Dr. Kendall Crowns

So stab wounds to the neck usually are very vascular, very hemorrhagic.

And depending on how they're angled, if they come more to midline, they can also involve your trachea or your windpipe where the air comes through.

And then you're basically now breathing through that new hole in your windpipe and the blood is flooding in there.

So you're gagging on your blood as you're bleeding out.

It's pretty bad to be stabbed in the neck.

So it means that the knife was driven in quite deeply, probably almost all the way up to the hilt of the knife.

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