Medical Examiner S Office

NEW YORK - As boxes full of victims' toothbrushes travel to laboratories in Albany and the city medical examiner's office sorts through truckloads of remains, a vast and unprecedented DNA identification effort is beginning. Genetic testing has helped identify victims in other catastrophes, including the Oklahoma City bombing and the crashes of TWA, Egypt Air and Alaska Air jetliners. But the victims from those incidents total fewer than 800. The number unaccounted for after hijacked planes slammed into the World Trade Center towers Sept.

Three months after a Calvert County man died of antifreeze poisoning while in custody, the Anne Arundel County Police Department has received autopsy results and is preparing to forward the case to the state's attorney's office for a decision on whether criminal charges against officers are warranted. Although investigators have known for months that Philip A. Montgomery, 20, of Lusby died of antifreeze poisoning while being held on drunken-driving charges in a Southern District cell, police officials said they needed the state medical examiner's final report before the case could be turned over to the county prosecutor.

A 31-year-old man being chased by Baltimore police officers apparently choked to death on a bag of drugs, police and the state medical examiner's office said yesterday. Melvin Grayson of the 1300 block of Homewood Ave. in the Johnston Square community was identified by relatives and through fingerprints, police said. The incident occurred shortly after 10 p.m. Tuesday in Northeast Baltimore. Police said that, as plainclothes officers tried to interview a group of men at East 25th Street and Sherwood Avenue, near Harford Road, one of them fled.

Witnesses to the double slayings in Atlanta after the Super Bowl told investigators that as many as 10 people jumped, then stabbed and shot at the victims, according to a medical examiner's report made public this week. Police have alleged that Ravens linebacker Ray Lewis, 24, and two co-defendants, Joseph Sweeting, 34, and Reginald Oakley, 31, took part in the fight that resulted in the deaths. The three have been charged with assault and murder. They have all pleaded not guilty. Lewis' attorneys say he was trying to break up the fight.

A decomposed body discovered Tuesday morning in a Northwest Baltimore park was identified yesterday by the state medical examiner's office as that of a 25-year-old woman who was reported missing in August from her apartment two miles away.Police spokesman Robert W. Weinhold Jr. said the medical examiner's office has not determined how Raquel Workman died.But Weinhold said investigators are treating her death as a homicide.Detectives had suspected since Tuesday that the body discovered at Cylburn Park was Workman's because of clothing recovered, but medical examiners had to rely on dental records for confirmation, homicide investigators said.

A defense pathologist challenged the findings of the chief medical examiner's office yesterday in the second day of a macabre trial stemming from the discovery of a mummified corpse in an Essex home last year.Patricia Thomas, 51, is charged with homicide in the death of a disabled woman who checked herself out of a nursing home to move in with Thomas and her family. The body of Marion V. Cusimano, 66, was found decomposing in a bedroom by police last year after Thomas' husband called to report Cusimano's death 14 months after it occurred.

An autopsy report released yesterday by the state medical examiner's office said a West Baltimore man who died last month was a homicide victim, police said.Police said William Franklin Davis, 42, of the 400 block of Oxford Court in the McCulloh Homes public housing complex was found April 18 on his apartment floor, bleeding from head injuries.They said the man was in critical condition at a local hospital until he died Dec. 9. report did not say which hospitalPolice said the medical examiner's office ruled that Davis died from blunt force trauma injuries suffered in a beating.

The death two weeks ago of a 13-month-old Baltimore girl was ruled a homicide yesterday by the state medical examiner's office, which said she died of morphine poisoning, according to sources.Police said they have made no arrests and that detectives continue to interview everyone who had contact with the victim, Tamia Washington, who lived with her parents in the 800 block of Glade Court in Brooklyn.Investigators released few details yesterday and would not say how they determined that the girl came to have morphine in her system.

The caregiver for an elderly woman left dead in an Essex home for nearly a year was charged yesterday with first-degree murder in a case that appears to be without recent precedent in Baltimore County.Patricia F. Thomas, 50, was also indicted for abuse of a vulnerable adult and grand theft from both the victim, Marion V. Cusimano, 66, and from the Social Security Administration, which issued her retirement checks.The indictments, returned by a Baltimore County grand jury, came after a monthlong investigation by the state medical examiner's office revealed that Cusimano died from malnutrition and failure to receive medical care for her multiple sclerosis.

LOS ANGELES -- The dead still outnumber the living at the county morgue, but that may not hold true forever if sales keep booming at the gift shop.The Los Angeles County Coroner's Office handles 19,000 bodies and serves 1,000 living customers a year browsing for such articles as a $20 beach towel emblazoned with a chalk outline of a body.Talked up from People to Playboy, the shop called Skeletons in the Closet has expanded to an office with a full-time staff of one and has sold the rights to market its name in Japan, where homicide in America plays as a dime-store novelty.