Srpski arhiv za celokupno lekarstvo 2013 Volume 141, Issue 5-6, Pages: 409-414
https://doi.org/10.2298/SARH1306409N
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The mechanism of injuring of front-seat passengers in head-on motor vehicle collisions: Forensic issues
Nikolić Slobodan (Medicinski fakultet, Institut za sudsku medicinu, Beograd)
Strajina Veljko (Medicinski fakultet, Institut za sudsku medicinu, Beograd)
Živković Vladimir (Medicinski fakultet, Institut za sudsku medicinu, Beograd)
Forensic pathologists sometimes need to determine seating positions of
automobile occupants after road traffic accidents as accurately as possible.
That could be of essential significance particularly in regard to the
question of guilt both in the criminal and civil law. So far, medical surveys
have implied the specific injury which would undoubtedly point at the
allocation of the seating positions of fatally injured car occupant. Some of
the injuries could occur by both direct and indirect force action. Same type
of injury of the specific body region in both drivers and front seat
passengers could occur by different mechanism and in different phases of the
accident. Sometimes neither the order of injury occurrence remains unclear,
nor whether some of the injuries are postmortal. What makes it even harder
is the fact that same body regions, i.e. head and thorax, are most affected
in both drivers and front seat passengers, and that these injuries are often
fatal. Even if the victim survives the accident for some time and later dies
in hospital, the possibility of accident reconstruction and determination of
car occupants seating position at the moment of accident declines with the
time length of survival period. Examining the victims’ clothes, searching for
biological traces, technical expert inspection of the vehicle, traffic expert
analysis of the site, enables adequate reconstruction of the traffic
accident. All this implies that in such cases the knowledge of underlying
mechanism of car occupants’ injury is insufficient, and that a close
cooperation between forensic pathologists and the team of other forensic
technical experts is necessary.
Keywords: drivers, frontseat passengers, headon collision, injury, autopsy, forensic pathology
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