Interpretation of Burned Remains

ABSRACT

Victim remains at fatal fire scenes are typically difficult to detect, recover and handle. All of the burned material at the scene, including biological tissue, is often modified to a similar appearance, and bones, in particular, become discolored, brittle, and highly fragmented. As a consequence, these remains are often missed, disturbed, altered, or even destroyed during scene processing with the existing protocols. The added postmortem fracturing, fragmentation and bone loss resulting from these recovery techniques hinder the already difficult task of autopsy and laboratory analysis of burned human remains. This is especially problematic for bone trauma analysis, as its most immediate goal is distinguishing perimortem (forensically significant) trauma, from postmortem (not forensically significant) alteration. The substantial addition of trauma features created by fire and then recovery can result in a daunting analytical task. Lack of on-scene recordation of relevant information related to body positioning and contextual relationships of remains as well as other...