Trip to the Medical Examiner’s Office

I got to visit the Medical Examiner’s Office.  That place is the source of death records and other evidence if you get there in time.  I say that because after ten days, claimed bodies get cremated.

I’ll just get right to it and say it now.  I saw a corpse after its autopsy.  The head and chest was cut wide open.  The brains and the chest organs were gone.  It was incredibly disgusting.  Many of my classmates said the body looked fake, but that was a real corpse.  In the flesh… lol the ripped open flesh. 

The more exciting part of this trip was definitely the morgue and the toxicology lab.  The more important part of the trip would probably be in the records room, which was coincidentally room 119.  Each file is color-coded by cause of death.  I thought that was pretty neat.  I think the homicide victims had a red tab on the folder, yellow was suicide, etc.  There were others but I don’t remember which color went to what type of death.

When we visited the toxicology lab where they test to see how someone died, there wasn’t really anything going on.  I just saw a lot of big, high-tech machines built to test the flesh.  I even heard that the lab has small amounts of every drug, including the illegal ones.  The drugs are only there to test the overdose corpses to see what kind of drug it died from.

The juicy part of the trip was obviously the morgue.  We got to see a dead body, yay.  My class was stoked to see it.  I’ve heard this advice in just about every journalism course I’ve taken and it goes along the lines of, “You’re gonna see a lot of blood.  You better have a stomach for it.”

I was very proud of all my classmates.  Only one was about to throw up after being in the morgue but it wasn’t at the sight of the corpse but it was the smell of what I like to call the “meat cooler.”  After we saw the corpse a bunch of classmates wanted to see where the rest of the dead bodies are kept.  I thought it wasn’t necessary.  We just saw an explicitly grotesque corpse with its chest cut wide open.  But we humans, are never satisfied. 

I was still staring at the corpse when the rest of the class went over to the meat cooler.  As soon as they opened the door, the smell of death just filled the room.  Ugh, it was so nasty.  It smelled like rotten chicken that has been in the trash for days (I’ll never make that mistake again).  It just stunk!  I decided not to go into the cooler because I wasn’t that desperate to see a whole bunch of dead bodies.  The smell was so pungent I just walked out of the morgue without the rest of the class along with another student covering his mouth and nose obviously about to toss his cookies.  I’ve been having some bad morning sickness (no, I’m not pregnant) over the past week and I just didn’t want to take any chances with my weak stomach.  I hope the poor guy didn’t throw up, though. 

The lesson I learned is obviously I need to have a strong stomach as a journalist and if I wanna know more about how a person died, I have to go to the Medical Examiner’s Office.

Public Meeting

I went to a county public meeting concerning the future construction on Dale Mabry Highway.

County meetings are always so plain and simple.  They hold these meetings to ask the public what they think on an issue.  The sad part is that only a handful of citizens attend these meetings.  I would say only about 50 people showed up to this meeting that pertained to much more than that.

At the meeting, the county proposed spending a total of $4.8 million on improving the Dale Mabry intersections at Lakeview Drive and Northdale Boulevard.  So the county is going to spend all those tax monies on construction.  This meeting is their way of showing the public they really do care about what their citizens think.

The county played a video explaining the construction options in a very simple and clear way.  There were four different ways to rebuild the Lakeview Drive intersection and three different ways to fix up Northdale Boulevard.

In the video, there were maps and lots of labels and color coding explaining how the end result of each project should be.  I thought it was a really good way to explain what the county is considering how to spend those tax dollars.

After the video, we got to look at the maps closer to refresh our memories on the specifics, but there wasn’t really much more to the meeting after that.

On the way out, we were on Northdale Boulevard getting ready to turn onto Dale Mabry: the exact location of the future construction project.  There was a sign announcing this public meeting.  It read something along the lines of “public meeting at 6:30 Oct. 26.”

What struck me about that sign is that the people that ride through this intersection dealing with bad traffic knew about this meeting and are the ones affected by this the most.  I don’t find myself in Carrollwood much but I still showed up to this meeting to witness how the county wants to spend $4.8 million of our tax dollars.  The commuters that travel through this intersection are also the people that would best know how to improve the intersection and would be most effective in making the right choice.

APME Convention visit

Because of my what my job demands, I was able to catch the tail end of the convention.  At the convention, I got to see some really important people get awards and had lunch with a few of my classmates, my professor and Brian Boyer from the Chicago Tribune. 

The awards were so boring.  I walked in on the end of that and what I saw was just utterly boring acceptance speeches.  Randy Lovely, News Editor for The Arizona Republic, and Bill Church, Executive Editor for The Statesman Journal, received the Robert McGruder for Diversity Leadership award.  Good for them for practicing diversity in the newsroom. 

One more thing about the awards is there was a quote from McGruder (he's dead now) that said, "I am the messenger and the message of diversity.  I represent the African-Americans, Latinos, Arab-Americans, Asians, Native Americans, gays and lesbians, women and all the others we must see represented in our business offices, newsrooms and our newspapers if we truly want to meet the challenge of serving our communities."

