Dr. Kendall Crowns

Yes, I can.

I mean, the facial skin, the scalp skin is very vasculature, a lot of arteries, a lot of veins.

And when you're looking at those pictures, you can see deep lacerations right at the edge of the scalp and one kind of more in the hair itself.

So there's going to be a tremendous amount of bleeding associated with that, which you're seeing in these pictures kind of streaming down her face.

And of course, people are going to say, oh, well, you know, those injuries aren't all that significant.

It's just that's how you bleed when you get hit there.

But the problem is, is that is a significant amount of blood on her face.

And those are very deep injuries created by a rock that also caused lacerating injuries.

So it's kind of has a sharp edge.

And potentially she could have had skull fractures if he had continued to pound on her.

Yes, that is accurate.

Often photographs in the courtroom situations are deemed inflammatory so we can't use them unless they are cleaned up photographs that just show the wound on the external surface of the body.

Even the example you're using of the facial skin being peeled forward showing the underlying subgallial hemorrhages

are often deemed too inflammatory because it's said that it's upsetting for the jury to see the skull in that nature.

So really what we usually are able to use is very clean, sanitized photographs of the wounds themselves.

Although occasionally a judge will allow more internal photographs to be shown or more of the injury photographs to be shown because they feel that the nature of the crime merits the showing of these pictures.

How do you prove it when you can't show the pictures or you don't have an actual autopsy is you have to go through what was seen.

She has those deep lacerations.

You can describe those.

And then you can also talk about the potential for being beaten with the rock, creating fractures of the skull and even internal injuries like subarachnoid hemorrhage of the brain.