Deadhouse: Life in a Coronerâ??s Office

SEVEN: THE TV TEAM

124 SEVEN THE TV TEAM The phone rings, and Michael DeRosa takes the call. Fortyyear -old female, dead in Ben Avon. Alone in the investigative office, DeRosa goes searching for a partner. In the entrance hall, he runs into Ed Strimlan. “Want to take a ride?” DeRosa asks. “Whatcha got?” Ed asks. “A big girl,” DeRosa says. They head downstairs to the wagons. Just before they pull out, Ed remembers something. He jumps out of his wagon and calls upstairs on the garage phone. Mike Chichwak picks up, and Ed says he and DeRosa are going on a call and could he track down the camera crew, the guys from MSNBC? Mike says OK. When Ed hangs up, DeRosa says: “You didn’t have to do that.” “I know,” Ed says.“I just don’t want anybody bitching at me tomorrow.” Ed doesn’t tell DeRosa this, but the truth is, he doesn’t mind being on camera , in the public eye. He’s good at speaking about his job—funny and knowledgeable and articulate.Unlike many deputy coroners,he is friendly with some local reporters. He enjoys giving drunk-driving lectures during the mock car crashes the coroner’s office stages at high schools during prom season. He really liked being a guest speaker in a course on death and dying at the local community college. He thinks he might pursue teaching further—maybe a night class on anatomy or physiology—after he switches to the day shift at the end of the month. He’s looking forward to it. The MSNBC producer and cameraman come down. The producer, a lanky, goateed man named Trent Gillies, is in Pittsburgh for the week, shooting a one-hour installment of a documentary series called Crime Files. The deputy coroners are under orders to page Gillies in his room at the Marriott before they go on calls, but this hasn’t always worked out. Gillies missed a good case a couple days earlier when a woman stole a van and then, fleeing police, smashed into a truck, killing the driver. And the day they were supposed to shoot the autopsy room, the pathologist refused to be taped. So Gillies is eager to take advantage of Ed’s cooperation. He cut short an interview with the serology lab to come on this call. The juiciest case he’s gotten so far this week, a man beaten to death in a homeless camp on the South Side slopes, also involved Ed. Gillies instructs the cameraman to get a shot of Ed sitting in the driver’s seat of the wagon. The photographer props the camera on his shoulder and aims it through the passenger window. Ed needs no prompting to ignore the camera and just stare through the windshield of the idling wagon, as if he’s pondering the case ahead. But he can’t quite suppress a faint smile, breaking one of his own rules for dealing with the media. Ed has two on-camera rules: never look straight at the lens and never smile. Although it’s unnatural on this job to keep a straight face. It’s unnatural not to joke around with the homicide detectives at death scenes, because funny stuff happens. But Ed is media-savvy enough to understand how bad it looks on television. The tape rolls for a few seconds, and then the cameraman looks at Gillies. “You want to ask him anything?” “What do we know so far about this case?” Gillies asks quickly, in sonorous television tones. “We know we have a forty-year-old lady in her apartment, apparently with no past medical history,” Ed says smoothly.“So we’re going to go out to the scene and find out what we have and go from there.” THE TV TEAM 125 Gillies thanks him and says they’re just waiting for the sound technician before they can take off for the scene. Ed nods. He’s getting used to the inconvenience . During the homeless-camp homicide investigation, Ed and Tiffani had been accompanied by an administrator, an intern, and the three MSNBC people. (A photographer from the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette took advantage of the crowd and ducked under the police tape, too.) That crime scene was located on a steep and rocky hillside, cluttered with makeshift bunks, bags, and clothes. The dead man had been dragged and hidden in a...