Unusual deaths have clear King

By Abigail Goldman

Wednesday, Aug. 12, 2009 | 2 a.m.

Brian Elias finished his slide-show presentation on people asphyxiating in palm trees and was moving onto another segment of his “Death in Unusual Locations” lecture when the Los Angeles County coroner’s investigator had to cut the talk short.

His audience wanted to break for lunch — and ask questions about a certain high-profile death investigation Elias happens to be in the midst of.

People at the International Association of Coroners and Medical Examiners training conference look like many conventiongoers — business casual, checking BlackBerrys, drinking complimentary coffee. But while other groups attend seminars on corporate synergy, guests at this conference at the Golden Nugget last week took notes on mass fatalities, suspicious brain injuries, recovery diving (complete with a nine-hour instructive scuba course at Lake Mead) and strange places to die.

As for palm trees, a handful of people in Los Angeles have suffocated in them in the past few years. Tree-trimmers spider up the trunks and start whacking — perfectly fine until palm fronds, untangled and trimmed, suddenly give and fall down in one solid ring cocooning the trimmer in a heavy, hot, airless pocket of palm.

“Boom! The whole thing just separates and comes down on him.”

Elias has photos of people thus trapped, but they are so encased in fronds that all you see are firetruck ladders leaning against a hairy tree. By the time the trimmers are extricated, usually at least 45 minutes later, it’s too late.

Before the palm trees Elias discussed the teenager who somehow crept into wheel well of a Boeing 747 in South Africa in 2007 and remained there for five days, logging roughly 36,000 miles before airport workers at LAX found him dead.

“Due to my years of training experience, I was able to determine this was a 17-year-old male from South Africa,” Elias said.

He clicked to the next slide — a picture of the ID card that coroner investigators found tucked into Samuel Benjamin’s pocket.

He’d traveled from Cape Town to London to Singapore to London to Hong Kong to London to Los Angeles. At those altitudes, Elias said, the stowaway had oxygen for 60 seconds, at best, and the temperature in the wheel well ranged from minus 40 to minus 80. His body was still 30 degrees seven hours after it was discovered.

But lunch called.

“Any questions?” Elias said.

“Do you have the tox report back yet?” someone shouted. The audience laughed.

Oh, that death.

Michael Jackson died during Elias’ shift. He stopped counting media calls when they numbered 256 from nine countries. He wouldn’t comment on the toxicology results and answered other questions about the Jackson investigation (“How much is it going to cost your office?”) with rote, robotic deadpan: “We would like to make sure this is a thorough investigation ...”

Elias was offered $3 million for a photo of the body. His office was bombarded by people trying to get in. One guy stapled a novelty “Coroner” patch to his T-shirt, tucked a flashlight into his belt and dangled two latex gloves from his jeans before attempting to scale the back wall of the building.

It didn’t work. Neither did the audiences’ further attempts to pry information from Elias; a room full of colleagues revealing, first, their appetite for celebrity news — and then just their appetite.