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Medical Examiner: Lucero Was Punched and Stabbed, But Not Repeatedly

Posted April 1, 2010 by Ted Hesson
Categories: Hate Watch

Yesterday, I posted about a serologist who testified at the trial of Jeffrey Conroy, the Medford teen accused of stabbing and killing Marcelo Lucero. The blood expert confirmed that after the attack, Lucero’s blood was found on Conroy’s knife and jeans.

Dr. Stuart Dawson, the now-retired Suffolk County deputy chief medical examiner, also testified yesterday. Dawson said that the cause of Lucero’s death was a stab wound to the chest.

The New York Times’ Manny Fernandez reports on the testimony:

The autopsy report and Dr. Dawson’s testimony showed that Mr. Lucero was not beaten or stabbed repeatedly. The only significant injuries were cuts on his upper and lower lips that probably came from a single punch, and a stab wound just below the collarbone that did not penetrate the chest cavity and ran parallel to the skin, said Dr. Dawson, a former deputy chief medical examiner who has since retired. No major organs were struck, but Mr. Lucero’s right axillary artery and an adjacent large vein were cut, according to the report and Dr. Dawson’s testimony.

During the trial, defense attorney William Keahon has at times questioned how emergency services might have contributed to Lucero’s death. The New York Times’ Fernandez, in turn, has written several articles focusing on that aspect of the trial: how long the ambulance took to arrive at the scene, the lapsed certification of the lead EMT in the ambulance, and the inability to airlift Lucero to Stony Brook University Hospital because he was in cardiac arrest.

Fernandez, however, has yet to cite the opinion of an emergency services expert in the articles that mention the emergency response to the stabbing. Without an expert opinion, there’s no way for readers to know whether or not the emergency response in the Lucero case was reasonable for Suffolk County.

The issue of emergency services comes up again in the most recent Times article:

An assistant chief with the ambulance company testified earlier that the crew took Mr. Lucero to a nearby landing zone to be airlifted. When Mr. Lucero went into cardiac arrest, the crew instead took him to Brookhaven, stopping to pick up a paramedic.

Until then, no one in the ambulance had been qualified to give a patient an IV, though there were IVs in the ambulance and Mr. Lucero was in shock from blood loss, said the assistant chief, Chris Schiera. Mr. Schiera said his E.M.T. certification had lapsed at the time, preventing him from administering an IV.

Dr. Dawson told Megan O’Donnell, the assistant district attorney handling the case, that he had reviewed Mr. Schiera’s testimony, but that his opinion about the cause of death had not changed.

But Dr. Dawson said under cross-examination that the essence of Mr. Lucero’s situation after he had been stabbed was “loss of blood volume.”

Mr. Conroy’s lawyer, William Keahon, asked Dr. Dawson if no one on the ambulance crew was certified to hook up an IV, would the best actions have been to put pressure on the wound and rush him to Brookhaven. Dr. Dawson said the question put him in the position of an emergency responder.

“I really hesitate to answer a question like that,” he told Mr. Keahon.

In order to give some perspective on the ambulance response times, our blogger Patrick Young, Esq., consulted Glenn Abolafia, a defense lawyer and a former prosecutor who also has years of experience with a New Jersey ambulance company. Here’s what Pat posted on March 18:

He told me that what the ambulance responders did was a judgment call. He said that in many cases of severe injury, such as that suffered by Lucero, the choice is to airlift to a hospital with a large trauma unit like Stony Brook. He said that a helicopter crew, arriving when Lucero had gone into cardiac arrest, would not take him until he was stabilized and that the EMTs would then take him by ambulance to the nearest hospital. So the reaction of the ambulance crew, which some have questioned in hindsight, was not outside ordinary practices, he told me.

In any case, Glenn says, the ambulance crew’s decisions are “totally irrelevant” to the charges against Conroy. The rescue workers’ decisions are not a defense to murder, since they did not cause the injury that led to Marcelo Lucero’s death.

As I was told back in law school, a killer can’t argue that his victim was entitled to better medical care than he received. Conroy has said he stabbed Marcelo Lucero. A knife to the chest could reasonably be expected to kill the victim. It is unlikely Conroy stabbed Lucero thinking, “At least he’ll get the best medical attention possible”.

I’d like to see the Times consult an expert, though, so their audience (a tad bit larger than ours) can get some perspective on this aspect of the case.

Tags : beaner hopping, hate crimes, jeffrey conroy, marcelo lucero, new york times, suffolk

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