An Ocean Technology Mantis FFM
Cara gets her feet wet: Cara’s BioGard suit, hood, gloves and boots will be ready tomorrow. Since there are a lot of women wearing this equipment at Jeff’s labs it was just a matter of some minor alterations, almost off the shelf for some very specialized hazardous environment gear. But she didn’t need special gear to go with Taryn and me last night on what we have come to think of as a ‘routine’ cleanup call. A 23 y/o senior at UNLV had been found dead at the bottom of a swimming pool of the house she was renting. The problem was that she was the daughter of an important Middle Eastern religious leader who has been very upset by the liberated lifestyle she was leading; dressing in the latest fashions and having a stable of boyfriends not to mention having given up the family’s religion. She had been threatened with abduction on several occasions and so she had security men in the house at all times. The two security men on duty had been tasered then bound and gagged with duct tape so were more or less unharmed.
It wasn’t just a matter of going down to attach a lift bag to the corpse and bring it to the surface, then float it into a body bag and run the cleaning cycle on the pool. That’s because most of the woman’s brains and the contents of her bowels were floating in a cloud around her corpse. Taryn stayed on the surface to look for signs of a struggle while I took Cara down with me. We wore Mistral twin hose regs attached to HASMAT FFMs and lightweight (5mm) black neoprene Avon drysuits, hoods, gloves and booties. We used twin-hose regs so our bubble streams wouldn’t obscure our view of our surroundings which is always important when dealing with the aftermath of violence. When we got to the bottom we found her in a tiny white thong bikini that had been soiled when her bowels had emptied. She had been shot with a large caliber gun – I’m guessing a 44 or 45 caliber - through the left lens of the clear silicone Mantis FFM she was wearing. Her Mantis is similar to the one shown in the image accompanying this entry. She must have been on the surface at the time she was shot since there were powder burns on the lens indicating the gun was fired at close range. The bullet had gone through her left eye and into and through her brain before blowing off the back of her head. She was wearing a white silicone swim cap which ordinarily would have contained most of her brain tissue, but it didn’t. She had been shot with a special expanding bullet that began expanding when it hit the lens of her mask, then again when it penetrated the bone behind her left eye socket and a third time when it passed through the back of her skull. There was a jagged edged hole in the back of her swim cap the size of a baseball where the bullet fragments had traveled on through taking a cloud of puréed brain tissue with them before eventually becoming spent in the water. Her single hose regulator was floating nearby and the pressure gage on her octopus indicated an almost full tank so she couldn’t have been breathing on the reg for very long before being shot. I collected six fragments of the bullet off the pool bottom. It had shattered, flattened and had razor sharp edges. The girls mask was full of blood where she had bled briefly from her eyes and nose from the pressure of her skull exploding.
Maintaining the status quo: The people I work for aren’t interested in whether this was an ‘honor’ killing (the woman killed because she brought dishonor on her family) or if it was a fundamentalist religious killing or even if it was the result of an emotional attachment that went bad. As long as it doesn’t affect the status quo in town they just want it to disappear. As best we could tell from her wardrobe and her sex toys – a vibi, some condoms and a dildo – she had what I think of as a very vanilla sex life; although to a fundamentalist father she could have been Satan in skirts. She wasn’t a working girl doing tricks for a few hundred a pop. Her checkbook showed a 5 figure balance and monthly deposits from a trust fund. Nor was she pregnant, I squeezed some urine out of her bladder onto a test strip and there was no indication of hCG and she didn’t have any obvious amount of semen in her vagina. The place hadn’t been tossed so if it was searched it was a thorough and professional job. Cara and I floated the body into the shallow end and then into a latex body bag and the two of us lifted it into a laundry cart and took it out to the van. Then Cara and I washed ourselves off thoroughly in the pool shower because we had brain tissue and fecal material on our suits where we went into the cloud of human debris to retrieve her body. Taryn checked the dead chick’s email and voice mail and there was nothing that seemed suspicious there so we aren’t sure what the motive was for her murder. When we got back to my place Cara nearly freaked out from what she had seen and handled, but I told her she had done remarkably well because the first time a new girl goes on the cleanup crew she usually vomits. After a couple of shots of Grey Goose Vodka she was fine. I think Cara’s going to work out well, I can tell she’ll be a trooper!
