Pushing Up Lilies

•   Stranglers often blame someone else for their rage and violence and abuse, and I know when I did sexual assault exams, there were a lot of the sexual assault victims that had been strangled prior to being assaulted. I can remember when I first started doing SANE exams, we really didn't focus a lot on that, and then we realized how very little pressure it took to cut off someone's oxygen supply...

• Many times the behavior of these men is not compromising at all. It's his way or the highway. He also may believe that love justifies sacrificing his wife or his girlfriend. The only way that he can ensure obedience and express authority and power is to kill her. And so that's why this happens a lot. It reminds me of the Scott Peterson case back from 2002. And of course it's a little bit differe...

•  I've found a New Year's Eve murder story that I thought that you all would be super interested in. I was thinking about it as I was going through all of the history of this particular story. I can remember growing up how mad I used to get. Did you all have chores? I had so many chores and I did not get allowance. A lot of my friends would have certain chores that they'd have to do certain days...

•  There was an 18 year old named Alex Valdez. I don't know the background, I couldn't find very much information on his parents, but he had been staying with his aunt and her boyfriend for about six months. The boyfriend was Sylvester Diaz Hernandez and he was 41 years old. Evidently the aunt and boyfriend told Alexis that he could live with them as long as he worked and continued to go to school...

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•   Christmas and New Year are risk factors for cardiac and non-cardiac deaths. A couple of reasons for that are that people delay actually going to the ER. They don't want to rush up there if there's nothing truly wrong. They don't want to leave their families. They're in the middle of the holiday festivities. They're spending time with the people that they love and they don't want to leave. They...

•  I started working as an LVN before I graduated from RN school. And so after graduation, I was able to pretty much continue my job there. But of course, my pay went up because at that point, I was actually a nurse and not a patient care tech. So I began working there and that required a lot of additional training. I got my NRP, which is going through the neonatal resuscitation program. And at th...

• I was driving home from work earlier and I started thinking about sometimes how paranoid my job has made me over the years. And as I was driving down the road and it was very dark and the road was very curvy, I got to thinking, you know, I'm trusting that person that's coming towards me around that curve from the opposite direction not to hit me. And I don't know them from Adam and I don't know...

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•  We're back on the subject today of nurses or healthcare workers who have killed patients. And some of them are actually serial killers. So they've killed multiple patients. Nurses who kill are actually called angels of mercy or angels of death and that's a type of criminal offender who can be a serial killer, who is employed as a caregiver and will intentionally harm someone or kill someone who...

•    A lot of nurses who have done this tend to make excuses and claim that they're taking someone's life to end their suffering or on the opposite end of the spectrum, they want to get rid of difficult patients. They might be tired of taking care of someone, and they don't want to do it anymore, and they figure that the best way to do it is just to over-medicate them or give them a medication tha...

•   It was so strange because this dentist, y'all was actually old as the hills, he was my mom's dentist when she was a kid. He pulled all of her teeth when she was 16 years old and gave her dentures because she had really bad teeth. I remember her telling me how bad it hurt. I thought to myself, why is she taking me to him if he caused her so much pain as a child? But nonetheless, she did... I ju...

•   I remember one night when I was with my friends and we were in a spare room of our house in the little town of Valley View, Texas, shout out to my home town. We were playing with my Ouija Board that I had gotten for Christmas, and of course, it spelled out something, I can't even remember what it was. But during this time, we were all a little bit spooked and it was new and it was mysterious....

•   I ran across a couple other really interesting Halloween deaths that probably most of us have never even heard of. So we all know that all over the world, but there's a huge gang population in California, so in Northwest Pasadena and Los Angeles County, back on October 31st in 1993, there were actually three gang members who gunned down a group of boys who were trick or treating. It turns out...

•   I can remember waiting out by the road and my sister walking up this long sidewalk, of course, they had the outside decorated, didn't look too scary, so we weren't really initially too terrified. But they pulled her into the house and then made her screen before they gave her candy. I was completely freaked out, I'm like, Oh no, forget it, I'm not going in there. I took off running home, I don...

•  There's two different kinds of exams, and acute exam is one that we do on someone at the hospital that's been assaulted within the last 20 hours or five days, those are the ones that come to the hospital that could potentially have life-threatening injuries that may need prophylactic antibiotics that would still be effective because of the time frame that can be discharged from the hospital and...

•    I know that hotels are a magnet for suicides and other types of death. People will go to a hotel to commit suicide to avoid making a mess at home, and so, of course, in that hotel room where someone might shoot themselves, there's going to be a hole in the wall or blood or whatnot. And so to avoid that mess at home, then they would go to a hotel... I've seen this a lot over the years. Obvious...

•  So this case just hit really close to home for me, but I wanted to give you all some information on this guy because I've been at a piece and together a timeline of his life, and it seems like he was only 11 when he first entered the juvenile court system. So at the age of 12, if you can only imagine a 12-year-old, he was charged with aggravated assault with a weapon. And what aggravated assaul...

•  The one thing that we don't do is autopsies. Now, you may find in some offices that the investigators have multiple jobs, and one of them may be to serve as an autopsy tech and also investigate the death, those may be in smaller offices where they have fewer staff members and they utilize the investigators also as autopsy tech. In our office though, we do not... Ultimately, the autopsies are do...

•  We'll get a lot of questions about autopsies and whether or not people should have one done on their loved one, or if they have to have one done. Back in the day, they used to do autopsies, I would say just about on everyone. Of course, there's always those exceptions. But now, because of the population, it is absolutely impossible to do an autopsy, a full autopsy on everyone. The medical exami...

 • I usually look back at someone's life or history or the way they were raised, and you can somehow put two and two together as to why they turned out this way or why they think this is acceptable behavior. But Meiwes actually had two older half brothers and his father abandoned him when he was 8. He had a desire for cannibalism, and he said it was related to the fairy tale of Hansel and Gretel....

•  We realized that a lot of people are estranged from their families. And so I guess what I like to do is always encourage people to have someone that can check on them on a daily basis, or just to check and make sure that they're okay. So if there's an elderly person that lives next door to you, please check on them, they don't always have family, they don't always have someone that's calling th...

•  We may go home smelling like a decomposed body, and sometimes we forget because we're so used to it. I know I've gone into a scene before where the body's been there for a couple of days, it's decomposing, the smell is bad, they may be covered in flies, gnats, maggots, I'm covered in deep sweat and stench... And have walked into a restaurant and stood in line for a sandwich, forgetting complete...

Every journey has a beginning, and this is mine. Before forensic nursing became a recognized specialty and long before crime scene television shows made forensics mainstream, I found myself drawn to a career that would ultimately change my life. In this very first episode of Pushing Up Lilies , I share how I went from working as an emergency room nurse to becoming a Forensic Nurse Death Investigat...