Dr. Kendall Crowns

And that striking the base of the bone and breaking it means there's a lot of force being put into it as they're stabbing the individual in the neck.

So it's a forceful stab wound fracturing the base of the skull.

And what you were talking about earlier, or fracturing the cervical bone,

And what you were talking about earlier, if you go more centrally, you can decapitate someone easily.

Cutting through the bone and soft tissue, the neck isn't all that structurally hard.

So you can take someone's head off stabbing through their neck.

So typically with the babies that are found in trash bags, you first have to determine if they were born alive.

There are certain things that you can look for.

One of them is gestational age.

If they're under 22 weeks, they probably couldn't have survived being born.

If they have this thing called maceration, which is an overall kind of

reddish decoloration, sloughing of the skin of the baby, you know they died in utero.

And then finally, do they have any major birth defects like they have no brain or something of that nature?

Then you go from there and you have to figure out if you determine that they could have been born alive, then you have to determine

if they actually took a breath.

And that can be a number of tests that are actually not all that accurate.

There's the float test with the lung, but that can be disrupted by decomposition.

So the main thing, like I was talking about, is they're going to be looking for any signs that the child was living when it was born.

So did it take a breath?

And if it took a breath, the lungs will fill up with air and they could potentially float if you put them in water.