Today they’re household names, but it started with a leap of faith
I
was involved in my first autopsy case when I was 17. A Yid who davened with us in Rabbi Bick’s shul in the Bronx went down to the washing machines in the basement of his apartment building and found some hoodlums breaking into the machines to rip out the stash of quarters inside. He yelled at them, and they killed them.
The shul was in turmoil. I went down to the office of the medical examiner to request that they not do an autopsy, when Dr. Milton Helpern, the chief medical examiner of New York City, came in. “What are you doing here? You’re trespassing and have no right to be on city property.”
I said, “Tomorrow you can arrest me for trespassing, but today let’s see what we can do.”
We argued back and forth about the autopsy and other options. At the end, the examiner relented and agreed to do just a partial examination, “to establish cause of death.”
Create a free account to keep reading.
