NCJ Number
214504
Journal
Journal of Forensic Sciences Volume: 51 Issue: 3 Dated: May 2006 Pages: 643-650
Date Published
May 2006
Length
8 pages
Annotation
This article presents two case studies of drowning in Great Britain that correlated diatom (a group of unicellular algae that have been recorded and classified for over 200 years) samples from the study area and diatoms recovered from the victim's clothing and lung tissue/fluid to reinforce the determination of drowning as the cause of death and to localize the drowning site.
Abstract
In one case study, the body of a woman was found face down floating in a river. The authors collected samples for diatom analysis from sites along the length of the river, including the body-recovery site. Diatom lung and clothing samples from the victim had statistically significant similarities to the body recovery site, indicating that was the location of the drowning. In the second case study, the body of a boy was found face down floating in a pond. After an initial finding that the boy drowned in the pond, the case was reopened due to a suspicion that drowning had occurred in a bathtub before the body was transported to the pond. The authors collected diatom samples for analysis from around the edges and center of the pond. The analog matching suggested that the majority of lung samples from the boy had a statistically significant relationship to pond samples, indicating that the drowning occurred in the pond. The authors advise, however, that this is a reasonable but not conclusive deduction, since the diatoms in the lung samples could not be compared with a sample of water from the pond at the time of the drowning. The article describes the quantitative reconstruction techniques used by the authors in these two cases. These are techniques recently adopted by ecologists for ecological reconstruction. 1 table, 4 figures, and 43 references