Citation

Byard RW, O'Donovan S, van den Huevel C, Baldock MRJ. J. Forensic Sci. 2018; 63(4): 1307-1308.

Affiliation

Centre for Automotive Safety Research, The University of Adelaide, Adelaide, South Australia, 5005, Australia.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2018, American Society for Testing and Materials, Publisher John Wiley and Sons)

DOI

10.1111/1556-4029.13667

PMID

28973788

Abstract

A certain number of single-vehicle crashes into stationary roadside objects such as trees are thought to be occult suicides. However, is it possible that some cases of multiple deaths within a family in similar crashes are due to unrecognized familial murder-suicides? A 39-year-old woman and her 11-year-old daughter are reported who died of injuries following a vehicle impact with a tree. Unusual behavior of the mother leading up to the crash, and assessment at the scene, raised the possibility of this being a nonaccidental event. However, difficulties in retrospectively determining the intent of a driver in a vehicle crash, and the nonrecording of, or lack of separate coding for murder-suicides on registers, make determination of the incidence of these types of events extremely difficult. It may be that this is a subcategory of murder-suicide that is underdiagnosed and so is not being registered on central motor vehicle crash databases.

© 2017 American Academy of Forensic Sciences.

Language: en

Keywords

child; database; dyadic; familial; forensic science; murder-suicide; vehicle