Medical Examiner S Office

BALTIMORE Man on watch list to stay in custody until transfer A Pakistani man whose name is listed in a terrorism-related database will remain in custody until his transfer to New York, a federal court judge in Baltimore ruled yesterday. Muhammad Asif Haider, 27, of New York City was arrested Sunday on immigration fraud charges after a traffic stop in Baltimore County. Yesterday in U.S. District Court, his defense attorney, assistant federal public defender Jeffrey E. Risberg, did not object to prosecutors' request to hold Haider until he appears in court in New York, where the charges against him were filed.

A Baltimore County Circuit Court judge said yesterday that he will consider a request to dismiss the murder case against a woman accused of fatally beating her 5-year-old son more than three decades ago but not charged until an e-mail from the boy's brother prompted police to reopen the case last year. Judge John G. Turnbull II said he is concerned that the time it took for the state medical examiner's office to rule the case a homicide will make the charges difficult for Diane B. Coffman, 58, to answer, but said he needs to hear what the doctor who reviewed the case last year has to say before deciding whether the case should proceed.

An autopsy on Terri Schiavo found that she had massive, irreversible brain damage, a Florida medical examiner's office said yesterday in a report that gave scientific support to her husband's decision to withdraw her feeding tube. But for Schiavo's parents and others, the findings didn't end the ethical or medical debate that eventually drew in Congress and the White House. Bob and Mary Schindler still say that their daughter would not have wanted her life ended and that she was not in a persistent vegetative state, their lawyer, David Gibbs III, said.

Again and again, the standard DNA tests came up negative on a 3-inch-by-2-inch piece of muscle recovered from the World Trade Center site, and a year after the 2001 attacks, forensics experts were stymied. Yet now the scrap has been linked to a firefighter from Midtown Manhattan, enabling his death to be confirmed and giving his wife and two children some sense of finality. Solving brutally difficult cases like that one required an investment of two extra years and millions of dollars by the medical examiner's office in New York, which sought out and used DNA identification technologies that had never been tried before.

FREDERICK - Police investigating the death of a Hood College senior said yesterday that they believe it is not suspicious, although they are awaiting a report from the state medical examiner's office. "There is no foul play whatsoever," Lt. Thomas Chase, a Frederick city police spokesman, said of the death of Rebecca Sullivan, a senior from Landing, N.J. Her body was found in her dormitory room Wednesday after she failed to appear in class that morning and was reported missing by her professor, college officials said.

Thirty-two years after the death of his 5-year-old brother, a man's suspicions about their mother's involvement sparked a re-examination of the Baltimore County case that led to her arrest in Florida this week on a murder charge, police said yesterday. Richard A. Coffman, now 35, sent an e-mail to Baltimore County police through the department's Web site July 9, saying he believed that his mother, Diane B. Coffman, was responsible for his brother's death in 1972, said Bill Toohey, a department spokesman.

A 24-year-old man was shot early yesterday in East Baltimore and died minutes later at Johns Hopkins Hospital, city police reported. Police detectives also were investigating a fatal shooting early Wednesday in Southeast Baltimore, and a death in March that was ruled a homicide this week by the state medical examiner's office. The latest slaying victim was identified as Tyrone Robert Hutchins of the 700 block of N. Lakewood Ave. He was gunned down shortly before 1 a.m. yesterday in the 2200 block of Jefferson St., police said.

FRUITLAND - The death of a Wicomico County public defender whose body was found Tuesday in his parked pickup truck has been ruled a suicide by the state medical examiner's office. An autopsy performed yesterday determined that Anthony T. Carozza, 40, died of multiple cut wounds to his wrists, complicated by hypothermia, according to Dr. Laron Locke of the medical examiner's office. Carozza, who lived in Salisbury's Coulborn Mill Village neighborhood, was found about 4 a.m. in the truck, which was parked beside a recreational complex in Fruitland.

NEW YORK - When the first hijacked airliner hit the World Trade Center, Dr. Robert Shaler was holding his regular Tuesday morning staff meeting to plan the workload for the 90 forensic experts under his direction at New York's Office of the Chief Medical Examiner. After almost 14 years in the medical examiner's office, Shaler is no stranger to the confusion that fogs the circumstances of violent death. The Office of the Chief Medical Examiner, led by Dr. Charles Hirsch, is the country's busiest, handling 25,000 deaths a year, including 3,300 homicides and sexual assaults.

HOW'S THIS for sheer baffling irony? Folks gathered in the City Council chamber Tuesday to excoriate Baltimore police Commissioner Ed Norris. Three African-Americans -- one former lieutenant and two officers still on the force -- said that the disparity in discipline for black and white cops still exists. That's a horrible double standard, they moaned, apparently oblivious to the other double standard. It's the one they applied to Norris, the white guy. Has there ever been a black police commissioner -- and there have been several -- who's gone through this type of reconfirmation hearing?