A death investigator has spoked about the 'haunting' case that he will remember forever.
Joseph Scott Morgan is a death investigator with 20 years of experience of working with the police to determine what has happened to a person that has died.
He told LADbible that he started by working at a hospital in Jefferson Parish, Louisiana when he was mentored by a forensic investigator, which led to him attending autopsies.
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In time he ended up scribing things for the forensic pathologist and after a while was offered the option of closing up the incisions on a body.
He was then offered the opportunity to open up a body, and in his career as a death investigator has gone on to work on 7,000 bodies.
When asked if there were any cases which stuck out in his mind, Joseph said that the 'default position is always kids', and that it was 'haunting' when he saw what had been done.
The death investigator said that in his line of work he found 'evidence of a life lived', telling LADbible about finding children who had died in their cribs and the elderly who had died alone with their bodies not found for a lengthy amount of time.
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Describing one specific case, he said there was an instance of elder abuse where a woman had kept her mother in the basement.
"The daughter had placed her in the basement of her home in this room," Joseph described. "Had no furniture, it had piles of dirty clothes and bed linens and all this stuff, and you would see old food wrappers like crackers and things like this that are left behind, a water bottle.
"The room reeked of urine, and there's a kind of sickly-sweet smell that comes along with that, and she had defecated everywhere over a period of time.
"I think that case stuck with me because the daughter had allowed it and had perpetrated this. It would have been more merciful if she had literally killed her."
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The death investigator went on to explain that the daughter had 'kept her mother alive' in her basement while continuing to receive her retirement money and living 'high on the hog' as he put it.
He said: "You go into the upstairs of the house, all of the cupboards are full of food, clean, smelled nice, and her mother, I'll never forget examining her mother's body on this dirty red carpet.
"Her mother had bilateral untreated breast cancer, and she had these huge ulcerated areas where her breast had been. As a matter of fact on the left aspect, so if you look beneath the area where her armpit is, there was no longer, where her ribs are, there was no longer intercostal muscle.
"Soft tissue, skin is all gone. You could literally look through her ribs and see her lung. In life she had been this way, this was not decomposition, she was literally rotting alive."
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It made Joseph think of his own grandmother as he said that he hadn't known this woman but knew 'she didn't deserve this'.
He also spoke of another situation he investigated where two children with drug-addicted parents had 'moved 26 times in one year' and the kids were 'eating dirty mop strings to survive'.
"Most people, when you tell them these stories, they don't believe it," Joseph said of the worst he'd seen in his career.
"They don't believe that people could do this. And the reason they don't believe it is because they don't wanna believe that kind of horror exists.
"Some people have, they're so devoid of any level of compassion they'll just take a life in a second. They treat people like rubbish."
Topics: Crime, True Crime, Health
Joe Harker