Giving The Dead A Voice

by Maureen Thom

For the past nine years, Vidal Herrera has worked underground performing autopsies on the dead. Each day, Herrera enters building 500 on the West Los Angeles Veteran Administration property, takes the elevator down to level "G" and enters his office. Surrounded by Nirvana "In Utero" and Bob Dylan "Hard Rain" posters and a neon clock with the words "Dead End Motel" written nearly around the border, Herrera clocks in to begin a day living among the dead. "I want to emphasize the positive side of death," says Herrera, a husky, middle-aged Latino man with black hair a black mustache revealing a few hints of gray hair. "I’m not a doctor and I don’t pretend to be one, I’m an autopsy technician." Stating that, Herrera walks over to a door within his underground office and peers through a small window.

Behind the window is a student sawing into a 70-year-old man’s neck, just beneath the chin. The saw, which resembles a hand blender without a guard over the blade, relentlessly whacks away at layers of tissue, muscle and fat revealing glands, bones and organs that will be removed and analyzed. The man, who died of an embolism, is cut open in a "Y" beginning at each shoulder, meeting at the sternum bone on the chest and continuing in a straight line down his abdomen. Flaps of flesh are peeled open, ribs are cracked and pushed to each side. And there the deceased man lies, on his back, with his blue eyes open, and straight salt-and-pepper hair in disarray. His body is wide open, revealing a mild yellow layer of fat contrasted sharply against the red of his muscles and organs. A student technician peers at every organ, removing each one with painful precision. A second technician, working at a nearby table in the examining room with yellow tiled walls and floors, takes each organ and prepares it for analysis.

The student autopsy technician is looking for a blood clot, and according to Herrera, he quickly finds it in the groin area. Wearing surgical scrubs, latex gloves, cloth cap, and shoe covers, the student is performing this autopsy under Herrera’s instruction as part of an internship program. "The apprenticeship helps them into medical school," says Herrera of his three interns "I weed out the lazy ones and work with the focused student to reach them how to carefully and accurately perform an autopsy. What we do is important. It needs to be done and it needs to be done correctly."

Herrera takes his work seriously. The motto of his company, Autopsy/Post Services, is "mortius praesdium et vocem dare necessee est," Latin for "the deceased must be protected and given a voice." And Herrera says he does give the deceased a voice as well as provide families with closure after losing a loved one. "Since 1978, the rate of autopsies has decreased from 50 percent to 5 percent, " he says, attributing the decline to the bottom-line financial focus of managed care companies. "The public is caught right in the middle." Autopsy/Post Services is in the middle as well, Herrera, who is paid by VA officials on a per-body basis, also works with UCLA, UC Irvine, County/USC Medical Center, Cedars-Sinai and St. John’s, as well as several other facilities throughout Los Angeles County.

Traveling in a white minivan with 1-800 AUTOPSY painted in clean black letters on the doors. Herrera mans a mobile office that ventures to hospitals and funeral homes to work on the deceased to find answers about what caused a person to die. "I’m literally a mobile based business," he says, displaying a red equipment box packed in the rear of his van. The red metal box is loaded with a saw, a rib cutter, sterile blades, scales, scissors, a camera an a jar of formaldehyde. "I have everything I need right here." Herrera says the van generates strange looks on Los Angeles freeways and tends to evoke people to expose themselves, shouting phrases like "autopsy this." "I just laugh at it," he says, "You have to laugh sometimes. I’m used to it." But Herrera doesn’t’ find his job depressing. "A lot of good can come out of a death," he says, remembering a fireman burned in the Malibu fires last summer. "When he was released, in small print reporters would mention how much skin was needed for his grafts. That skin came from cadavers."

Herrera remarks that many people don’t donate their organs when they die. Superstition, religion and ignorance play major roles in a family’s decision not to donate a deceased relative’s organs, he says. "We get right in their face and tell them, ‘They could do a lot of good and save someone else’s life,’" says Herrera. "We speak Spanish so we’re able to explain the process to Latinos also. We’re straight and direct with everyone." A "product of the ‘60’s" Herrera eked out a meager salary working at County/USC in various departments.

While at a pizza join in Silver Lake, an older friend of Herrera’s told him to look for opening in the morgue. Herrera says his friend told him morgue work comes with a lot of "down time," which would allow Herrera to attend school and make contacts in the Los Angeles County Coroner’s Office while collecting a paycheck. "At first I just saw dead bodies everywhere and it got me in my stomach," he says. "But I knew I had a job to do, an important job. And that was it. I never looked back." Eventually Herrera did accept a job with the coroner’s office as a investigator. But after lifting a 5-foot-2-inch-tall suicide victim who weighed 284 pounds, Herrera suffered a back injury that led to a complicated surgery and lengthy recovery. After several years of rehabilitation, Herrera was unemployed and deemed disabled. He was confined to a wheelchair for a period of time.

Four years after the injury, Herrera, still unemployed due to his disability, stumbled onto an interview with VA officials. He later accepted his per diem position at the VA Medical Center, "After that I learned to value work," he says, "I’ll never take any job for granted. I’m fortunate that the federal government gave man an opportunity." Now, with a flourishing franchise business, numerous contracts at several hospitals and a reputation for being professional, courteous and conscientious. Herrera can concentrate on what he enjoys most about his job: providing a valuable service to families and educating the public about the positive side of death. Nearly 40 minutes after the autopsy on the man who died of the embolism began, the technician holds up the man’s brain, which is wet with sticky, thick blood. He turns it over displaying where the brain was once attached to the spinal cord. "That’s his brain," he says, stating the obvious with an instructor’s tone in this voice. "It’s important to look at everything unfortunately most people don’t anymore." "That’s the cerebellum," he continues, happy to share his knowledge of human anatomy, "and right here is where it was attached to the spinal cord," he says, pointed to the severed, jagged piece of bone. "Death is unexpected," he says "I appreciate life and live it to the fullest."