When death is all in a day's work
His job is not for the faint of heart; the corpses he sees sometimes make even deputies gag. But he hasn't lost his sense of compassion.
By JONATHAN ABEL
Published August 6, 2006
BROOKSVILLE - Mickey Moran's weekend starts two hours into a recent Saturday with a decomposing body.
The dead man has been waiting for four or five days in his recliner. His skin has turned black. Flesh is peeling away from his body and melting into the carpet. The air is pungent with death.
"This isn't a bad one," Moran says. "The bad ones are when the bone is showing through the skin."
The deputies around him gag; Moran's eyes narrow.
This is death, and death is his business.
Moran walks outside, pulls out his digital camera, and shoots his way back into the house, documenting everything from the guns on the wall to the Ho Hos in the refrigerator.
As an investigator for the 5th District Medical Examiner's Office, Moran collects evidence at death scenes so autopsy doctors can get a sense of how the person lived and died.
He makes midnight calls to car accidents, putrid homes, and back yards with men, women and children hanging from trees.
"Forty cases a month for 16 years; I don't keep count," he said.
That's about 8,000 dead bodies, more than the entire living population of Brooksville.
More than anyone else in the county, Moran and his fellow investigators live on intimate terms with death.
Florida Statute 406 details which deaths need to be investigated - murders, suicides, car accidents, drownings, electrocutions and most other cases where no doctor is present to sign a death certificate. But the job is more complicated than that.
"People aren't used to death - a family has one death in 20 years," he said. "I tell them that we go to a couple deaths every day. I help them through it."
With a gruff voice and a thick Brooklyn accent, Moran, 60, is hardened from 20 years as a New York City cop. He patrolled Brooklyn for two years, then Harlem for 18, rising to the rank of detective.
When he retired to Florida with his family, he wanted something to do, and the medical examiner investigator job, which pays $27,500 a year, was open.
He wears short-sleeved white shirts and dark ties. "If you're going to talk to people about a private affair, you need to dress right," Moran said.
At 7 a.m. one day, he shows up at an elderly woman's house. She died in her sleep, with her family in the room next door. But because she hadn't seen a doctor in more than a decade, her body had to go to the Medical Examiner's Office for an autopsy.
Moran tells the family to stand outside - they won't want to see this. The woman is rolled onto her stomach so he can check for wounds.
"You don't want to miss the gunshot wound to the back or the ice pick to the back," he said.
Outside, he talks softly to the family as the woman is wheeled into the van and whisked off to the medical examiner's cooler in Leesburg.
Another night, Moran goes to the home of a 300-pound man who has doubled over on his coffee table, a stalactite of blood hanging from his nose and mouth. He's been locked in this death pose for more than a day before anyone happens upon him.
Moran combs through his apartment and finds a bottle of methadone pills, refilled a few days ago but already empty. That means 70 or so pills are missing.
The autopsy doctor will have to look for them in the dead man's stomach.
Moran photographs the scene. Then he locks up the apartment and hands the keys to the complex's manager.
Her son committed suicide 12 years ago. Does Moran remember him?
He doesn't.
It happened at a local hotel, she says. Then she says her son's name again.
"I could have worked it, but I don't remember," he said. "They blend together."
They blend together, to be sure, but each one is different. There's no telling which ones stick out after so many years.
Moran has handled corpses without faces, and bodies without heads, and people hanging so high in trees that it takes a cherry picker to get them down.
It requires real effort to remember that these rotting collections of flesh and bones are actually people.
"I always call them by their names, never it," he explains with a flash of anger. "You don't say it around me. I call them John or Tom or him, if you don't know the name. Sometimes the family says it, and I ask them who? He's got a name."
Solemnity is a suit Moran wears well, but there are light moments, too.
"We'll tell some jokes. No disrespect to the scene or anything; it's just something we do to keep going," he said.
Sometimes the dead have a sense of humor. Moran remembers one man who shot himself to death. He left a note for his ex-wife: "Honey, I quit smoking today."
The interviews with the family, and the process of notifying the next of kin, can be the hardest parts of the job.
Moran asks about medical histories. Did she ever talk about suicide? Did you think she was serious?
This job takes detective skills, some medical knowledge and a strong stomach, but it also takes a serving of humanity. There's a thin line between gathering information and upsetting the family.
When one of his subjects has no family or friends, Moran goes to the funeral. Sometimes he's the only one there. One lonely man was a veteran; the funeral home offered him the flag.
Moran thinks back to his days patrolling the streets of New York. "If someone got mugged or had a purse stolen, we were there in a minute to catch them," he said.
It's not like that anymore.
"It's different from law enforcement because we're not making a difference to the victim," he said. "The goal here is to help the family so that by the time you leave they're inviting you back under different circumstances."
Twenty-four hours on-call can feel endless covering Hernando, Citrus and sometimes Sumter counties. There is no shortage of dead bodies to process and no off-season in the business of death.
It's past 4 a.m. when Moran packs up from the man decomposing in his recliner. It will take him an hour to get back to the office and another hour to write up and send off his report - all before the autopsy at 7 a.m.
After that, he will go home and wait for the next call.
"Maybe I'll have breakfast," he said. But the stench is still in his nostrils. "Maybe just a cup of tea."
Jonathan Abel can be reached at jabel@sptimes.com or 352 754-6114.