Coroner Graham Hetrick has a catchphrase on his true crime TV show - “I speak for the dead”. But when Graham speaks for people who died at Dauphin County Prison there appears to be a lot more to the story.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
Chapter 1: What happened at the City Gas and Diesel mini-mart?
Wondery Plus subscribers can binge all episodes of Death County PA early and ad-free. Join Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or on Apple Podcasts. The crime scene at the City Gas and Diesel mini-mart is grim. The store's clerk, a 23-year-old Indian immigrant, lies dead behind the counter. A single bullet wound in his chest.
The bulletproof glass surrounding the counter is splattered with the man's blood. Two Harrisburg police detectives arrive at the scene. There are no witnesses, no fingerprints, and no obvious leads. The detectives are stumped, but they know who can help. The dead speak in patterns.
Angles of bullets, blood droplets, and wounds.
They call in a signal 12, a death.
When I have a signal 12, it doesn't matter what time of day or night it is, I'm the coroner and I respond.
In this episode of The Coroner, I speak for the dead. Graham Hetrick does just that. He drives to the convenience store and greets the detectives. It's the middle of the night, but Graham is wearing a bow tie. He begins to examine the crime scene.
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Chapter 2: How does Graham Hetrick investigate crime scenes?
I noticed that there was bulletproof glass specifically designed to protect the attendant that surrounded the counter. But I also noticed that the window had been opened. It made me wonder if the window was open because he knew the customer or if somehow he had been forced to open it.
This is just the first of Graham's many insights. He's like a modern day Sherlock Holmes. He even figures out the victim's time of death just by measuring his temperature with a thermometer. When Graham gets the body back to his morgue, he personally conducts an autopsy.
We started to examine the blood clot, and as I moved my fingers around the clot, I could feel a solidity that was much harder than the clot itself.
It's the bullet. Graham realizes the clerk must have been shot while he was bending over to get cash from the register. The killing was a robbery in progress, likely by someone the clerk knew. Graham cracked the case. The detectives find the killer, get him to confess, and the crime is solved. That's not what happened.
Michael McClurg, who goes by Mac, was a deputy coroner who worked under Graham Hetrick for 12 years, starting in the late 90s.
I mean, I always called his TV show the Science Fiction Hour because I had firsthand knowledge of nothing happened the way it was portrayed on a TV show.
Mack remembers this specific case, and he remembers watching this episode. He knew from the get-go it wasn't what happened. Because Mack responded to the murder at the mini-mart, not Graham. And Mack knew that even if Graham had been there that night, he wouldn't have been analyzing evidence at the crime scene. The coroner doesn't do that. And it didn't stop there.
There's a misconception that the coroner performs the autopsies. He orders the autopsies, but a forensic pathologist actually performs it and comes up with the cause and manner of death.
So the notion that Graham was some super detective who also personally conducted autopsies was completely made up. But the most ridiculous thing of all to Mac was the way the episode showed Graham helping to solve the crime from clues on the dead body. That was just flat out false. As soon as the police arrived at the mini-mart, they looked at the store's surveillance video.
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Chapter 3: What are the misconceptions about coroners and autopsies?
To Mack, it felt like Graham was putting on a show. And voters kept rewarding Graham by electing him over and over and over. He said he was doing a great job and everyone seemed to buy it. But after Tyreek Riley's death, things started to change. People in Dauphin County started getting more skeptical. They started asking hard questions, demanding real answers.
Who's gonna feel my pain?
Who's gonna say my name?
Ain't no joy. This is Episode 2, Speaking for the Dead.
Three seasons into The Coroner, I speak for the dead. Graham Hetrick was at the height of his celebrity. The local minor league baseball team, the Harrisburg Senators, even gave out a bobblehead of Graham posed next to his dog, Sherlock. He was also working the local media circuit, giving interviews about the show to Penn Live, the newspaper I work for.
With a production team, we go through over 600 homicides. I had one guy thank me for the episode because he says, I never was able to process the death until I actually watched it there. And he says, I never realized you guys were working seven years to solve the case.
When Graham got a platform like this, he typically wanted to talk about a lot more than his job. He liked to share his personal philosophies, trends he was observing in the world, lessons he thought we should all live by.
We have to take this life and claim responsibility for it because this is our school. This is where we learn and we pass or we fail. Tick, tick, tick goes the clock, doesn't it?
Graham kept returning to this theme, individual responsibility. It seemed like the lens through which he understood the world. You could see it in the way he had talked about Tyreek Riley's case. At the press conference, he suggested that Tyreek's brain inflammation might very well have been caused by cocaine use, even though tests confirmed that there was no cocaine in his blood at the time.
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Chapter 4: Who was Ishmael Thompson and what happened to him?
My man, how you doing?
Roger Mitchell is a Howard University professor and a former forensic pathologist. He's nationally known for his work on deaths in custody and how they're often ignored. I got on the phone with Roger to ask if he agreed with Graham's findings that Ishmael's manner of death was undetermined. I disagreed with Graham, but I'm just a reporter. I needed someone who knew what he was talking about.
And right off the bat, he was clear. The short answer is no, I don't agree. Roger didn't think Ishmael's death was undetermined at all.
When you engage somebody and you fight somebody and they die subsequent to that fight, It's a homicide. It's death at the hands of another.
A homicide. As Roger saw it, the guards at DCP killed Ishmael.
The bottom line is that this man was living a relatively normal life, whatever that normal life was for him prior to the altercation. The altercation happens. He never returns back to baseline health and he dies.
And for Graham to call Ishmael's death undetermined Roger felt that he wasn't doing his job.
