Somebody could say this isn't a medical examiner's case and medically speaking it's not," said Dr. Cyril H. Wecht, the Allegheny County, Pa., coroner whom the Schindlers initially asked to review Thogmartin's work. "However, with all the allegations, I must say I would agree and have no problem understanding jurisdiction."
E-mails and letters have streamed in accusing Thogmartin of bias.
A Star Trek fan, when the tough questions come up, Thogmartin often jokes with his staff, "What would Capt. Kirk do?"
But his philosophy, one he heard from a Miami-Dade medical examiner, is serious: "There's no right or wrong way to sign a death certificate. There's the high road and the low road, the good way and the bad way."
Says Thogmartin: "Basically it means that as long as you're being honest, you can't be wrong. You have to call it as you see it and let the fallout come."