Media Gone Wild or Just a Drunk Janitor?

I was recently reading regional news for my area and read a short news article that said that an investigation was ongoing at a local high school. A janitor had found a bag inside a girl's locker and he belived that it contained the remains of a human fetus.

Police and forensics folks were brought in. By the end of my workday it was also splashed on local television station news. Human remains found in a schoolgirl's locker! Nothing much was said about the girl who had used the locker (like an explanation for what the bag contained or how it ended up there) and nothing much was said about what prompted the janitor to look in the locker. Since school is probably out there, though, I would think that the janitor smelled something icky and opened the locker. The girl may not have been easy to reach with school being out. Nevertheless it apparently took a few hours for experts to determine the exact nature of the contents of the bag.

In the early evening I heard a television news update and they announced that the contents of the bag had turned out to be - oranges. Yes, oranges. Dried out and rotten, to be sure, but still only oranges. No bones. No nothing, really. Just a leftover snack that didn't make it out of the end-of-school locker cleanup.

Now, I wasn't there so maybe my thoughts on this are quite moot. I'm also not even close to an expert on forensics or even biology. Heck, I was an English major! Still- I do watch shows like CSI and Bones. I even watched E/R until it seemed to dry out like old oranges. What I'm wondering is, didn't anyone notice right away that there were probably some discrepancies in the case of the human fetus? (That would have been a SCARY 'Nancy Drew' title, wouldn't it?)

I mean, one would think that if no one noticed a pretty bad smell in April or so when school was still in full swing, the oranges probably hadn't gone totally south by then. If they were starting to rot about then, they've had somewhere between 2-4 months of sitting in that locker. Perhaps an orange would dry out and turn black and slightly resemble a tiny skull? Personally, I'd think that it would collapse and look more like a dark moldy shriveled orange. I'm only guessing at what fetus remains might look like, too, based on my CSI/Bones expertise, but I would figured that if it was old enough to have a skull the size of a shrunken orange, it would have formed at least some basic bones. The most obvious one I'd think of is a spine which seems to be a distinctive feature in t.v. corpses of all ages and sizes. Maybe these were special oranges that were packaged with a free fake vertebral column?

Yes, I know, I'm poking a bit of fun at this and surely they did have to check it out. Truthfully, if I found something really weird in a locker I'd probably assume it was something ghastly as well. I have a great imagination. Sometimes I help with deconstruction projects for a local charity and each time we tear down an old building, I feel fairly certain that we'll find a body or a box of money or some other interesting thing. It never happens quite like that. So, yes, I might have thought it was a baby too. And, once that had been thought of, I'm sure an investigation had to take place. It did make me wonder a few things. Do school janitors have a lot to do in the summer? Maybe he WAS hitting the bottle a bit. It could have been a slow day for the local media too, and what a story! Great headlines if it had worked out! "Girl Puts Baby in School Locker!"

So, anyway, that's my thought-to-blog for this lovely Saturday evening. Now, off to watch a re-run of CSI.