It becomes irresponsible of the medical legal death investigation system, the coroner and medical examiner system, to not call these homicides.
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Chapter 5: Why was Ishmael Thompson's death ruled as undetermined?
By not calling Ishmael's death a homicide, Graham was letting DCP off the hook. He was saying, case closed. We tried. No point in asking further questions. I wanted to make sure Ishmael's story didn't end like that. A year after Ishmael died, PennLive published my investigation into his death. The headline was, Hiding a Homicide.
After the article was published, someone who had worked at the jail reached out. He knew a lot about Ishmael's death. He hinted this went way beyond Graham's ruling. And there was a video that he had seen. And he wanted to tell me all about it. In Death County, PA, Lamont Jones thought freedom meant leaving Dolphin County Prison behind.
But when his cousin dies under mysterious circumstances, Lamont uncovers a web of corruption, a reality TV corner, and a system designed to silence the truth. If you're drawn to stories of justice gone wrong, you'll be gripped by American Scandal, Police Corruption in Baltimore.
where the Gun Trace Task Force, an elite police unit, turned into a criminal empire, robbing suspects and falsifying evidence while the city looked the other way. When the truth finally came out, it exposed a culture of corruption that went far beyond one rogue unit. Follow American Scandal on the Wondery app or wherever you get your podcast.
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Chapter 6: What did Roger Mitchell say about Ishmael's death?
Strapping someone into a restraint chair, handcuffed with their arms pinned behind their back, it compresses the chest cavity, making it way more difficult to get air into your lungs.
Some of the comments coming back from the supervisor was, well, if you're talking, you're breathing. So just keep breathing, which isn't part of the policy and also isn't necessarily correct. Then a couple of the staff members wheel him back in the chair into one of the holding cells that are in the booking area. And they tell medical that it's now time for them to come in and check him.
Medical staff are supposed to check to make sure restraints aren't too tight. The person in the chair can breathe and see if there's anything medically they need. A nurse enters the room. She doesn't stay long.
They checked the handcuffs. They kind of checked his fingers. There wasn't any kind of communication at all. And then he left. James didn't train the medical staff.
They weren't DCP employees. They worked for a company called Prime Care, which DCP contracted to provide all medical services. But James remembers looking at that video and thinking, that's it? That's all they're going to do? Did they check for a pulse? Did they check that he was breathing properly? From what James was seeing, Ishmael was in bad shape.
He looked exhausted. His head was hunched over a little bit, and he could tell that he was having a difficult time breathing. I do remember that it became less frequent, and he just looked defeated. So it went from saying, I can't breathe, I can't breathe, to just not saying anything.
Several minutes go by. Ishmael is still in the restraint chair, and a corrections officer is in the room. But he doesn't have a clear view of Ishmael's face. which is why it takes longer than it should for him to realize that Ishmael has stopped breathing.
And they called for medical, they said medical emergency.
All across his screen, everyone is scrambling. They're trying to talk to Ishmael, but he isn't responding.
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Chapter 7: What evidence suggests a cover-up in Ishmael’s case?
It was irritating the medical staff as they were trying to provide him care.
They use a defibrillator on him to try to get his heart to start beating again. They give him two doses of Narcan, no response. Two officers come in and rush Ishmael off, still unconscious. Five days later, on July 29th, 2021, Ishmael Thompson was pronounced dead. He died at Harrisburg Hospital. You had to watch a video of basically, you watch somebody die.
It made me sick. This is something that should not have occurred for a number of reasons. What made many of us upset was that had the policies and procedures that were in place been followed to the letter, it might not have happened. I remember feeling like I sat there and I watched my staff kill somebody. And that's how I felt. And that's horrible for me to say.
James had trained the staff on the use of pepper spray, how to wash it off with water to stop the gagging and spitting. He had trained them to take the handcuffs off when putting an inmate in the restraint chair. That way they could breathe properly. He had trained them to continually monitor someone in a restraint chair to make sure they were okay. James knew that what he saw was wrong.
Chapter 8: How does this episode challenge the portrayal of true crime on TV?
And if officers weren't following the training, something needed to change. He was ready to speak out to prevent a death like this from happening again. But the people in charge had a different plan. After Ishmael Thompson died, there were no protests, no press conferences. Graham Hetrick didn't get up and do a PowerPoint explaining the manner of death.
Unlike Tyreek, Ishmael wasn't a Harrisburg local. He had family who mourned him, but they were in his home state of Delaware. And because Ishmael died in the hospital, his death officially didn't happen at Dauphin County Prison. That meant that the county could get by without reporting his death to the state or federal government. It seemed like nothing was going to happen following his death.
But inside DCP, James could tell that Ishmael's death was a big deal.
We would have weekly meetings. There would have been director and all the other directors and the warden. So in the next weekly meeting, the one topic was Ishmael.
In that meeting, James assumed there would be some discussion of what needed to change after Ishmael's death and whether any DCP staff would face disciplinary action.
And I remember the then-director saying, instructing the warden to determine who needs to document where people failed policies or procedures or failed whatever it is that that needs to be documented. Whether that be a disciplinary report, a counseling slip, something, something needed to happen that documented that the administration knew that errors were made in that incident.
And this is at least documented that we're addressing it. We're going to try to address it.
This all made sense to James. He had already taken notes on the incident, how the COs hadn't followed the protocol. But as the meeting went on, it became clear to James that the warden had other ideas.
The response from the warden at the time was, well, I spoke with some of them, and I don't think that's the right course of action, so I didn't do it.
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