Dr. Kendall Crowns

The other situation is the carotid sleeper hold, where they put your neck in the crook of the arm and then compress both sides of your carotid, causing the blood not to flow to your brain and you pass out.

So either one of those scenarios could be what they're defining as mechanical asphyxia or mechanical strangulation.

So it could mean when they're compressing the neck with the arm that they're placing pressure with the other arm along the side of the neck and the arm is kind of to the side causing the bruising.

It could also mean that he placed her in a carotid sleeper hold and using the cruck of his arm, both sides of his arm compressed on either sides of her neck, compressing her carotids and caused her to pass out and die from lack of blood to her brain.

Well, toxicology reports can take up to six to eight weeks, so you potentially don't have the DNA report back from a sexual assault kit or a rape kit because there hasn't been enough time passed.

So again, there'd have to be a little more testing done, a little more stuff done by the crime labs before it's all back.

My answer to that is maybe there is still DNA out there waiting to get done, and we just don't know about it yet.

There can be a rush on it, but typically it can take six to eight weeks depending on what drugs are on board, especially if there's some sort of synthetic or designer drug being looked for.

It can take up to two months.

Like synthetic marijuana, bath salts, those kind of designer drugs that every so often show up that we don't have a lot of specific testing for, so more has to be done.

Every day, the drug chemists are making new variations on drugs that the toxicology labs are constantly having to test for to try and keep ahead of.

Often with strangulations, the evidence is trying to get the object off your neck.

So you'll see scratch marks on the neck from the individual's fingernails themselves.

You can also see injuries on the person who is the suspect in the case as well, scratches on their face, scratches on their arms.

If you see intense petechial hemorrhages or small pinpoint hemorrhages on the face, you know that the compression may have been released and then brought back, and it could be that sign of a struggle as well.

As well as the bruising on her neck could be from her thrashing about trying to get the restraint off her neck.

So there's a number of signs that could show that she fought back to try and get out of the hold.

So again, that would be the particular hemorrhages that you're talking about, the little pinpoint hemorrhages you see in the eye, but you also see them in the periocular region or around the eyes as well, can be throughout the face, the gums.

And what happens is it only takes a little bit of pressure to compress your jugular, which is 4.4 pounds, and your carotid, which is 11 pounds of pressure.

And once those are compressed, you do still have a little bit of vertebral artery circulation coming in.