The real fun was with my professor and Brian Boyer.  We got to eat lunch served by the convention (rather tasty salad however I could throw the chicken at the window and watch the window break because it was so hard) and we just talked about all the cool online resources used for news gathering. 

Boyer's main advice for making it in this industry is to find our niche.  Find out what we're good at and market that.  I think I knew that before, but his reinforcement of that statement just reminds me to keep being good at what I'm good at.

Trip to WFLA

Steve Andrews, what a character!  This man has really exposed some people in the most sinister ways.  The reactions to his stories range from getting people fired to getting people killed. 

Andrews has been an investigative reporter for News Channel 8 for 25 years, exposing government waste and crime.  He said he has always made an effort to make it fun and interesting despite being driven by public records.

A point he made was that most of his big stories came from phone calls.  He then told his story about his exposure of former state attorney Harry Lee Coe of abusing his power to feed his gambling addiction.  It all started from a simple phone call.

Andrews got to the bottom of it by digging through public records, dealing with Coe destroying evidence on the computer, and filtering through lots of lies.

After his story aired, Coe ended up killing himself.  An ironic fact: Andrews was the one who found Coe's corpse.  Andrews quickly got his camera to film - though the producer told him not to film anything at all - the scene of the suicide before the cops showed up to prove a rather powerful point: "How would this look in court?"

It was a good lesson in journalist etiquette.  He made a point that it is much more professional to a jury to film the subject walking away from the camera saying "no comment" instead of chasing the subject while badgering for a response.

Another good lesson he taught us was that we should make a checklist of follow-up questions we want answered.  That way we can still stick to the story in case someone answers a question and starts going down a tangent from the original story.

Andrews was a great presenter, he is definitely a role model for aspiring journalists.  He simply told the story and told the truth.

Trip to the Courthouse

I got to meet Pat Frank, Hillsborough County Clerk of Circuit Court. Click here to see what she looks like!

Pat gave a lovely monotone speech about the cool things she gets to do and all the cool things that have been happening around the court. She couldn't stick around to give us the tour but she had her helpers Dana Caranante and Doug Bakke to do that for her. Dana and Doug are pretty important people in the courthouse, too. 

Pat did spend some time talking about how big of a deal she really is.  She started serving on the school board, then the state senate, then the board of county commission.  She is the CFO for the county, responsible for a $1.8 billion budget.

Pat also stated a few fun facts.  She talked about how the courthouse receives 9,000-10,000 calls per day, how the dwindling economy caused budget cuts, eliminating jobs within the courthouse, causing her much stress in restructuring the responsibility to fewer people.  She also said tax deed sales are up (shocking!) and marriage licenses are down.  

Pat then went on to explain how the court knows it's important to have upgraded technology and an easy to use system (I know she didn't say it, but basically make the website easy to use for the dumb people, since it's dumb people that usually end up having to go to court in some way anyway).  They're trying to use less paper, improve customer service and all that jazz.

Pat had to leave and go to her meeting so she turned it over to Doug and Doug walked us through the website, showed us all the obvious stuff.  I was really bored by that, but he was just spelling it out for all the people that don't know how to figure out what the link meant.  Like "Online Forms" is pretty self-explanatory.  

Doug was more fun to pay attention to when we actually got up to tour the courthouse.  I love going places where people aren't used to being seen by strangers.  We went through a lot of "employees only" zones and we even got to see the evidence room.

Tour time!  We passed by the mental health records (confidential, of course) office, the appeals office, and the mediation room (where people try to resolve their cases themselves without lawyers and a judge).  We then went to the mortgage case filing room.  Wanna know how many foreclosure and mortgage cases there are in Tampa?  A LOT!  I saw a whole office room with shelf after shelf of file folders containing mortgage and foreclosure cases.  The people processing those cases get about 5 or 6 boxes full of cases per day.

We then got on the elevator (that I farted in) to go see the traffic and family law section.  Both places were not cool places to be.  The line for the traffic court was so long!  And many of the people standing in line looked pretty dirty and nasty and/or had little annoying children with them.  Family law didn't have as many of them, but that place reminded me of the jail.  There were lots of trashy looking people there.  I tried to imagine a situation where I would end up here and the only thing I could think of was if my boyfriend and I had a child and we broke up and had to fight over the kid.  So basically, it's where daddy has to pay child support or mommy is looking for daddy to get that child support.  It could also be vice versa.  But "single moms" are much more common than "single dads."  And I mean that as the person that's taking care of the kid.  Obviously a male parent is still a dad, but I don't call him a single dad if he's not taking care of the kid.

We eventually made our way to the evidence room and to our disappointment, nothing gruesome was in there at the time.  Mel and I'm sure other classmates were looking forward to see some severed fingers in the mason jars.  

So what did I learn?  Court is not a fun place to be... ok seriously.  All public records end up at the courthouse.  As a reporter, I will be spending much time at the courthouse while doing background research on someone.  Many records can be found online but for some of the older records and more personal records, a trip to the courthouse is a must.  So it would be a good idea to have a list of the records needed before going down there, of course.  Just trying to think ahead here.  More at 11.