A Rage To Kill And Other True Cases

blood. And often that bleeding is internal. Life slips away silently as the lungs or abdominal cavity fill with blood. Some victims can suffer massive stab wounds and bleed enough externally that it appears as if every drop of blood in their bodies has seeped out, and still survive. Others, like Brad Bass, can die from one innocuous-looking shallow thrust.
    Something was terribly wrong with Brad Bass, and he was rushed into surgery. Once the trauma surgeon had opened his chest, he could see that Bass had sustained a one-inch wide stab wound that had penetrated two and a half to three inches through his chest wall. But, in doing so, it had nicked the right auricular appendage of the heart and the aorta—the large artery that carries blood to all parts of the body. A silent, often-fatal medical situation called “cardiac tamponade” had resulted. The pericardial sac that encases the heart had begun to fill up with blood. The sac that usually protects the heart was rapidly crushing it. Each time Brad Bass’s heart contracted, more blood filled the sac surrounding it, compressing the heart so tightly that less and less blood could be pumped to the extremities of his body. Despite the surgeon’s efforts, his blood pressure continued to drop.
    The surgeon mended the damage done by the tip of a thin blade to the heart and aorta, but it was too late. Brad had begun to die.
    It is essential to look at all the ramifications of Brad Bass’s demise to understand what legal death is. The human body does not die all at once. Rather, it dies in stages. When there is a lack of oxygen and nutrients, death occurs first in the most fragile cells. The brain cells are the most sensitive of all to lack of oxygen and may die in a matter of minutes while skin and bone cells can continue to “live” for weeks after brain, heart, and lung death.

    It was still Friday, February 13. As dawn broke only hours after he had walked out of Larry’s Take 5, Brad Bass, until this day a perfect physical specimen, lay motionless. The cells of his brain had flickered out like light bulbs cut off from electricity, and they would never live again. He was
legally
alive, but not in the sense of his having any meaningful life. But he was not yet officially a homicide statistic.

    The detectives assigned to the Seattle Police Homicide Unit arrived at work at 7:45 A..M. Detective Sergeant Jerry Yates talked to the head nurse in the emergency room at Harborview. She told him that the victim of the street stabbing of the night before was “very bad”—worse than critical, if possible. He had been admitted with ten dollars and change in his pockets. They had found no wallet and no I.D. “He was able to give us his name,” she said. “But that’s all. We have no way of knowing if he has any relatives or friends in Seattle.”
    When Yates heard that the victim’s prognosis was almost nil, he realized that he and his men would have to treat this as a probable murder case.
    Information gathered by patrol officers at the site of the stabbing had been sketchy; habitués of the nether world along Pike Street were not traditionally known to confide in the police. The only information that had survived the chaos of the scene was that the victim had been involved in a scuffle with a tall, sexy, black woman. Some said the glamorous figure was most certainly a female; others questioned that.
    The “woman” had left the scene in a dirty, dark, old car—possibly a Chevrolet—which had held several occupants of undetermined sex.
    Jerry Yates asked the hospital to place a hold on the victim’s clothing and to call if, by some miracle, the youth regained consciousness. Solving a homicide that was not even a homicide yet, a case with so many conflicting witness statements at that, didn’t seem likely.

    Dalton Bass was worried. Brad had been gone all of Thursday night and still wasn’t home by Friday night and that wasn’t like him. He would never have stayed away all night without calling. The brothers had talked on the phone Thursday and Brad said then that he was going to try to cash his paycheck Thursday night. He had been temporarily laid off from his shipfitting job but his last paycheck was for over $200.
    Dalton called the Seattle police after he’d checked all of his and Brad’s friends. They told Dalton that a Brad Bass had been injured in a street fight and was in the hospital. Shaking his head in disbelief, Dalton Bass was horrified when he