Forensics Quiz

Well, I fractured my tibia bone recently and now I have to submit my quiz online and here it is, not sure if I did it correctly, was trying to figure this out myself, but hopefully it works out.

Forensics Quiz Honors Biology

A twenty year old man was found supine along Thompson Creek Trail with a bullet wound. The entrance of the wound was on the left lateral side 1cm above the 3rd rib. The exit wound was 5 cm above the belly button in the umbilical region. While tracing the bullet path you notice at the entrance it travels in the frontal plane with a 45 degree downward angle. On inspection of the right side of the rib cage by x-ray you observe the 8th posterior rib fractured with fragments of bullet and then 3 plausible alternatives and how would you rule them out.

At a first look, this case makes no sense at all since the 8th posterior rib of the right side is fractured but the bullet went into the victim's body on the left lateral side 1 cm above the 3rd rib and exited 5cm above the umbilical region. So now I have to analyse the whole picture. First of all, the entrance of the bullet is very close to the heart. And second, the bullet followed a strange path travelling downward at 45 degrees and fractured the 8th bone and went out on top of the belly button.

Plausible alternatives:

1) The most probable reason of the victim's death is the bullet damaging the heart when it entered the body thus causing an excessive loss of blood, leading to the malfunction of the body and death. We would have to check whether the heart is shredded to confirm this possibility.

2) An alternative would come from the evidence that the bullet broke the 8th posterior rib bone, since that bone is so close to the liver, if the bullet fractured the bone, there is a possibility that the liver is damaged. And since the liver filters most poisons for our body, if the victim has had any sort of poisons that did not reach the liver in time and if the poison is strong enough to kill a human quickly, then this could be a possibility of the victim's death. However, this would mean a check on the liver itself along with a list of the victim's food intake in the past 24 hours.

3) Lastly, since the bullet exited in the umbilical region and that is where the small intestines are, then there is a chance that the bullet shredded these intestines and caused the stomach not being able to digest food or bleed out. To rule this out we would need a check on the small intestines in the umbilical region.

Hope I did this right, spent a while to figure this out haha