Walt "Butch" Hendrick
Drowning continues to hold it’s unprecedented position in the top two causes of accidental death to children in the United States
Accident is the key word here. As law enforcement personnel, our first thought as we respond to a drowning incident is probably that there has been a tragic accident. On the other hand, as we respond to a child found dead with a bullet or stabbing wound, we prepare ourselves to immediately begin looking for signs of possible foul play.
Even though all drownings should be considered possible homicides until proven differently, very often the responding officer is already in the mindset of accidental death. We almost cannot help it. Ever since we were children we have thought of drowning as accidental; we were trained to automatically think of drownings as accidents. Everyone has heard of someone who died in a drowning accident. We read about drowning accidents in newspapers and books, we watched them on television and in movies, and we were trained how to manage and prevent them in water safety and rescue courses. Part of the reason we think about drownings as accidental is because we tend to think of water for recreational activities. That was not always the case.
Since the beginning of time punishment in the water has been an extremely effective tool. John the Baptist, purified sinners in the water, the Chinese punished criminals by water, and pirates had the ever-popular keel hauling or walking the plank. In our own history dunking was a popular way of proving a person’s innocence. If suspects survived the dunking they were innocent, but if they drowned it was proof of their guilt. Dunking was still active in the late 1800’s.
Homicide by Drowning, is an ever-popular television and movie theme to be solved by the great sleuths of fantasy. In historical writing, Moses parted the Red Sea to save his people and destroy his enemy; and God did away with bad life on earth by drowning everyone not on Noah’s Ark.
Compounding the perceived accident concept, is the problem of little or no typical evidence of foul play on drowning sites or drowning victims.
 | It can be difficult for a pathologist to conclusively prove that a person died of drowning. |
| There might not be a body because it has not been found yet. |
| If the body is found quickly, such as in a swimming pool or tub, it is quickly removed by rescue personnel, which means evidence could be destroyed. |
| There is little or no standard evidence to recover and witnesses are usually family members or non-existent. |
| There are usually none of the normal signals to alert the police officer’s brain of possible foul play. |
Remember, emotionally police officers are basically no different than any other human being, except perhaps they are more sensitive to a senseless death, especially when it comes to the death of a child. This sensitivity and perhaps empathy for a victim’s family members could influence an officer to accepting a drowning as accidental.
We talk, and hopefully attempt, to prepare for critical stress as it pertains to violence and severe personal threat. Perhaps the next stage of critical stress training will be for the minds eye and it’s perception of thought, emotion. Not so much the physical threat, but rather the emotional side of the brain and how it functions when stressed with rejectable emotions. Does the mind except accident because it is simple, or better yet, because the critical stress side of the brain believes it to be, or wants it to be.
We are perhaps quick to perceive homicide in the water when victims have a bullet in their head, bricks tied to their body, or when the obvious, available witness information is not making sense. For the most part autopsies generally do not look for much more than to prove that the victim did die of suffocation or drowning. Many of today’s police agencies are under-manned or under financed and simply do not have the ability to do any more than they are doing now. Again what happens to our standard police investigative skills when there is no body or no evidence of foul play. Perhaps the over-loaded mind seeks the simplest path.
A child drowns in the back yard pool and the case is closed in a rather short time, even if the witness information does not completely make sense. Another child dies at the foot of the stairs in the home next door, perhaps a victim of a falling accident. Is the first perception the same, or did your police trained-mind think of the drowning as an accident and the staircase accident as possibly foul play?
We are used to looking deeper into the situation surrounding suspicious death or accidents, when there is a body or evidence to research. When asked, the average police officer does not think of a drowning as suspicious unless there are other visible circumstances.
A fifty-year-old man is found drowned in the late fall, totally naked in a lake four miles form his home. No vehicle or clothes are found on the beach. There is nothing to show how he got there, and no one reported a naked man walking on the road or high way. Accidental death?!
The FBI has made statements as long as ten years ago that they believed that not all drowning were accidental. However in basic law enforcement this concept has not been well shared or expanded upon.
Bucket drownings of children under the age of four is not all that uncommon, nor are they all that simple. How many children drown that are special education or problem children with personality, health or medical problems? Accidents with guns, knives, baseball bats etc. are not so easy to hide or misperceive as is a drowning.
Think about it, adults and children die in car, fire or drowning accidents every day, they are for the most part, exactly what they seem, accidents. An estimated 100,000 people experience near drowning a year. Drowning is the second most common cause of child accidental death, with motor vehicle accidents as number one. For years we believed that (Sudden Infant Death Syndrome) was a signficant cause of death to infants, and today we begin to realize that there is a chance that a portion of these child deaths could actually be Shaken Trauma Death Syndrome. We know that humans, and specifically parents, can perform incredible atrocities to their children during every day life. Why would drowning them be any different? Of the 100,000 near drowning incidents and the 7,000 adults and children who die from drowning, what if only 1% of those are not quite the accident they seem?
What if that percentage was higher ?