Cara gets her feet wet: Cara’s BioGard suit, hood, gloves and boots will be ready tomorrow. Since there are a lot of women wearing this equipment at Jeff’s labs it was just a matter of some minor alterations, almost off the shelf for some very specialized hazardous environment gear. But she didn’t need special gear to go with Taryn and me last night on what we have come to think of as a ‘routine’ cleanup call. A 23 y/o senior at UNLV had been found dead at the bottom of a swimming pool of the house she was renting. The problem was that she was the daughter of an important Middle Eastern religious leader who has been very upset by the liberated lifestyle she was leading; dressing in the latest fashions and having a stable of boyfriends not to mention having given up the family’s religion. She had been threatened with abduction on several occasions and so she had security men in the house at all times. The two security men on duty had been tasered then bound and gagged with duct tape so were more or less unharmed.
It wasn’t just a matter of going down to attach a lift bag to the corpse and bring it to the surface, then float it into a body bag and run the cleaning cycle on the pool. That’s because most of the woman’s brains and the contents of her bowels were floating in a cloud around her corpse. Taryn stayed on the surface to look for signs of a struggle while I took Cara down with me. We wore Mistral twin hose regs attached to HASMAT FFMs and lightweight (5mm) black neoprene Avon drysuits, hoods, gloves and booties. We used twin-hose regs so our bubble streams wouldn’t obscure our view of our surroundings which is always important when dealing with the aftermath of violence. When we got to the bottom we found her in a tiny white thong bikini that had been soiled when her bowels had emptied. She had been shot with a large caliber gun – I’m guessing a 44 or 45 caliber - through the left lens of the clear silicone Mantis FFM she was wearing. Her Mantis is similar to the one shown in the image accompanying this entry. She must have been on the surface at the time she was shot since there were powder burns on the lens indicating the gun was fired at close range. The bullet had gone through her left eye and into and through her brain before blowing off the back of her head. She was wearing a white silicone swim cap which ordinarily would have contained most of her brain tissue, but it didn’t. She had been shot with a special expanding bullet that began expanding when it hit the lens of her mask, then again when it penetrated the bone behind her left eye socket and a third time when it passed through the back of her skull. There was a jagged edged hole in the back of her swim cap the size of a baseball where the bullet fragments had traveled on through taking a cloud of puréed brain tissue with them before eventually becoming spent in the water. Her single hose regulator was floating nearby and the pressure gage on her octopus indicated an almost full tank so she couldn’t have been breathing on the reg for very long before being shot. I collected six fragments of the bullet off the pool bottom. It had shattered, flattened and had razor sharp edges. The girls mask was full of blood where she had bled briefly from her eyes and nose from the pressure of her skull exploding.
Maintaining the status quo: The people I work for aren’t interested in whether this was an ‘honor’ killing (the woman killed because she brought dishonor on her family) or if it was a fundamentalist religious killing or even if it was the result of an emotional attachment that went bad. As long as it doesn’t affect the status quo in town they just want it to disappear. As best we could tell from her wardrobe and her sex toys – a vibi, some condoms and a dildo – she had what I think of as a very vanilla sex life; although to a fundamentalist father she could have been Satan in skirts. She wasn’t a working girl doing tricks for a few hundred a pop. Her checkbook showed a 5 figure balance and monthly deposits from a trust fund. Nor was she pregnant, I squeezed some urine out of her bladder onto a test strip and there was no indication of hCG and she didn’t have any obvious amount of semen in her vagina. The place hadn’t been tossed so if it was searched it was a thorough and professional job. Cara and I floated the body into the shallow end and then into a latex body bag and the two of us lifted it into a laundry cart and took it out to the van. Then Cara and I washed ourselves off thoroughly in the pool shower because we had brain tissue and fecal material on our suits where we went into the cloud of human debris to retrieve her body. Taryn checked the dead chick’s email and voice mail and there was nothing that seemed suspicious there so we aren’t sure what the motive was for her murder. When we got back to my place Cara nearly freaked out from what she had seen and handled, but I told her she had done remarkably well because the first time a new girl goes on the cleanup crew she usually vomits. After a couple of shots of Grey Goose Vodka she was fine. I think Cara’s going to work out well, I can tell she’ll be a trooper!
thats very unusal and shocking way to die. seems like it has many untraceable aspects too
ReplyDeleteYou didn't notice the bullet anywhere, did you? That might help as who might have done this (usually bullets are serial numbered, but pros might have non-registered ammo) (of course, that's from what I see on TV).
ReplyDeleteHi Eric… “You didn't notice the bullet anywhere, did you?”
ReplyDeleteI wrote: “I collected six fragments of the bullet off the pool bottom. It had shattered, flattened and had razor sharp edges.” I kept the fragments because I hadn’t seen anything like them before. I gave them to the security people when they found the other things in the wall safe. I think sometimes they can tell the manufacturer and perhaps even the lot from the metal formulation in the bullet. There were no spent cartridges.
Didn't see the comment about the fragments. At least you have some evidence.
ReplyDelete