She Wanted It All - Kathryn Casey [174]
“Yes,” he said. “Just a few days ago.”
“Did you look at the photos?”
“I’m not qualified to interpret the photos,” Satterwhite said. “I’m not trained in it.”
“Pulmonary embolisms are common with trauma surgery when a patient has not been ambulatory?”
“Yes,” Satterwhite said. “I haven’t seen the slides. There weren’t any microscopic findings in the autopsy report.”
“Wasn’t the rash a complication of the gunshot wound?”
“Not in my opinion,” Satterwhite said.
“But if he got it in HealthSouth, the reason he was there is because of the gunshot?”
“Yes,” Satterwhite said.
After Satterwhite, Dr. Charles Petty took the stand. An elderly, balding, 1950 Harvard Medical School graduate, Petty had established the Medical Examiner’s Office in Dallas and resembled a favorite uncle. In his career, he’d done more than 13,000 autopsies and testified in court 1,300 times. Unlike Dr. Satterwhite, Dr. Petty had reviewed not only the records, but the autopsy and slides.
“Mr. Beard died of overwhelming infection,” he said in a still strong voice. “His blood cultures showed GAS or Group A strep.”
Both on where the infection started and its relationship to the gunshot wound, Petty agreed with Satterwhite: It began in the rash on Steve’s groin and had no relationship to the gunshot. If the two doctors were right, Steve Beard had died not of homicide, but of natural causes. Perhaps it could even have been malpractice, DeGuerin suggested, since Steve went for a full day after lab tests found the infection before receiving an antibiotic. For this testimony, the jurors sat up straight, and some leaned forward.
As to the blood clots Dr. Bayardo had noted in Steve’s lungs, Dr. Petty saw them in the slides but disagreed about their significance. They were of different ages, some old, he said. They may have been associated with Steve’s chronic lung condition.
“Just because you have a pulmonary embolism, does that mean you’re going to die?” DeGuerin asked.
“No,” Dr. Petty said. “An area of this patient’s lungs was infarcted, dead, the blood supply from the artery cut off. It had been that way for some time. It indicates that these clots had gone on over a period of time.”
“Can a person survive such clots?”
“If they’re not big enough to cut off the blood to the lungs.”
“Could it cause death?”
“If it is predeath, yes,” he said. “I can’t tell if these were.”
Under cross exam, Dr. Petty said that the last time he’d conducted an autopsy had been seven years earlier and that he knew Dr. Bayardo well and considered him a good medical examiner. Since retiring, Petty had testified at other trials, sometimes for the prosecutors and other times for the defense.
“You lectured at a class with Mr. DeGuerin entitled, ‘You Sure It Was the Bullet and Not the Chili?—Cross Examining the Pathologist,’ didn’t you?’ On getting alternative causes of death in front of a jury?” Cobb asked.
Petty agreed he’d participated, but said he didn’t remember the seminar’s title. Then, while he said he’d discussed Dr. Satterwhite’s findings with him, Petty insisted he’d made up his mind about the cause of death in the Beard case on his own.
“The pulmonary embolism you mentioned, was that sufficient to cause death?” Cobb asked.
“He had an old pulmonary embolism that didn’t cause his death,” Petty said. “I’m just giving my opinion. He died of infection.”
“Could it be that Dr. Bayardo’s opinion is correct and yours was incorrect?”
“Could be,” he said.
“Are you familiar with the case of David Gunby?” Cobb asked, and DeGuerin objected. Shot in 1966 when Charles Whitman fired a high-powered rifle off the UT tower, Gunby lived until 2001, when he died after a failed kidney transplant. The medical examiner ruled his death a homicide, caused by longstanding complications of his wounds. Kocurek ruled in DeGuerin’s favor, disallowing the line of questioning.
“Can complications of a gunshot wound ultimately cause death even years later?” Cobb asked.
“Yes,” Petty said.
Although she believed Cobb had done well with both physicians,