what happens to the body after someone shoots himself in the head

Claim: Video shows a suspect in a constabulary shooting committing suicide in an interview room.

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TRUE

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Example: [Collected via e-mail, 2004]

Is this video existent?

GRAPHIC Paradigm WARNING: Video shows a suicide past gunshot.

Origins: Movies and television have planted sensationalized images of certain phenomena into the public consciousness, to the extent that when virtually of us run into the real thing, we're disappointed that it seems then mundane. In films and television programs, automobile crashes are always slam-bang affairs that inevitably end with one or more cars bursting into flame and exploding; thunder is ever a very loud, sharp, and short study which occurs simultaneously with a bolt of lightning (rather

than a tedious, distant, gradually increasing rumbling which arrives well after the lightning flash); and gunshots are commonly depicted as producing ear-splitting volumes of sound and, when aimed at another human being, resulting in plenty of gore and splatter.

It's no wonder, so, that when the in a higher place-displayed video of a detainee shooting himself while in law custody began to circulate, many viewers were skeptical of its authenticity — by Hollywood standards, it's so tame as to be most surreal. As depicted in the video, an uncuffed doubtable enters an interrogation room and sits downward in a chair, followed by an officer who dumps some keys and sunglasses on a table, checks his cell phone, and leaves the room momentarily. The officeholder returns several seconds later with a bottle of water and a cup of coffee, then hands the water bottle to the suspect, checks his prison cell phone over again, picks up the coffee, and exits the room a second time — leaving the doubtable solitary and unrestrained, and the door open. The doubtable takes a couple of swigs of water, then calmly reaches into his pants with his other hand, pulls out a big-caliber handgun, and shoots himself in the left temple.

Simply what we see in the video is nothing like what nearly of us might expect. The before long-to-exist suicide victim is neither visibly nervous nor distraught every bit he freely pulls out a gun and places it against his head. (He even replaces the cap on the water bottle before pulling the trigger.) The weapon does not produce an ear-shattering concussive

sound in the small-scale room, blood and encephalon affair don't splatter all over the walls, and the victim'south body isn't hurtled out of the chair and onto the floor. The gun makes a sharp popping audio equally the suspect shoots himself, blood streams from the victim's head and mouth, his hands drib the gun and water canteen to the floor, and his body slumps only slightly in the chair.

Even more than unusual to many viewers is the officer'due south reaction to this issue. He doesn't answer with any of the emotions most of us might feel, such as fear, panic, terror, or cloy. Nor does he blitz to the victim'southward help, check him for signs of life, summon help, or otherwise raise an alarm. "Oh, fuck," he exclaims as he re-enters the room, puts his coffee downwardly on the table, and surveys the scene for a second or 2, then adds "Holy fuck." When a 2nd (unseen) officer inquires "What did he do?" he responds with, "Nobody shook him" (i.e., nobody searched the suspect for weapons), and then calmly retrieves the keys and sunglasses and leaves the room. Throughout the short video, the officer's actions seem almost nonchalant: he doesn't act the least bit shocked or horrified that a human being being has just died a tearing expiry right in front of him. Instead, the foremost thought on his mind seems to be concern that someone's going to become into large problem for the oversight of allowing a detainee to retain a weapon.

(We realize, of course, that all of this would be viewed quite differently from a police perspective. Officers undergo thorough educational activity in the handling and use of firearms, they generally see far more than claret and violence on the job than nigh of u.s.a. will experience in our lifetimes, and they're trained to reply to emergency situations past following proper procedure rather than reacting with fearfulness or panic. Nosotros're simply presenting the average person'southward reaction to this video, as reflected in the email we've received from readers who have viewed it.)

The circumstances behind this video took identify on 19 December 2003, when 47-year-old Ricardo Alfonso Cerna was stopped for a traffic violation at nigh 9:30 A.M. in Muscoy (a residential suburb of San Bernardino Canton, well-nigh sixty miles e of Los Angeles). Cerna fled the scene (in his motorcar and then on pes) before shooting the pursuing officer, sheriff'southward deputy Michael Parham, twice in the abdomen. (Deputy Parham survived the shooting.) Cerna was soon arrested by San Bernardino police and taken to sheriff'south headquarters on 3rd Street, where he was placed in an interview room just before 11 A.M. in preparation for questioning past Bobby Dean, head of the San Bernardino County sheriff's homicide unit.

When Dean stepped out of the room briefly to speak with a detective in the hallway, Cerna pulled the .45-caliber handgun out of his pants and shot himself in the head. Evidently a concatenation of mistakes led to Cerna, a shooting doubtable, being taken into custody without either the arresting officers or the booking officers discovering he had a large, heavy handgun concealed on his person:

[Sheriff Gary] Penrod said deputies failed to adequately search Cerna before he was put in a car, and again when he was transferred to the homicide partition office. Each receiving deputy may have wrongly assumed the previous officer fairly searched the human, he said.

Penrod said confusion among the three agencies involved — the Highway Patrol, San Bernardino police force and the Sheriff'due south Department — may take contributed to the oversight.

"Obviously there was a mistake made," Penrod said by phone. "Information technology was hectic and it was a guy who was cuffed by somebody other than the transporting officer.

(This apparently egregious oversight led to conspiracy-theory speculation in some quarters that Cerna had been "executed" by the San Bernardino Sheriff'due south Department, or that the sheriff returned the gun to Cerna and urged him to commit suicide with it — the completely implausible scenario of officers' deliberately handing a loaded gun to a suspect who had already shot 1 policeman notwithstanding.)

Every bit to how the video of Cerna'south suicide made it onto the Internet, sheriff's spokesman Chip Patterson said:

[A] ranking official at the section was authorized to testify the video during a presentation on officeholder safety at the FBI's preparation academy in Quantico, Va., several months ago.

Following the presentation, dozens of copies of the video were made at the request of police-enforcement agencies across the land. Officials of those agencies wanted the copies for training purposes.

Sheriff's officials practise not know who might take leaked the video to the public. Some of the officers involved in Cerna's arrest and handling were subjected to disciplinary action, but sheriff'due south officials wouldn't annotate on the specifics of that activeness or identify the officers involved.

Last updated: nineteen Jan 2014

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Sources:

Grenda, Tim and Imran Ghori.   "Man in Custody Had Hidden Gun."

The [Riverside] Press-Enterprise twenty December 2003.

Nelson, Joe.   "Sheriff'south Detainee'southward Suicide Put on Spider web."

San Bernardino County Lord's day. 21 December 2004.

Associated Press. "Arrestee Pulls Hidden Gun, Kills Self."

CNN.com. 20 December 2003.

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Source: https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/the-last-interrogation/

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