As a Detective at Kerrville Police Department in the late 1970s, I received a call out late one evening to respond to an unattended death. The location was a small house in an older residential area of the town. The yard was halfway overgrown with weeds and the paint was peeling from the wood siding on the old house. The ambulance was already standing by.
Inside, an elderly man, the sole resident, lay in bed, already well into a state of rigor mortis with extensive postmortem lividity. There were no signs of foul play and it had every appearance of a natural death.
The ambulance crew could not remove the body without an official pronouncement of death, as if we all couldn’t make that assessment accurately in this case. But rules are rules. Kerr County had neither a Medical Examiner or a Coroner, so we were required to get a Justice of the Peace to pronounce deceased and conduct an investigation. I radioed dispatch to call out the Justice of the Peace for that precinct.
The JP was an old man himself, well into his 80s, with one foot pretty far across the threshold of dementia. He kept getting reelected by virtue of longevity in office and the fact nobody else wanted the position in that precinct. The ambulance attendants, both friends of mine on a first name basis, were shaking their heads as soon as they heard who the responding JP was going to be. They hated having him show up at scenes.
The dispatcher called me back on the radio when he had the old JP on the phone and said the JP wanted to know if we were sure the victim was dead. “Yes,” I replied, “he’s already in rigor mortis and has post-mortem lividity. The ambulance attendants and I agree that death occurred many hours ago, based on the the condition of the body.”
On receiving my answer, I could hear the ancient, quivering voice of the JP telling the dispatcher, “Well, just tell them to stand by until I get there. Friday Night Wrestling just started and it’s not over until 11:00. If the guy is already dead, there’s no hurry and I don’t want to miss my Friday night wrestling program.”
Altogether, we stood by for about an hour and 20 minutes after the first phone call to the JP until he got there. When he did arrive, he shuffled into the house and to the bedroom doorway, took one look at the body from across the room and said, “Yep, he’s dead. Old age.” With no further ado, he turned and ambled back out to his car to go home.
The ambulance attendants quickly loaded the body onto their stretcher and remove it to the funeral home. I went to the office to write my report.
It was a quiet night. No other ambulance calls came in while we waited and since no patrol officers were tied up at the scene, KPD’s normal functioning was not impeded. I still shake my head that a senile old JP would hold his favorite weekly TV wrestling program in higher regard than the responsibilities of his elected office and the death of a citizen in his precinct. But that was Kerrville, Texas, in the 1970s